I’ll offer just one more comment, as the standards of GD seem to cry out for a reality check. Then I think I’ll drop it, as this has become tedious.
NajaNivea, you base your assertions on two primary foundations—your own experience, and some statements by CDC and AVMA which you continue to accuse me of not reading. Your own experience must be completely anecdotal, else you would have offered your own controlled studies as cites. Lacking such scientific background, it seems that you have failed to qualify yourself as an expert. Note that your position on a board having a special relationship with the breed you so vigorously defend does nothing to support your assertions. By analogy, one’s defense of, say, wildcat oil drillers might reasonably be questioned if one were simultaneously serving on an oil drillers’ board. Let us therefore dismiss your personal anecdotes as we dismiss others without recognized authority.
As for the statements you quote * ad nauseum*, no, I do not claim to be “smarter” than CDC or AVMA. But as a professional myself, I recognize something about the way professional associations work. I have already pointed out that the papers from which you draw your favorite quotes are neither “scientific studies” nor are they “peer review” of anything, including Clifton. They are position papers of the organizations, nothing more, nothing less. The positions they espouse are based upon those organizations’ own review of the factual information available, as well as internal and external politics specific to those organizations. The positions are impacted by the relationship between these organizations and various other stakeholders such as animal owners, breeders, law enforcement (“animal control”) agencies, humane organizations, animal rights activists, and a host of others. They attempt to provide both information and guidance for a diversity of possible audiences, to be put to a variety of possible uses. They do not condemn any specific breed despite agitation from some fronts for such an action. But neither do they declare that breed absolutely, positively cannot have any influence on biting behavior. Wright himself, in the citation upon which they and you rely so heavily (that “7” to which I have linked already) clearly accepts breed as one among many factors. (In his case, at at the time of his article, the GSD topped the list and Pit Bulls had been banned in the study area for the two previous years.) Instead they offer caveats to the data available, and declare difficulty of analysis as I have outlined upthread. They are, as is typical of position papers from national organizations, political statements, not scientific treatises.
Even this statement (below), which you offer as a clincher to your assertions, is itself merely an assertion that the authors do not back up with data or analysis:
We’ve iterated the caveats repeatedly, and still this is not, as you declare it, a statement that “no differences exist” but is instead merely emphasizing their observations on the current state of available statistics and analysis. They are clearly offering what modern parlance would term “a nuanced position”. This is often the politically expedient choice.
I am sorry that you cannot accept such a nuanced position yourself. The problem of dog bites is a serious one, and it is influenced by many human factors including history, fad, fashion, and the politics of animal rights plus doggie factors including but not limited to dog breeds, all woven together in a complex feedback system. Breed bans themselves will clearly do little to address let alone correct the problem. But neither will an adamant insistence that breeds (as they exist right now) have no effect on the problem at all.
