It’s been confirmed as a pit bull now…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/merseyside/8392842.stm
Not that it means much in one isolated case, of course. Now I’m curious about the tests they use to determine the breed.
Not all pitbulls are violent. But, some are inherently violent.
I fully understand the concept that any one human life is more important than the lives of every pitbull on the planet. (debate that point all you want, but the laws will side with that argument) If the 99% of perfectly safe and innocent pitbulls have to die to protect our families from the 1% that isn’t (because no one can really tell the difference until the violence occurs) so be it. Americans as a whole are perfectly fine with killing innocent animals for their pleasure, let alone percieved safety. (Can’t get a cheeseburger without killing a harmless cow)
Many breeds of dogs share this problem of inherent violence, its not just pit bulls. I’m all for dealing with all potentially violent breeds of dogs with eradication.
A better alternative would be to require any dog with the potential to kill to undergo training/evaluation at the owners expense - euthanizing those who fail.
These are animals. Animals we create. We bring them into the world, we should take them out if they cannot be guaranteed safe.
If killing every pit-bull in the country saves one child from being torn apart alive, do it.
There were 37,435 deaths caused by automobiles in the United States in 2007. (cite)
There were 33 deaths caused by dogs in 2007. (cite)
Cars are useful so we tolerate them. Dogs can likewise be very useful for a number of tasks (indeed Islam deems dogs “unclean” but allows them to be kept for the useful tasks they perform such as guarding, hunting, shepherding, guide dogs and so on).
By your analysis we should ban all cars because they are FAR more dangerous than dogs. If just one child is saved it’d be worth it right?
Wow. That’s a really stupid idea.
Since even small dogs can tear a child apart, anything larger than a Jack Russell needs to be killed as well. Most domestic animals can kill children, so cows, horses, sheep, and so on and so on need to be obliterated too. Hell, fathers have been known to kill their children. Mothers too. Might as well throw them on the pile. Snakes, sharks, bears, wolves, raccoons … that’s going to be a pretty big list there after a while.
Larger than a Pomeranian actually (which is maybe 5 pounds wet).
Pomeranian Kills six-week-old baby
Not the best analogy. Jack Russells can be nasty, especially to little kids.
I support the dogs. The regulation in my city (Omaha) states that a pit bull needs to be muzzled unless they have their CGC (canine good citizen) designation. Not a horrible idea, but a little silly.
The only time I’ve ever really had an issue with pit bull aficionados is when they claim that fighting dogs aren’t dangerous to humans. Do I have a shred of evidence that says fighting dogs ARE dangerous to humans? Not really; not my field. It IS a little hard for me to accept that a dog bred and trained to rip the viscera from other dogs isn’t a problem around people. Call it an irrational fear of killer animals, I guess.
And the only reason they are so dogged - pardon the pun - in attack, is because they have been encouraged by humans to fight other dogs that are equally game. We created this mess; we should tidy it up without having to wipe out a specific breed and all its relations.
It doesn’t matter. Almost any dog has the *potential *to kill a child. See the link above.
If you claim that breeding accounts for X, you have to accept that breeding can account for Y. Pits were bred to be non-aggressive to humans, so that they could be managed by their handlers.
Sigh.
Here we go again (nahnah nah nah nahnahNA broken-record time!) 
Lots of breeds of dogs have been bred and trained to rip the viscera from other animals, including human beings. I, too, have an issue with dog owners of any breed who claim that dogs of *any *breed aren’t dangerous to humans. The problem of “killer” dogs is not breed-specific, it’s very nearly entirely human-behavior-specific… which is among the many reasons why breed bans and wholesale slaughter of the “dangerous dog du jour” are useless for increasing public safety. The same scumbags who take a pit dog and turn it into an unsocialized, unmanaged “killer” are perfectly happy to take any other “scary looking” breed and turn it to the same ends.
The problem isn’t pit fighting blood, indeed as LHOD and The Flying Dutchman very helpfully demonstrated in the pit thread, the general public doesn’t have the first fucking clue what a real “pit bull” even looks like and is perfectly happy to apply the label to any “mastiff type” (regardless of the fact that pit dogs aren’t mastiffs at all) or mixed-breed dog that fits the “canine racial profile” by any vague degree, regardless of whether or not there’s any “pit fighting” blood in its veins. The problem is abusive, neglectful, or even just purely inattentive dog owners who create problem dogs of any breeding background, and then allow them to be the problem that they themselves have created.
If you (stuthehistoryguy) are just complaining about the sort of pit bull owner whose attitude is “my sweet schmoopie-pie furbaby could never harm a flea!” then I have the same attitude you do, which is exactly the same attitude I’d have toward a person with a, say, shepherd mix or cattle dog or redbone coonhound who offered the same nonsensical opinion on their sweet schmoopie-pie furbaby. Dogs are dogs, they’re all pack-oriented carnivores. Pit dogs are no more finely-honed killers than any other breed finely-honed to kill anything.
I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again here–I always feel like the frothiness over “dog fighting” as equating to “savage killer” whereas, say, “wolf fighting” does not, is because dog fighting is a deviant activity perpetrated by amoral scumbags, where as wolf-killing breeds are seen as doing noble battle with an ancient enemy. This feeling rubs off on the general public’s attitude about the dogs, in total defiance of the fact that many breeds are “savage killers” in their own realm. Fox hunting, wolf-killing, and boar fighting don’t have the same social stigma, and neither do the dogs involved. This is compounded and perpetuated by the fact that scumbags looking for a “bad ass dog” follow fashion trends just like anybody else. If pit dogs are fashionable bad ass dogs (also cheap, readily available, and far more malleable and easily managed than most “bad ass dog” breeds), then seeing them, and dogs that look like them, appear on the roster of badly managed dogs involved in serious bite incidents should be no surprise at all. Slaughter all the pits and the sleezebags will just turn to something else. Slaughter all the “dogs of the apocalypse” breeds and the sleezebags will just turn to something else in turn.
A pit bull is no more physically powerful or temperamentally driven to turn his “killer’s instinct” toward killing a human than a Kuvasz is, but you won’t see people breaking out in a cold sweat when this dog appears in the neighborhood.
The difference is that removing cars would kill more children due to the starvation caused by the economic depression.
Remove the 5-10% of dogs responsible for more than 50% of attacks and no one starves. (Most of the pro-pitbull website cite 30-40% of the country’s dogs as pitbulls - but that is the statistic of ratio of pitbulls in shelters to the total dog population)
Please keep in mind, that the preferred method I mentioned was to require dogs to get certified as safe - thinking about it, we should require owners to do the same thing. License people to own dogs with the same depth of regulation as we license them to operate cars.
PS: stu, most of that was aimed at pan1, not you. You don’t necessarily come off as part of the “pit bull hysteria” crowd, to me. 
Honestly, NajaNivea, the flat-out “everybody’s out to get the pit bulls” paranoia running through your post is what I’m talking about. I’m not talking about “my sweet schmoopie-pie furbaby could never harm a flea!” types. I’m talking about Michael F. Vick and the like. I agree with you that pit bulls as a breed aren’t automatically honed killing machines by any stretch of the imagination, but to intimate that fighting dogs–dogs that actually fight–aren’t any more dangerous to humans than your average Pom strikes me as disingenuous.
That’s what I’m talking about. Of course, you’ll probably go into a spiel about how every study about pit bulls has been discredited unless it says something good about the breed. Whatever.
ETA: I also don’t mean to target you NN, but do think about how your next response will be perceived. Comparing pits (or German shepherds or rots or Belgian malanois or what have you) to Pomeranians just flies in the face of common sense, though it certainly is correct that one shouldn’t leave their pom with the baby unattended.
Are you claiming that this 5-10% of US dogs which attack is all pit bulls? Or that pit bulls are responsible for more than 50% of attacks? Or that you have in any way the possibility of demonstrating that pit bulls are statistically more likely to attack than any other breed, demonstrated with a ratio of attacking pit bulls to the total population of pit bulls vs. the ratio of attacking dogs of any other breed to the total population of that breed? How about some evidence that every dog bite where the perpetrator was identified by a layman as a “pit bull” were, in fact, pit bulls?
If it’s not abundantly clear yet, every reputable source disagrees with your assessment of this situation.
And, yes, I realize that you didn’t make the pom remark in the first place.
I have not seen a reputable source on this subject that disagreed with the numbers. The Acturarial and Statistical studies support my numbers.
The bottom line everyone agrees on - Dogs are only as dangerous as they are raised to be. I’ll concede that easily.
The problem with pit bulls is that they make good fighting dogs. They’ve been bred for that purpose. So they are the favored dog for criminals who propogate the “sport” and others who glorify that lifestyle.
So a percentage of Pit Bulls are more dangerous than most other dogs. Not all Pit Bulls are dangerous, but the odds of a Pit Bull being dangerous (still less than 1% would kill a person) are significantly higher than other dog types (I say type because we all know Pitbull is not a breed, but a collection of breeds created for Pit fighting - or bred from breeds created for pit fighting.
It’s certainly arguable that if we kill all the pit bulls, the criminals would just start using other breeds. But its also arguable that these breeds are not efficient enough in dog fighting to make it such a viable “sport”. Dog fight breeders would be forced to take the efforts to create a new breed of fighting dogs. When they do, we can kill those dogs too.
It’s just getting kind of old reading every so often some post about how pit bulls are relentless and that’s just how it is. Even if I were one of those who believed pit bulls were qualitatively different from other dogs, I’d be pretty fed up with him not actually backing up any of his assertions.
It’s not paranoia, the poster I quoted above you appears perfectly ready to “get the pit bulls”, and as I said, most of the post wasn’t directed at you.
I don’t disagree with you that dogs that have been raised and socialized in the shithole environments and with the kind of abuse and neglect that fighting dogs frequently (if not always) are, are “more dangerous to humans”. This added danger, though, is a product of environmental factors far more than breed. I can think of plenty of other situations far more common not involving dog fighting that produces dogs that are just as likely to be “more dangerous to humans”. Chaining involving lengthy periods of neglect is the most common.
Where the comparison to a pom comes in is in the discussion of the actual reality of the majority of dog bite related fatalities, which were not perpetrated by “trained fighting dogs”, but by family pets, or neglected dogs on chains. Is a pom equally dangerous to you, an ostensibly physically capable adult? Unlikely in the extreme, but then most dog bite fatalities aren’t perpetrated on physically capable adults… are they?
The CDC isn’t a “reputable source”? Nor are the AVMA, AAP, ASPS, and ASPCA… all of whom agree that there’s no useful statistical correlation to be drawn with the current data?
When you say “The Acturarial and Statistical studies”, which “Acturarial and Statistical studies” are you talking about?
You mean, significantly higher than other dog types, like the dog types created to attack and kill human beings?
What are you talking about? There are different breeds of dogs used in dog fighting, for one thing, and secondly, most fatal dog attacks aren’t perpetrated by “fighting dogs”. In any case, it doesn’t matter what “dog fighters” are doing, it matters what abusive and neglectful dog owners are doing. It doesn’t matter whether a boxer mix makes a good pit dog or not, if what the owner is after is a bad-ass looking dog that will sit around his junk yard on a chain its whole life (and, incidentally, maul the neighbor’s unattended toddler who wanders into the yard). It also doesn’t matter whether a husky makes a good pit dog, if it sees the infant as a squeaky toy.
If nothing else, how do you explain all the stats prior to the HSUS promotion of the pit bull as a homicidal maniac, demonstrating that at that time, the GSD and Chow were most common perpetrators? I know I (and all reputable and relevant authorities) explain this by pointing out that sleezebags that wanted canine weapons found those breeds fashionable at that time. There were plenty of pit dogs living amongst us in the 50’s, they just weren’t popular amongst the sleezebag set then.
And how many attacks per year were they estimated to be responsible for?
You’re correct, I’m being unfair to pit bulls. The alaskan Malamute, per canine capita is a much more vicous animal, statistically.
But as we’ve all agreed, a dog is the product of it’s upbringing. As we’ve also all agreed, Pit Bulls are favored by people who glorify the criminal life. My argument is that these people are less likely to give their dogs a proper upbringing leading to an actuarially higher risk of attacks from these dogs (According to a co-worker in the actuarial dept at the Insurance Company I worked for, German Sheperds, Chows, Dobermans and Malamutes are also substantial actuarial risks. So much so that the company charges more to insure homes that contain these). There is no more reliable statistic gathering organization than one who’s profits depend on it.
I’m still for removing these breeds from society if they are not mandatorially trained and tested. Pit Bulls are just the breed that is the subject of this thread. Statistically, owners of Dobermans and German Shepherds attend obedience training more often than other large dog owners. But if I had my druthers any dog over 20 lbs would require a class, a test, and an earned license.
But, I’m not morally opposed to the simple elimantion of the most dangerous breeds. Not necessarily through forced euthanasia - forced sterilization would serve the purpose over the course of a decade.