The news organization is maintaining that dogs do NOT routinely attack people – they don’t even HAVE a “dog attack” graphic. What they have is a “pit bull attack” graphic. They are maintaining, implicitly if nor explicitly, that pit bulls do what other dogs do not do.
Educated people know – this is not a matter of opinion, it’s demonstrable fact – that’s not a true representation of the facts. So the entire furor over this case is because – not incidental to, but because – some people treat pit bull cases differently.
In that sense, my bringing up a different breed’s involvement in a demonstrably more serious attack – remember, no one was injured in the barbershop – is vastly more relevant to the actual issue at hand than some macho declaration that one would bravely take appropriate action.
What’s that, you say? Other news reports alleged others injured by the barber shop dog? Maybe so…but you’re the one trying to limit discussion to just the video, not me, so you’ve excluded that from the conversation, apparently.
I notice you have not taken a position on “appropriate action” toward yellow labs. This is consistent with my observation, widely available to regular readers of the Straight Dope, that people willingly declare their bravery in facing down pit bulls but not so much other breeds, because the words “pit bull” carry connotations.
I guess it’s possible that all six of the guys in the barbershop were stupid wimps who freaked out for no reason, and that the three kids lied about being bitten by the dog, as some posters have been saying in this thread. But it seems more likely to me that the dog was actually attacking the men in the shop. It doesn’t look to me like the dog was playing around; I can see the hair standing up on its back at :28 and :52, and at 1:00 it looks like he’s sinking his teeth into one of the guys’ legs.
Regarding the biting at 1:00, a non-playful bite from a dog of that size that held on that long wouldn’t have left the guy’s pants undamaged or let him jump and scramble away like nothing was happening. Dog bites are a little more serious business than that, in my experience.
Oh, I see, it was just a playful bite. Yeah, then everybody was clearly overreacting. Everyone knows that when a strange dog grabs your leg in its jaw, it’s OK as long as it’s being playful.
Nobody said “it’s okay.” But also nobody said anyone in the barbershop was injured.
Can posters who maintain the following three arguments:
[ol]
[li]Pit bull bites are especially damaging and dangerous[/li][li]That pit bull in the shop intended to bite, and bit a man[/li][li]The news reporting is 100% factual[/li][/ol]
explain why the same news reporting says no one was injured in the barbershop? If that supposedly crushing bite was applied by that allegedly vicious dog, was the guy Clark Kent or something?
It’s certainly differentiated from “sinking his teeth into one of the guys’ legs”, which is a direct quote from the post I was responding to. The lack of injury to the supposedly bitten person directly contradicts the notion from the same post that “the dog was actually attacking the men in the shop.”
No one is arguing the dog is behaving appropriately. The dog’s owner should be punished. Nonetheless, when evaluating whether an animal is “dangerous” or not, there is a vast, vast gulf between “inappropriate playful behavior” and “attack behavior”.
I maintain that several of the people in that video were either playing with the dog or are complete idiots–especially the slapdick who kept open-hand slapping at the dog’s face. “I’m going to ineffectually flail my hands near the eyes and mouth of a dog whose behavior I don’t fully understand”–there is no universe where that’s an appropriate reaction. If you’re going to try to subdue the dog, just hit the damn thing.
Well, no, not that either. You don’t subdue a strange dog by hitting it. You grab it by the scruff of the neck and pick it up.
For crying out loud, it’s a dog, not a freaking alligator.
The dog was a poorly socialized animal, much too excited, and playing too aggressively. You handle a dog like that by establishing dominance. Pick it up by the scruff just like its momma used to do when it was a puppy.
Everybody in the damn barber shop seems to have lost their silly heads and done everything about as wrong as they could - flapping their hands at the dog’s head, running away in a panic, generally encouraging the dog to get even more excited than it already was - and still nobody got hurt.
Maybe I am biased by being a veterinarian’s son, but doesn’t anyone have a clue on how to handle a dog? Those ninnies saw a pit bull and reacted like they were skinny dipping next to a great white shark.
You gotta admit, it’s a better strategy than slap-fighting it.
In all seriousness, I agree with you. I have a really hard time believing that a selection of a dozen guys, not one of them has clue one what to do about a misbehaving dog?
I did notice that most of those guys seemed to be black. I have no idea why this is, but in my limited experience (having lived for a while in a predominately black neighborhood with a hyper-friendly weimaraner) black guys have a tendency to freak out over large dogs. I know: racist! Sorry. Maybe my experience was unique. I dunno. There it is, though.
I love how everyone is calling the people in the video idiots because everyone knows that X is the true way to calm a dog!
And then the next person comes along, “Well, not X. That will enrage him. Everyone knows you do Y”
Well, actually, Y has been debunked, see here. It’s Z now.
Yeah. Look, the people in that video freaked out. They aren’t idiots for not staying up on the latest dog handling techniques. Yes, they could have jumped on it and alpha rolled it, forcing it to submit like a wolf in the wild. They could have grabbed it by the scruff of it’s neck and watched it fall into a harmless, motionless, hypnotized state, they could have quit the slap fighting and step it up to ‘hitting’, per Zerial’s advice, or they could have applied what I like to call the MagiverManeuver and ended the whole thing for good. But I don’t blame them for freaking out if they were afraid of dogs. I like to think I would have been able to remain calm and realize I’m dealing with a playful dog, but not everyone can do that when faced with their fear.
ETA: Sailboat, are you saying that *you *believe a pit bull bite is especially vicious, or did other posters in this thread say that and I missed it. Regarding point 1 in your three point list.
No, but they’re unquestionably idiots for employing the techniques they did use. A blow dryer? An empty shampoo bottle? Flailing?
Ugh, another macho chest-beating post. Did you really have to link to that?
Believe’s got nothin’ to do with it, to paraphrase Will Munny in The Unforgiven. Dr. Brady Barr of National Geographic tested the bite force of several breeds of dogs with reputations for biting and found that the pit bull’s bite force was lower than the German Shepherd Dog’s or the Rottweiler’s. He concluded tentatively that bite force in dogs is mostly a function of size. Pit bulls are medium-sized dogs. Ergo, they are not the kings of bite force in the dog world, not that one would expect much variation between similarly-sized breeds anyway. The jaw structure is the same on all dogs (possibly allowing for some minor variation in the brachycephalic breeds).
No, I was basing my comment on the urban myth which gets repeated everywhere. If it wasn’t implied in this thread, my apologies; it might have been used in the other pit bull thread currently in play; certainly it’s been brought up repeatedly in past pit bull threads on the Dope. It’s a little hard to keep repeating this one particular fight against ignorance over and over and over again without some of it blurring together.
Look, I know you caveated that, but I’m not going to defend a dog breed against bigoted caricature by resorting to anything that even sounds similar.
There are people in my neighborhood who seem afraid of all dogs and do not happen to be black; conversely, the biggest, most muscular dog in the neighborhood lives with a black family who dotes on him.