Highlights: In a bizarre turn of events last month, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced that he would ban American XL bullies, a type of pit bull-shaped dog that had recently been implicated in a number of violent and sometimes deadly attacks.
XL bullies are perceived to be dangerous — but is that really rooted in reality?
FTA:
That describes about half of all dogs, so no fucking shit.
Yeah, it’s clear that these people that use dog bite statistics to argue for breed bans are not doing so in good faith. The breed is unknown is over half of all dog bite cases. That is the beginning and end of this discussion. It’s all that needs to be said.
The entire premise of these ban advocates is based on counting something that simply cannot be counted.
I suspect it is really just a ruse to push sympathy for eugenics and right-wing pseudo science about genetics.
So if a dog is 10% pit bull, 20% German shepherd, 10% beagle 15% husky, 20% lab, 5% golden and 10% Belgian Malinois it counts towards “pit bulls” but no other breed? Got it. It’s almost like another form of historical discrimination by race said any percentage counts as belonging to the undesired race that is being targeted…
“Of unidentifiable dogs that have average dog characteristics we attributed generic criteria that meet any number of breeds but also fit the specific ones we wanted to target with our predetermined conclusion prior to executing this study. We were able to validate our desired outcome with this specific targeting.” #Science!
The fuck?
Not what the article actually said.
They’re actually right. Pitbull describes a certain shape of dog not an actual breed. If a dog is mixed breed or a completely different breed of dog but looks like we think of as a pitbull it labeled as such
“Any dog that we think might have some pitbull is listed as a pitbull.” That’s plain English for what the study says. No other breeds are singled out where any suspected percentage adds to only their tally for overall rate of attacks. Yes, common dog breeds are obviously statistically represented in the majority of average cases. The only thing unique about pitbulls is how far people go out of their way to prescribe blame solely on them. Every dog that meets their size and measurement categories almost certainly contains multiple other breeds, yet they are only counting pitbulls. If there was any academic integrity or scientific process, counting an assumed percentage as a tally for one breed means any other assumed breeds should increase their tallies as well; otherwise it’s just bad science which is par for the course on breed hating “studies.”
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Mixed breed is a separate category from pit. Your example dog would be under mixed breed.
And they deliberately set broad and abusable categories of “unknown” to try and single out pits based on weight and “wide heads.” The bottom line is that when a dog bits and it isn’t an obvious breed, due to decades of misplaced canine bigotry everyone just assumes it’s a pit or pit mix. Pitbulls are no more aggressive (and in most studies slightly less aggressive) than any other breed. They also are no more capable of causing injury than any other equivalent sized dog. There are exactly two factors that lead to the current stigma around them; bad owners who deliberately make them violent and ignorant people that mislabel any dog they are afraid of as a “pit mix.” If any other breed was categorized the same way where any wild-assed guess that it might be “part x-breed” counts as an “X-breed attack” then it would easily top the lists the exact same way.
Not true. Pitbulls do not give up attacking as easily as other breeds. What makes pits so dangerous is that once they do decide to attack something there is very little you can do to stop them. I’ve watched video of a pit trying to attack a horse, and even after being repeatedly kicked in the had, the stupid dog just kept attacking until the horse killed it.
This is a trait that has been bred into pitbulls since they have been bred to fight other dogs. Other dog breeds are smart enough to give up on an attack.
If you add up literally every other dog breed in the list of fatal dog attacks it doesn’t even come close to the number of kills by pitbulls. Combine together rotweillers, german shepherds, malinose, huskies, chow-chows, mastiffs, etc… and pits still kill more people than all of those together. And that’s not including pits killing other dogs, which is a frequent occurrence.
This is just purely false. It is literally anecdotal from people that hate pitbulls. The primary trait that benefits them in fighting is loyalty to owners where they will do things they don’t want to, such as fight and injure other living things, to please their owners. Out of the 51 dogs recovered from Michael Vick’s dogfighting operation, 49 were successfully rehabilitated and only one was euthanized due to behavior. What you are saying is literally wrong and made up.
“Pitbulls” are actually somewhat rare. Dogs with some pitbull in them are what are common, but they also have a bit of every other breed. It is literally observation bias mixed with selective exclusion. It’s literally a broad and generic term used to classify any number of mixed breed mutts without attributing the downsides to any other breed that is present. If you apply a single label to a broad and undefined mixture and then exclude every other component of that mixture it is super easy to say that the thing you labeled is the majority; it’s the most basic form of garbage “science.”