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?
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.”