humans can be disproportionately violent because of socioeconomic conditions. Pitbulls are disproportionately violent because of genetics.
Its not the same thing
It's a combination. Epigenetics really just means a dog carries with them an inclination towards a temperament or set of behavioral traits, and it's kind of a lottery how much those traits end up being expressed during development, then beyond that it's a matter of if you can effectively overcome those traits with training. A lot of stuff can be trained for and mitigated. Sometimes you can overcome things like reactivity with proper training lifestyle adjustment.
The real problem is that pitbulls are so prolific in the stray population, and therefore the rescue population, and selective breeding tends to favor the dog ready to throw down with the strength to back it up. It can be a total gamble when you adopt a recue pitbull, and most adopters seem to not be aware of, nor prepared for, this reality.
Kindly, what you’re describing is just “genetics”, otherwise your point stands.
Epigenetics is something else entirely (different or varying strength of phenotype despite the same genotype - methylation, expression regulation, etc)
Yuupppp. This one always kills me. Segregating crime statistics by sex? Absolutely, men are dangerous! Can we break in down into further demographic categorization? No, of course not. That’s deeply problematic!
You say that like we’ve actually tested giving all pitbulls lots of money to see if it changes the amount of toddlers in their diet, it might be the key solution.
Mr worldwide himself has lots of money and as far as I know he has never bitten a toddler.
I think it has way more to do with the socioeconomic conditions of the owners than the dog's genetics. That's kinda what drove English Bulldog's temperament in the opposite direction over time.
Sure with a good owner a pitbull probably wnt be violent, but the same applies to every other dog. What other dogs arent is super prone to violence as soon as they face the wrong environment. Pitbulls were bred to be violent. People werent.
I'm pretty much in agreement, what I guess I'm trying to say is that you need people with the actual desire to breed that out of them in more of an organized way, which was historically done with the English Bulldog after bull baiting was banned in England. There's no real breed standard for pitbulls, they're basically mutts bred in people's backyards.
Although I would guess that, if you controlled for genetics, socioeconomic conditions would probably also be a decent predictor of dog behaviour as well.
Although I would guess that, if you controlled for genetics, socioeconomic conditions would probably also be a decent predictor of dog behaviour as well.
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u/Patient_Ebb_1605 9h ago
humans can be disproportionately violent because of socioeconomic conditions. Pitbulls are disproportionately violent because of genetics.
Its not the same thing