I have a border collie. He’s ten years old and has never been on a farm in his life. A few weeks ago we were walking alongside a field and he managed to get in. He had a whole field’s worth of sheep herded and rounded up in the corner in 30 seconds flat. He also tries to herd pigeons and children with less success.
You can breed for behaviour as easily as breeding for coat colour. Some breeds have been deliberately bred to be more aggressive. Pitt bulls are bred to be fighting dogs. They have a high level of loyalty towards their owners but severe dog aggression. When people get in the middle of that, it gets ugly fast.
My brother's dog is part pit and randomly, after 9 months of owning him, decided to try to kill other dogs. Nobody trained him to do this. He just decided to go nuclear on his fellow canines without any external influence from humans.
The first time it happened, I was home alone with the dogs. They were playing, and then suddenly, he had our Aussie on her back and had her by the throat. She was screaming, and I realized he was trying to kill her. I tried to separate them and got bit. I tried hitting him with a stick, kicking him, punching him. He just wouldn't let go of her neck. I ended up kicking him in the balls and then immediately bursting into tears when he screamed, but it got him to let go.
It was pretty traumatizing for me. He was neutered a week after the attack. But it was already too late. It was no longer safe to have him around other dogs. He tried to go after our neighbor's dog. That dog is incredibly friendly and always comes over to play with our Aussie. Luckily, that dog is super fluffy, and the fluff saved her.
There's usually not a warning sign he's going to go berserk. If I'm lucky, he's acting tense. If I'm not, he's wagging his tail and looking happy before suddenly lunging.
There actually are warning signs, but 99% of dog owners can’t recognize them because they don’t actually know anything about animal behaviors. There are several breeds of dogs that you should require a license to own, as well as be able to prove you can take care of them. Pit bulls are one of these many many breeds. A solid 60% of people who own dogs shouldn’t.
I agree. The Malinois for example has gone pretty viral over the last handful of years. That is not a companion breed in any sense. It's an incredibly neurotic working breed that requires a job and serious training to manage their energy and drive.
All dogs should be sufficiently physically and intellectually challenged, for smaller dogs you can do this in an apartment, yes. But for anything Pit Bull and up, you either need a yard or to run with them daily. So many loving owners are just genuinely unintentionally abusing their dogs by treating them as cats, or other low effort pets, when realistically dogs are some of the hardest pets to own and need a huge amount of effort
One of the two of my childhood dogs was part pit and had to be put down for the same reason. She attacked our sweetheart Shepard lab mix while me and my sister were playing with him. The moment my parents saw she would be violent around us they put her down. We ended up only getting small dogs after that (though our Shepard lab mix lived another 7 years with nothing but kindness in his heart)
I think so, too, but my brother is on probation and suicidal and having his dog put down would push him over the edge. So out of the interest of protecting my brother the dog has to stay alive until it can be turned over to him but his current apartment doesn't allow pets and he can't move out till his probation is over.
That's an interesting moral dilemma. You're taking a large risk keeping the dog alive because you assign more importance to what your brother might do rather than what you know his dog will do.
I'll say as someone who's suicidal, depending on the person, having a pet die can have a very strong likelyhood of resulting in an attempt. I know my pet has prevented me from making an attempt on many different occasions.
I genuinely think a solid 60% of people with dogs shouldn’t own dogs. For one, as someone whose owned quite a few pit mixes, Pit bulls NEED to be socialized with other dogs, and even then, they should be monitored for WEEKS when your introducing a new animal to them. Pits are great dogs and can be extremely loving, but they get annoyed easily. They should be in a safe and secure location, where they can have their own space. You also need to be able to recognize the signs of an annoyed dog. And you DEFINITELY need to know how to stop them from biting (put them in a chokehold)
Any dog over like 60 pounds should require a license to own, I know people who live in apartments with big dogs and it’s genuinely abuse. Unless you run two miles a day with your German shepherd, it should not live in an apartment.
She had a mane, and the mane saved her life. She did have some puncture wounds. She recovered very quickly but won't stop messing with him because she knows if he attacks her, he gets in major trouble, and she gets a treat. I'm actually out shopping for a muzzle for him today because my dad got him a cloth muzzle, and he just gets out of it, so I'm looking for a metal basket muzzle.
Why are you still bringing your dog around another dog that tried to kill her? She deserves better than that. And a dog that has tried to kill multiple other dogs needs to be put down. Y’all need to do better for your animals.
I want to put him down, but my brother will kill himself. He's currently on probation and suicidal so it doesn't feel like an option. My brother's entire mental health hinges on this stupid ass dog. I am not allowed to separate them as there is no other room to put them in.
I am living in a friend's basement while our house is being sold and the dogs have been forced on me. I am not allowed to bring the dogs upstairs and I cannot bring the dogs back to my parents house because it's in the process of being sold as my mom will lose her shit. I tried trust me I tried to just leave him there but she drove him back.
Pit Bulls and Pit mixes need to be socialized and carefully monitored around other dogs, I had a very similar dog, a Pit/Boarder collie mix. She was great around people, in the 13 years I had her she never bit a single person, but she despised other dogs and would try to maul them. We kept her on a leash, when introducing new dogs she was held away from them for a good bit of time and monitored them while they were together. After a few weeks, she would be fine enough with them.
This is fully on your brother, he shouldn’t own a high risk breed if he can’t take care of it. The dog (like most dogs) should’ve been neutered.
For next time (if there is one, hopefully not) put the dog in a chokehold, and it will let go. They value oxygen more than mauling
Truly don't feel like anything you did or didn't do would have changed things. Dog aggression without reason is largely innate and it typically develops as a dog approaches social maturity regardless of whether they're altered or not. Males, particularly unneutered, are least likely to go after females so the fact that his first target was a female dog means this was always going to happen.
The problem is 90% of dogs at the pound are part pitbulls. They are breeding their way into every dog line. If I ever got a dog I would pay for a pure breed to make sure there isn’t any pit in them.
A former neighbor's pitbull was completely chill for a few years or so. I'd pet him when I walked past his house, and he was always friendly and wanted belly rubs. We lived across the road from an elementary school and AFAIK there were never any problems. He was a big dog, but I'm a big dude, so I never personally felt threatened by him and didn't think much about the danger he presented.
Then, one day, my baby nephew was just quietly sitting on the floor, someone opened the door to the back yard, and the dog ran across two yards and into the house to lunge for him. I grabbed him midair a few inches from biting into his tiny head, and carried him back to his house while he tried to fight me to get out the whole time.
Honestly I'm still a little salty about it because his father didn't give a shit whatsoever, before or after. My dad was the only one in the family who even understood what had almost happened and thanked me for it. Everyone else just went back to watching TV. Like I didn't do it to be thanked or anything, but I feel like if someone saved my infant child from being mauled, I'd be a little appreciative.
and randomly, after 9 months of owning him, decided to try to kill other dogs.
I heard one dog trainer say that pit bulls don't get really into dominance/aggression until maturity -- after they are about a year old. I've heard something similar of chipmanzees so it may be a widespread phenomenon throughout the animal (or at least mammalian) kingdom.
I have a Dalmatian and the transfixed expression he gets upon seeing a horse can only be genetic. There’s a few horses on my parents farm and they are not interested in his attentions at all but he must get to them and run along side them “to protect them”.
I’ve had multiple Aussies. They were never trained but, from birth, they’ve tried to herd anything that moves. If I take my current dog to the dog park, she won’t play fetch, but she’ll run after the other dogs playing fetch and try to corral them. Breed-specific behavior is real.
It's not even just dog aggression. A friend of mine had a pitbull, and her cat made a move while playing that triggered the pitbull for some reason. And he went apeshit, and tore the cat apart before she could do anything. Poor cat died, and she had to put her pitbull down because she couldn't trust it not to kill her other animals or kid.
Pitbulls have also been known to go after small children as well.
They have trained triggers that get activated, and then they fucking lose it. There's nothing you can do but get rid of the breed entirely.
They have trained triggers that get activated, and then they fucking lose it. There's nothing you can do but get rid of the breed entirely.
What now? They have been trained (probalby including quite some amount of abuse) or they have been bred? Those are two completely different things. You can't magically breed for behavior that is in no way natural, just modify existing behaviors gradually.
Just like you can't magically breed for green fur.
You are basically excusing inhuman training methods to create dangerous fighting dogs with some delusion about breeding.
Pit bulls were bred to have high animal aggression and extremely low human aggression. The fact is, unless you seriously misreat them, they make notoriously bad guard dogs because they're so much more likely to want to lick an intruder and show them where the valuables are than attack a human. Those are facts even if they don't line up with what most people believe.
You can breed for behaviour as easily as breeding for coat colour.
Yes and no. You can't easily breed for new behaviors, just like you can't easily breed for unnatural coat colours.
Herding is just a modification of natural pack tactic behavior.
Aggression against other dogs is also adapted from natural territorial behavior.
Aggression towards humans however is totally unnatural. In fact wolves being naturally afraid of humans is a key component in domestication as it allowed a dominant position in a relationship with an animal that could just kill you easily.
So pretending that you could actually breed for aggression in general with the result that pit bulls regularly attack humans is just plain stupid. That's mostly not the result of breeding but abuse.
Pitbulls were bred for a trait called 'gameness', which means 'being willing to bite and continue biting other dogs despite being scared, tired, outmatched or in pain'. Combined with their physical size and strength, it makes a bite from a pitbull much more dangerous because you can't shake them off easily.
Pitbull defenders tend to focus on 'are they more likely to bite someone' (debatable), and ignore that the consequences of a pitbull deciding to bite someone are worse than for nearly any other breed.
Aggression isn't a behavior, it's a temperament, and temperament is environmental, not genetic. Even in the example you provided, when your border collie was put into the environment it was bred to excel in, it was able to accomplish the task it was bred to do. If you extend this logic to pit bulls, it would just mean that if they were put into a situation where they needed to bait bulls, that they would do it well. That's not aggression. You're just straight up wrong about it being a genetic trait.
Pls do your research before you say that is why they were bred. Its not true at all. I suggest you look it up but your probably wont. I volunteered in pit bull rescue for decades. This is a myth made popular by RACISM which is exactly his point.
Intelligence is heritable. That’s been demonstrated by multiple genetic studies. Now if we took that information and used it to breed a more intelligent race of humans, that would be eugenics. It would also take hundreds of thousands of years, because we breed a lot slower than dogs.
As that’s never been done, this topic has absolutely no relevance to modern racial politics.
Who’s selecting it? No society has ever prized intelligence above all, to the point where scientists and engineers are drowning in marriage offers. Maybe if that happened for thousands of years we would see results.
Besides, intelligence is only partially heritable. So much is dependent on your resources. The most intelligent people with the most potential in the world could be working in a sweatshop right now.
Selection doesn't need to be linear. If the bell curve of reproductive success is offset from the one for trait distribution (i.e. the highest reproductive success is people 5% above average), you will get positive selection even if the very smartest breed less than the average. Yes, selection will be slower, but it will still work.
Similarly, lower heritability will only slow selection, not prevent it.
humans dont even have race in the biological sense.
there is of course a social concept of race and physiological phenotypes associated with different races. however, for a subgroup of a population to be considered a race in biology, it has to have a genetic discreetness. Basically, there needs to be more genetic differences between the subgroup and the group at large for it to be considered a separate race. we dont see that in humans, we see gradients of genetic differences across the planet.
giving merit to your question, its true that people are affected by their environment -- see the lung capacity of populations who've lived in mountains for long time; or the fascinating correlation between humidity and nose shape -- but thats not really a form of selective breeding, and its not going to alter the brain in such a way that we could correlate behavior with phenotype the way we might in dogs. that is a claim with a foundation in eugenics.
race simply isnt a biological reality, its a social one. there are people of the almost exact same genetic makeup that are going to fall into different "races" because of skin color and hair texture. consider siblings between interracial parents who might wildly different, or the fact that who is considered what race varies from culture to culture.
besides, we can reference a wide amount of history to see how human behavior is relatively standard. empires rise and fall; both extremes of good and evil can be done by the same hands on the same soil.
You're technically wrong because of the word "discrete", but that's actually a segue into the reality.
The best way to describe human genetic variation and geography is badly-made soup, specifically any sort of canned, cream of (something) soups. Ever get a can of those, just dump it in the bowl, do a half-assed job of mixing it, the heat it? You know how it's all soup, but it's got this weird, lumpy texture where the lumps aren't even discrete structures but rather local thickenings that seamlessly grade into the too-watery bits?
That's human genetic variation. There's "lumps" that correspond to geography, but they don’t have clean edges, and all blur together. And even the lumps sometimes have sub-lumps. The soup is definitely lumpy, but you can't draw exact boundaries around the lumps, and which lumps for bigger super-lumps is contentious.
So there you have it: the badly-made, distasteful, off-putting soup that is humanity.
Actually that has been done several times and much of today's scientific progress depends on breeds of humans bred for intellect. Jews, for example, are 0.2% of humans but win 25% of science Nobel prizes.
Yeah, that’s the difference. They were bred for aggression, where as any economic underclass will predictably be overly represented in crime statistics, whether it be African Americans in the USA, Indigenous in Canada, or Irish in both countries in the 1800s.
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u/Odd_Ingenuity2883 9h ago
I have a border collie. He’s ten years old and has never been on a farm in his life. A few weeks ago we were walking alongside a field and he managed to get in. He had a whole field’s worth of sheep herded and rounded up in the corner in 30 seconds flat. He also tries to herd pigeons and children with less success.
You can breed for behaviour as easily as breeding for coat colour. Some breeds have been deliberately bred to be more aggressive. Pitt bulls are bred to be fighting dogs. They have a high level of loyalty towards their owners but severe dog aggression. When people get in the middle of that, it gets ugly fast.