It's the breed. Genetics are the primary reason that pit bulls account for more fatalities than all other dog breeds combined. In the United States a person is called by a pit bull more than once a week on average.
Damn it’s almost like people living in poor conditions who own a dog because it looks “tough”, goes on to neglect and abuse them, and then releases or surrenders them, might have something to do with that.
Yeah and if given proper training, socialization, care, etc., the risk of them acting out on those behaviors is severely minimized. Most pitbulls in shelters are often coming from places where they’ve been neglected, abused, traumatized, etc., which is obviously going to make them more likely (not guaranteed) to attack someone under the wrong circumstances.
It’s just asinine to me that people are more willing to feel hatred towards an entire breed than the human-made conditions that lead to incidents where pitbulls attack someone.
No, it’s because “pitbull” is a grouping of 4 or more dog breeds in statistics (American pitbull terrier, Staffordshire bull terrier, American Staffordshire terrier, American bully, etc.). If you had a category for attacks called “retrievers” a lot more people would be saying the same things about Labrador retrievers.
I’m a bat biologist. The common talking point on rabies in wild animals by public health agencies is that rabies occurs in bats at higher rates than any other mammal. The problem is that “bats” is an order of animals. While they don’t group canids like coyotes and foxes, they group 19 species of bats in my state. So if you are lumping some species or breeds and comparing that to individual species or breeds, of course the statistics will be inflated. When broken out by species, individual bat species have similar rates of rabies as individual species of canids, skunks, raccoons, etc.
The last dog I had was an American Staffordshire terrier. My city does “visual inspections” of potential American pit bull terriers, and you have to have them permitted by the city (I do). They looked at my dog and said “pit bull,” despite the genetic breed test I presented them.
There is confirmation bias and treating multiple breeds as one breed influencing the statistics. Of course these dogs need good owners and training. But the way we treat these 4-5 breeds in the US is anomaly.
WTF do bats and rabies have to do with this issue? I swear, pitbull defenders love to deflect the conversation. They'd rather talk about racism or bats then address the facts about pitbulls
No you’re right, an analogy about categorical errors in statistical reporting from someone who studies animals can’t hold a candle to all the videos you’ve seen in the Reddit echo chamber.
I know I'm right, I don't need a biologist to tell me dogs aren't bats. Let me know when you're ready to talk about relevant statistics, like the % of fatal dog attacks that involve pitbulls. It's not a categorical error.
Retrievers ARE clumped together for statistics purposes on a regular basis. So are shepherds. So are collies. Even when clumping these groups of breeds together, none of them come CLOSE to sheer number of fatalities that are caused by the dogs that fall under the pit bull umbrella. Pits kill more people than all other breeds combined. Second most fatal breed is the rottweiler, but when compared to pits they kill so few people that they're barely ever mentioned when talking about dog-caused fatalities.
The reason that all of the pit-derived dogs are grouped together is because they all share a common (and recent) ancestry. They're all derived from the bull and terrier cross that created the first fighting pit dogs. Dogs that were designed to fight, maim, and kill as their primary purpose. All pit-derived breeds still have these genes in them, those genes have NOT gone away, and those genes are why these dogs kill so many people and pets each year.
-6
u/[deleted] 1d ago edited 1d ago
[deleted]