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?
I’m glad you took time to take a nuanced opinion on the article that you don’t seem to have read. To be honest it sounds like you didn’t read your own article. "unknown” tops the list. This is because dog breeds aren’t identified by genetics a cop shows up says oh it looked like a pitbull it had a blocky head and it’s automatically a pit until DNA tests prove otherwise.
I read the article. It’s the same old excuses about “It’s the owner not the breed.” And “Breed is not a reliable predictor of aggressive behavior in dogs.”
Those statements just aren’t true. Dogs are specifically bred for certain physical and behavioral traits.
There was also a study done that proved breeding aggressive animal lines made their progeny even more aggressive. And docile more docile.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/whos-a-good-fox-soviet-experiment-reveals-genetic-roots-of-behavior
This post is idiotic. It’s written by someone incapable of nuance or critical thinking.
https://atts.org/breed-statistics/statistics-page1/
From an organization that does temperament tests.
This is the percentage of tested animals that pass their temperament tests.
AMERICAN PIT BULL TERRIER - 87.6%
AMERICAN STAFFORDSHIRE TERRIER - 85.7%
OH NOES! 15% don’t pass! How horrific are these beasts?
AUSTRALIAN CATTLE DOG - 80.2%
AUSTRALIAN SHEPHERD - 82.5%
CHOW CHOW - 71.7%
COCKER SPANIEL - 82.4%
DOBERMAN PINSCHER - 80.1%
GERMAN SHEPHERD DOG - 85.7%
GOLDEN RETRIEVER - 85.9%
GREAT DANE - 82.7%
MIXED BREED - 86.6%
ROTTWEILER - 85.0%
WEIMARANER - 80.8%
This is a selection of fairly common dogs and the Weimaraner because I did NOT expect to see that kind of failure rate from those guys. Every one of them I’ve met has been incredibly patient. I include the chow chow to show an extreme outlier. That’s the lowest score I found with around a hundred or more animals tested. In that case it was 99, but that’s close enough for comparison.
So what does this show? Clearly, Aussie dogs all need to be destroyed. They’re far more temperamental and dangerous than pit bulls. Chow chow? Burn them in cleansing fire.
Incidentally, I included the cocker spaniel because that narrative of them being more dangerous than pit bulls follows my personal biases from my own anecdotal experiences. I’ve been bitten by three dogs, all cocker spaniels, all injured me to some extent. But nobody reports the cocker spaniel bite, no matter how bloody it is. You just clean it up and get on with your life because you got bit by a cocker spaniel you fucking pussy. On the other hand, I’ve been aggressively run at by numerous pit bulls and have thus far escaped with only considerable amounts of drool on me after a seriously violent request for pets ended in a belly rub massacre.
Anecdote, however, is not the singular form of data.
Temperament does not equate to ability and preponderance to cause severe injury or death.
And there it is people Good old American racism.
I’m certain you’ve also followed the Russian experiment where they managed to take wild foxes and domesticate them in under 50 generations and now you can adopt one as a pet. So what you’re telling me is that a dog that has been with humanity for over 10,000 years and then went through a period of roughly 300 years of pit fighting is irrepidly damaged but the fox that went through 15,000 years of being a fox It’s just magically now perfect pet in under 100 years. And you’re telling me that it’s genetics and not nurturing and raising the animal that has an impact okay…
I mean, to my understanding, those domestic foxes, while tame, are still not quite so perfect of pets as animals that have been bred for longer like dogs are. Though there is no reason it can’t be both, while a dog raised to be aggressive will probably be aggressive, and one raised well should be far less likely to be, it’s not fair to say that there is no genetic basis for friendliness and aggression, else there would be no need for domestication in the first place. A lot of selective breeding can be done in century, so the past few centuries of what an animal has been selectively bred for probably matter a bit more than the centuries before that, to a point anyway. I doubt anyone is really arguing that pit bulls are irreparably damaged as a whole either, but if an animal has been bred for aggression for awhile, undoing that is going to require breeding for the reverse, or crossbreeding with another line that does not have that trait and selecting offspring that do not display it, or similar.
I’m not really sure what stance to take on pitbulls and similar breeds myself, I’ve known some people with rather nice ones and it seems to me that any law targeting a specific dog breed is going to be somewhat impractical given that breeds are “fuzzy” categories with ill defined edges, not clear and sharply defined, so determining what animals are close to pitbulls but are not quite, and which are considered to be pitbulls, but barely, is going to be a very difficult line to reliably draw.
Look up the search terms rat poison and pitbulls and get back to me on the fact that people don’t hate them.
I didn’t say anything about people not hating them, clearly many people don’t like them, but that doesn’t really have any bearing on if they’re unreasonably dangerous compared to other breeds or not, since it could be that people think them dangerous because they don’t like them, or it could be that they don’t like them because of them being dangerous.
Sorry, can you clarify what part of OPs post is racism? Genuinely struggling with that connection.
Did you read the original article? It explains the racebaiting that goes on with pit bulls
The idiot I’m replying to believes that The genome of a animal directly correlates to that animals behavior potential for intelligence and general demeanor.
Now where have I heard before that someone’s genetic makeup makes it so that they are not qualified to the same rights and privileges as the others. If this person believes that the parentage of a animal determines how a animal will live and act… That’s eugenics.
Eugenics is the scientifically erroneous and immoral theory of “racial improvement” and “planned breeding,”
To clarify, you are directly equating dog breeds with different races of humans so you can paint op as a eugenics apologist, and win an online argument about dogs? Did I get that right??
Yes, all these ban pitbull people are eugenicist apologists. That’s facts. They might be useful idiots, but they have been tricked by pseudoscientific lies about genetics and behavior.
Breed restrictions are a soft way of telling certain people that they’re not welcome by forcing them to choose between their pet and living in a given location.
It’s redlining via an external factor that isn’t considered discriminatory. Some idiots look at a hard number “2,000 deaths in 30 years, OMG DANGER!” and refuse to accept the fact that per capita there are more dangerous dog breeds out there. But not by much, because the odds of you being killed by a dog are so preposterously low as to be irrelevant to your daily life.
I am merely reading the man statements at face value. Quote" “It’s the owner not the breed.” And “Breed is not a reliable predictor of aggressive behavior in dogs.”
Those statements just aren’t true. Dogs are specifically bred for certain physical and behavioral traits"
If you do not see that as the definition of eugenics then I don’t know what to say in regards to your assessment.
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Sweetheart I’m not the one saying that the genetics of a being make up the beings responses. That’s you and your buddy. I’m over here saying that genetics does not define the responses of a being. For the uninformed this means I do not believe in the false science of eugenics.
Pitbull dogs that were bred for fighting were euthanized if they attacked people. Also, most pitbulls were not used in dog fighting.
So really you just sound stupid.
They didn’t even undergo 300 years of pit fighting.
Handfuls of these dogs kept by handfuls of people engaged in pitbull fighting.
The substantial majority of pitbulls out there were just living their life, living amongst families and children, not bothering anyone.
And if they were bred to fight other dogs, so fucking what?
You can read first-hand accounts from people who are involved in dog fight organizing who said over and over that dogs who are aggressive towards humans were banned from competition and often euthanized.
A lot of domestic animals can go feral, as cats will do as kittens, under one generation. Creating a dog breed requires a lot of intentionality — selective breeding and conformance to some kind of breed standard, like making some specific breed of fox into something that can live in a house.
That’s not what is going on with pit bulls in 2023. Such as they can be defined, they’re usually selected for their capability to protect. And otherwise they’re bred randomly with other breeds and maybe lose that capability, but then they’re not pit bulls anymore. and to be honest nobody really knows what their capabilities are at that point. It’s a total mess, it’s nothing like concentratedly breeding non-aggressive, non-asshole foxes relentlessly until you can tolerate each other indoors.
By the way I heard fox piss is… unsuitable for human co-habitation, is that still a problem?
It’s better than empty sarcasm.
Edit: Note that they edited their comment after I called them out for it.
You literally did not read the article you posted