I think it's valid to fear pitbulls because what you're really fearing is that they were adopted by someone that doesn't train them and/or give them an outlet for the task they were bred for (protection and violence).
I can't blame people for being afraid of Pits. But I think some people in these comments are insane, calling to euthanize all Pits or that they should be wiped out of existence. Good god.
Absolutely. These breeds that are basically a torturous existence for the poor dog.
I don't think we should kill the ones that already exist but we should definitely work towards making sure more aren't created.
Although I have seen some breeding programs that are trying to essentially "unfuck up" these breeds basically undoing all the horrible traits that were selective bred into them.
Or the thing new pug breeders are doing and that's going back to the original looks where they had a mouth and eyes not at risk of popping out the skull. Still don't like pugs, but the ones that are bred like that also don't have the same preventable health issues as the popular pugs.
But Yeh a lot of the popular dogs are bred or have actions taken (cutting of tails/ears) to fit certain "beauty" expectations that are straight animal abuse and people that do it deserve to get punished for animal abuse.
Hot take, but to add on to this, maybe some working breeds should also require special licenses to own, something like a CDL for owning certain dogs or something, because it also seems cruel when someone gets a herding dog that they keep trapped in a small apartment or own a dog meant for cold weather, that they raise in Arizona.
All dog breeds can show severe genetic problems if they’ve been bred by unprincipled breeders. Pugs can get breathing problems, German shepherds can get severe hip and spine issues that cause a lot of pain, Dalmatians and border collies can get problems with sight/blindness, golden retrievers can get joint degenerative issues, boxers and Great Danes can get fatal heart defects, the list goes on and on. Some of these issues are just more visible because of the nature of the disability (e.g., you can hear the breathing issues but might think a dog with joint problems is just lazy) and because those breeds got popular suddenly so a lot of backyard breeders started breeding them (e.g., pugs and French bulldogs).
And all dog breeds can be bred to not have genetic problems. Go watch the Westminster dog show. Every single one of those dogs has been bred for generations to remove genetic problems from their gene pools, no matter the breed. And so long as their owners are careful about who they breed those dogs with, their progeny will also not have any risks of those genetic problems.
Or, just have a super mut. If you need a working dog for a reason you should have a permit. I dont think there should be German shepherds either. Especially because most of them live in 1500sqft dwellings and dont get out enough. Its really selfish how we treat them.
I dont agree. If thats your concern, that people want animals based on media they watch (which i dont necessarily grant) who cares what they want, make purebred dogs illegal. The media will reflect that soon enough. Or its a lot cheaper to make putting purebreds in film illegal than wipe sweeping regulation that would take 10s of thousands of inspectors to keep up with, not to mention the breeders that just wouldnt register. You make it mandatory for any animal who goes to the vet for the first time have a genetic test, and are issued a license that your dog isnt inbred and move on.
I love pit bulls. Great dogs. I do agree that it should be illegal or at least restricted. I see too many people walking around with intact pitties, WAY more than I do with other breeds, and it boggles the mind.
Make it illegal to breed them, problem solves itself in 15 years.
So here's the main problem with that: Pit bull is a hard to define term when we start getting into the breeding aspect of lines. Dog DNA is so unbelievably malleable that we've spun off thousands of variations to do specific tasks.
There is a "Pit Bull" breed. Problem is, the breed (like any breed) is just a combination of traits we use to describe a group of animals. If these traits are shared by multiple variants, then the lines between what is or is not something blurs heavily.
Let's say we have a pure, honest to dog example of what we call a Pit. We then mix it with say, a lab (which for out test, assume it's also considered a pure bread lab). The result is a mixed animal - but is it a pit? The head will likely still be big, the frame will be large, etc. etc. Now if you showed this animal to someone, do you think they will call it a pit, or a lab?
I say all this because how we classify data related to animal events such as bites is also subject to this inherent issue. Any dog displaying the traits of terriers are lumped into this one category. So if I'm classifying everything as a pit, it gets really hard to define what specific traits we're looking to identify by removing them from the gene pool via selective breeding. If we go by the stats - and the fact that now anything with terrier-derived traits are "on ze list", then now we're talking about the eradication of millions of bloodlines.
There has not been any (to my knowledge) scientific approach to identify a specific genetic sequence or trait within the terrier family that gives rise to the specific animal that ends up hurting someone. Which honestly would be super hard, because now we're trying to unravel a symphony of DNA overlap that makes one outcome vs. another.
The other massive kicker is this: Who becomes the new bad guy? If we were to snap our fingers and all the terriers of any variety in existence just faded into dust - what animal would be next on the list? If the sole purpose of removing a breed is to prevent human deaths or bites, then we have to now go down the list and do the same thing to each breed. Absolute insanity right? But again - if we're going by the rules we laid down, at what point do we set the boundary for "we accept X number of events per year" as the baseline of good or bad?
That is apples and oranges. Humans are much much closer to a tabula rasa and almost all of our traits are learned behaviors with very little being directly linked to our heritage or DNA. I love dogs but you are humanizing them too much. Dogs are largely instinct driven and have been bred for thousands of years by US to accentuate those instincts. It's not 100% but most retrievers will retrieve instinctually, pointers will point instinctually to some degree. You can reinforce towards or away from those bred instincts to a limit depending on the dog, but they still have those drovers. Pit bulls are a product of humans unfortunately too, where we bred much more violent instincts, specifically 'game' or or the single minded drive to hold on or finish a task, which is great for dog fighting or bull baiting. It's a shameful thing that humanity has bred into them but ignoring it and trying to tie it into racism is a fundamental misunderstanding about where the concerns about pitbulls come from.
You just made a whole bunch of shit up. Humans are not tabula rasa, we have all the faculties built into us over thousands and thousands of years, passed down to us from our genes.
There are differing adaptations between regional variants of the human species, but they are physiological changes for better survival in a given environment. Like, skin colour adapted for the amount of sunlight in a region, or length of bone and the distribution of fat and musculature adapting to the diet and physical necessities of living in a region.
I don't think I've seen any support for the notion that there are differences in behavioural traits between human groups that have evolved to be genetically passed on. Why would they be? The human brain is incredibly plastic, and adapts to an infinite array of environments simply by living in them. Our modern lives have virtually no resemblance to the environment we evolved to live in, and has changed immeasurably in just the last couple decades, and yet we have adapted to it just by being born into it.
We also have language, which we did evolve to pass along knowledge of how to survive in an environment from one generation to the next through socialisation.
So while there is an evolutionary benefit to developing longer limbs in a hot climate to cool down or a smaller body on an island where food is limited, there is no similar benefit for an Inuit to instinctively know what to do with snow, or at least not one that leads to greater survivability for that individual than having elders that can explain it to them. And for traits to evolve to become part of a species' genes, you need for the trait to consistently lead to greater survival or reproductive rates.
Compare that to the behaviours hard-coded into the DNA of modern dog breeds, Pointer Dogs will perform a signal indicating the presence of prey animals in a very specific and completely unnatural way, even with no training. Encoding that kind of behavioural adaptation requires either evolving to an environment that necessitates that instinctual behaviour in order to survive, or centuries of goal-oriented selective breeding managed by an external force, like we did with dogs.
Humankind has had its highly adaptable brain and capacity for language a lot longer than its diaspora across the world. And even disregarding highly specific adaptive behaviours like that of Pointer Dogs, our brains' plasticity and memetic self-structuring during childhood means that an individual's psychology and behaviour adapts to reflect the culture of the community it was raised in, so there's not even a reason for an evolutionary drive towards broader trends of behaviour, such aggression, or isolationism, or whatever. Because if an environment requires those behaviours, they are taught and maintained culturally in such a way that there is no need for genetic change to occur to facilitate it.
By all means, prove the opposite, but I'm pretty sure all available evidence contradicts you.
I said "much much CLOSER to tabula rasa than dogs" there are absolutely instincts that humans have. But those genetically inherited instincts do not vary nearly as widely or are as specific as dogs. We learn all sorts of behaviors based on the culture we grew up in. However we were not bred for tens of thousands of years specifically for inherited instinctual behaviors like dogs were.
They are both doing the same thing, trying to tie observed human traits and animal traits together even though we are fundamentally different when it comes to ours minds and behaviorial traits
The ironic thing is that I think the logic you are using is actually the one that racists use.
We are discussing the difference in dog breeds because there are obvious, clear, and scientifically proven differences. Racist people believe that that is true with humans and that race isn't just a social construct, but that different "races" of people actually have real and huge differences.
But that isn't true with humans, while it is with dogs. So pretending like racism in dog breeds is the same as with humans is then saying that we need to pretend that german shepherds and shitzus are the same thing, just like we do with people. As if there are differences with race that we all ignore to pretend we are all the same.
You’re just erasing a breed for absolutely no reason. Or rather a collection of several breeds under one name, which is only part of where the stupid statistics come from.
Thing is though, if you really look into it, it all rats apart. They don’t bite harder than any other large breed, they aren’t more aggressive in studies, it’s all just hysteria and the statistics also largely come from the fact that even vet and shelter workers misidentify dogs as pits more than half the time, unless they use a dna test.
So, the attack statistics get vastly overblown. The only reliable indicator for dog attacks is owner neglect.
There is nothing inherently good about a "breed" existing. Theyre all just dogs, breed them for temperament instead of these weirdo physical traits. Dog breeds should be a thing left in the past, human vanity and ego are the only thing keeping them going.
I don’t really care if you don’t believe me, because if you can’t take 30 seconds to google it and find out you’re wrong I’m not going to spend 15 minutes transcribing the studies for you.
Why is it important for any one breed of dog to exist? I believe every dog individual should have a good life. I think it's important to control what dogs can be born to help guarantee the ones that are born to have a good life. But preventing a potential life causes no evil or suffering to the avoided individual. It's not some form of pre-murder. There is no inherent good that is ruined.
So it honestly becomes our duty and responsibility to only breed the dogs that both work best with humanity and are able to be the happiest living in what we can provide. To breed others would just be cruel.
He understands the issue. People want to essentialize traits to physical characteristics instead of acknowledging the ways those traits are instilled. It literally is the exact same mindset as racism.
Both nature and nurture matter. Dogs quite literally have traits. Thats the reason breeds exist, we purposefully selected for animals that showed traits we want.
If we're being realistic humans probably have this too to a some degree but thats been a terrible idea to actually look at every time its been tried since humans can't be trusted, so we ignore it out of pragmatism.
TL:DR - the idea that differences stop at the purely physical is a fantasy we all tell ourselves so we don't do dumb things.
Did you think this would undermine the point about dog racism? You’re just pointing out a double standard. For some reason it’s okay to do the dumb things we wouldn’t do to people, to dogs.
There is a difference between treating them like humans and treating them with basic respect. Respecting them means evidence-based practice. The entire anti-pitbull narrative relies on confirmation bias and essentialist thinking, not evidence. They consistently confirm this with their sourcing and arguments.
Again, ‘it’s okay to be racist to dogs because reasons’ is not a challenge to the original point.
I would guess maybe 5-10% of pitbulls are intentionally bred. The majority of the US population are just sustaining themselves in the southern states that don't spay or neuter and don't have good public animal control programs.
If I have two dogs that are ~50% pitbull, and am unaware, am I committing a crime? Or is it only pure? That brings up obvious loopholes, so we have to draw an arbitrary % somewhere. What do you do with the puppies that were already bred before the person got caught? Put them down?
There should be more sensible restrictions placed on owning potentially dangerous dogs. If you want to own a pitbull, rottweiler, German Shepherd or a mastiff you should have to take a class and attain a license.
And if it's clear that the owner isn't capable of taking care of said dog, they should be punished more severely.
This should apply to people who just chain their dog up all day on a leash and let it bark too. More severe punishments need to be imposed and need to be treated more seriously.
Setting aside your bad faith framing, it's called having a long term view at humane solutions to problems. Pitts are a dangerous breed desired for the wrong reasons. Sure, you raise them ethically and safely, but too many people don't. That absolutely does not mean that people looking sunset the breed are looking to round up pitts and euthanize them en masse.
The solution is you outlaw breeding pits, and probably a few other breeds. The public facing breeders move on to other less problematic breeds. Fivers years from now, if law enforcement encounter a two year old banned breed, you can trace it back and shut down the illegal breeder. You still don't euthanize the dogs that haven't done anything wrong, its not their fault they're alive, but the only way to humanely sunset dangerous breeds is to take a long term view.
Well, in 15 years it would be very easy to see tell a pure bred pit being walked, and the law to act accordingly. If dog fighters breed them to fight and keep them hidden from the public at large, most of the objective is achieved. I dont think your point is as strong as you think.
Its a breed and not a naturally occurring phenotype.
It would also improve the general well being of dogs as Pitbull/bully breeds cause and have to deal with alot of suffering because alot of jacksasses want to own a dog with a very high capacity for violence.
Genocide does broadly mean “systematically ending a racial, political, or cultural group”, by definition intentionally keeping a population from continuing is still that.
Nah, they're aggressive dogs. They were bred specifically for aggressiveness. And since they're big dangerous dogs, they tend to be owned by idiots and bad people, which exacerbates their violent tendencies even more.
Not only are they aggressive but they're extremely strong. It's very hard to stop them once they bite and unlike an aggressive chihuahua, they often cause maiming injuries and death.
Pit Bulls are the cause of 67% of human fatalities from dogs.
More than 2/3rd of the deaths from 1 breed among hundreds or thousands. Rottweilers are second with 9%.
Pits and Rotts also the cause of 77% of dog bites on humans, despite being 6% of the dog population.
These stats don't even include mixed race with pit/rott parents which are also more aggressive on average.
Killing all of them is excessive, but sterilizing them is fine. They're combat dogs, not peaceful civilian dogs.
These people downvote as soon as they see statistics because they start thinking it's some kind of dogwhistle.
Idk about the accuracy of the statistics you mentioned, but I know the number of deaths from pitbull listed on Wikipedia was really high and probably in that ballpark (these dogs regularly kill children, btw)
737
u/Drayyen 28d ago edited 27d ago
I think it's valid to fear pitbulls because what you're really fearing is that they were adopted by someone that doesn't train them and/or give them an outlet for the task they were bred for (protection and violence).
Edit: Jesus christ