This is it, full stop.
Dogs are individuals and should be treated as such.
I helped raise and home two litters of Staffordshire pups, we kept a rigorous list of the owners that we interviewed and checked the homes once a year to monitor the dogs progression. We made the owners sign a contract stating that if the living standards weren’t up to snuff, we could reclaim the dogs. I worked with a fellow who raised Staffies for 30 years. In two litters, we had around a dozen well trained, friendly huggable porkchops. Two litters that had no recorded bites past a few months old (puppys nibble but can be trained), and showed no aggression with other animals. All those pups lived to old age, and passed in happy homes. I’ve also met too many pitbulls that were beyond any help i had to offer. Damaged dogs damaged by poor parenting.
I know my story is anecdotal, and i don’t expect to change minds here, but i cant stand the outrage against such lovable dorks when something like the chihuahua exists.
Dogs are animals, and no amount of training can make it certain they will not attack, because, as you say, they are individuals. Therefore a well-trained Pitbull remains more dangerous than a well-trained [insert literally any other dog breed here].
I absolutely love dogs, including Pitbulls. I despair at what humans have done with selective breeding, by giving Pugs a lifetime of health problems, Pitbulls a greater chance of being euthanised, greyhounds a brain the size of a pea etc., etc. The right thing to do is to vote with our feet and stop the demand for breeds that shouldn’t exist. The real villains here are the people creating pure bred pits for profit.
Dogs aren’t individuals. They’re animals. You don’t need a pitbull. There are plenty of other beautiful breeds like Retrievers/Laboradors or Border collies, etc.
With pitbulls you have to train them specifically not to fight to lower the chances. They shouldn’t be available to own to the general public.
Humans are also animals. Part of the animalia kingdom, like everything else of flesh and bone.
Animals may not be sapient (being capable of human level generalist brain processing), but they’re absolutely individuals with individual personalities.
You’d know this of you’ve lived with a few cats, or dogs, or worked on an animal farm for any length of time.
Or - and hear me out - we could castrate and render infertile every person who suggests the elimination of an entire breed so that they can’t spread their idiocy to their children.
Responsibility includes accounting for possible aggressive behavior :/
If you’re responsible for a chainsaw, you know to keep it oiled. You know to use it only in the correct environment, and you don’t have it anywhere near children.
So yes, you can responsibly own a pitbull. Responsibility is being responsible for a subject; its well being, its actions, and the consequences of its existence.
And yes, responsibility can overcome what 200 years of artificial selection at a rate of every 2 years has done. That is literally what responsibility is charged with.
My aunt has lived with two pitbulls for almost a decade now. Raised two small children in the same home. Nothing but sweethearts. Dogs are individuals, just like people. Just like having another person around your baby, you need to be responsible with any dog breed.
If it was about weeding out the fight drive of the dogs, a lot of things could be done, without the need to drive the breed to extinction. Inside the pit bull gene pool there are two lines: the fighting dogs and the bait dogs. The last ones are those that display the lowest drive for fighting and aggression. There is nothing wrong with these animals except their lack of will to fight other dogs and this trait makes these animals less desirable to people breeding these dogs that know they can make good money by keeping the fight drive of the breed. These are the people that often show off dogs hanging from ropes off the ground, growling and twisting on it, to showcase the bite force of the animals.
Increase the frequency of theses individuals in breeding pools, weed out the naturally more feisty, and you can modify the race or any race very fast. Pugs and Yorkshire Terriers area two examples that come to mind of breeds that suffered radical changes on very short time spans because of aesthetic trends. No obstacle on doing the same thing to improve a breed for good reasons instead of shallow ones.
There are a good number of breeds out in the world much more dangerous than the Pit Bull. The Tosa Inu, which was specifically bred to be a fighting dog, the Presa Canario, also bred for fighting, the Rodesian Ridgeback, and many others. In the 90’s, Dobermans had the dirtiest reputation for being very dangerous. Nowadays, not so much.
So, your statement is misinformed.
note to mods: don’t like what I wrote, just give me a permanent ban and be done with.
First I like that you acknowledge there is a fight drive.
Second, so you’re discussing selective breeding to get it out, which is entirely different than people thinking you can coddle it out. You missed the entire conversation.
If we could rely on every member of any sizable group of people to all reach even the lowest bar of decency, the world would be a very different place. Any solution that relies on the idea of “if everyone just does x” is not a real solution, as much as I’d like it to be.
Tuesday that 30-year-old (…) was found dead Monday night at a home near Newington from an apparent dog attack. (…) He says an autopsy revealed Wilcox died as a result of injuries received from the attack.
Investigators say Wilcox was familiar with the pets at that residence and had handled them safely on numerous occasions in the past. None of the dogs in the home had any known history of viciousness or aggression
Pitbulls are a breed designed to kill.
You can have a Border Collie and it will be shepherding sheep on a screen, or dust motes on the floor, because it’s in their DNA.
Killing and aggression are in the DNA of Pitbulls.
Pitbulls have a reputation for being dangerous tough guy dogs, so “tough guys” get pitbulls and proceed to not treat them well, this give pitbulls the reputation of being dangerous tough guy dogs.
I live in Copenhagen, however, and I’ve seen some very nicely treated pitbulls, even one that was part of a family. They can be so gentle.
Guns don’t get old and have a bad day killing their owner. Pitbulls do unfortunately. I’ve seen good ones and bad ones but when they are hurting or just grumpy old farts they can go off. The difference between a shitzu and and pitbull doing that is the pitbull is powerful and the shitzu is annoying.
Less. Chihuahuas can be aggressive, bitey little shits without proper training. Most people I’ve seen with Chihuahuas don’t train them. It’s just a small little dog, what harm can it do?
It doesn’t matter about the mauling. What is more likely to kill you? A pitbull or a Chihuahua. If a Chihuahua tried to maul an average healthy adult, the healthy adult could probably fight it off quite quickly with minimal small bite injuries. You can’t say the same about a pitbull.
That’s not a valid argument, since it can be used elsewhere. Using that argument would confirm any racist or sexist stereotype as well, since you know what they mean. Just because someone has heard let’s see, that Jewish people are lizard aliens who drink blood and adrenochrome from babies doesn’t mean there’s some truth to it.
I’m not using the above as an argument against pit bulls having aggressive natures; I mostly stay out of that argument (though the one pit I remember was a lovely pup). I am saying that as an argument backing up the aggressive claim, it’s a bad one to use.
You might want to adjust your thoughts on the second. Studies have shown that pit bulls are associated with black people, and that people who have unfavorable views of black people, especially as being violent, also have a correlation to negative views of pit bulls. You can find one such study here:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11213322/
Question: “If you had to guess, do you think Black people or white people are more likely to own the following dogs?” Source: Pooled Lucid Surveys, June-July 2020, August 2021.
Not everyone dislikes based on racial association, but to claim there is none only illustrates that your argument is both invalid and uninformed.
Studies have shown that pit bulls are associated with black people, and that people who have unfavorable views of black people, especially as being violent, also have a correlation to negative views of pit bulls
Not OP, but - this has nothing to do with racism, WTF are you talking about?
“Studies have shown”… My god, studies have shown that a breed created for violence and bloodthirst has a higher probability of being violent and bloodthirsty than those that weren’t, that’s literally all the context there was!
My comments and the links were all about the stereotypes part,not really the pitbulls. This particular comment reply chain, at least where I got involved, was just about how stereotypes alone isn’t a basis for truth. A counter argument was made that such a judgement doesn’t count for dog breeds, and the study shows that it indeed can count.
That may be true in the US. Here in the UK there is no such correlation, and yet pitbulls here still cause more injuries and deaths than all other breeds combined. Odd, that.
My argument wasn’t that it cancels out any studies showing pitbulls being aggressive; as I stated before, I wasn’t interested in participating in that argument. My argument was that stereotypes aren’t a valid argument that something is true. They then stated that dogs aren’t political, u like other stereotypes to which I demonstrated that yes, dogs breeds can be associated with political biases. I
Do you think that stereotyping applies here, then? You seem minded to agree that pitbulls are more dangerous in fact than other breeds, given you won’t participate one way or the other. So if pitbulls are in fact more dangerous then if would be reasonable, rather than irrational stereotyping, to be more wary of them, and to label them as more dangerous.
Is this a dig at pitbulls?
One the oldest around.
Yes, it is and people are assholes.
Yes, pit bull bites are more dangerous. No, that doesn’t mean they should all be euthanized. They need proper training and that’s it.
They should all be euthanised. There’s no good reason to own a pitbull. They were literally bred for fighting and it’s in their instincts.
Should I go down the list of all the dogs that were specifically bred for being hunting dogs, war dogs, or guard dogs?
That list is absolutely going to be massive and I’m pretty sure it’ll feature a number of dogs you’d otherwise consider lovable family dogs.
We’re probably going to be left with a handful of breeds meant for puffed up rich floozies that suffer from amalgamated sinus cavities.
This is it, full stop. Dogs are individuals and should be treated as such.
I helped raise and home two litters of Staffordshire pups, we kept a rigorous list of the owners that we interviewed and checked the homes once a year to monitor the dogs progression. We made the owners sign a contract stating that if the living standards weren’t up to snuff, we could reclaim the dogs. I worked with a fellow who raised Staffies for 30 years. In two litters, we had around a dozen well trained, friendly huggable porkchops. Two litters that had no recorded bites past a few months old (puppys nibble but can be trained), and showed no aggression with other animals. All those pups lived to old age, and passed in happy homes. I’ve also met too many pitbulls that were beyond any help i had to offer. Damaged dogs damaged by poor parenting.
I know my story is anecdotal, and i don’t expect to change minds here, but i cant stand the outrage against such lovable dorks when something like the chihuahua exists.
Dogs are animals, and no amount of training can make it certain they will not attack, because, as you say, they are individuals. Therefore a well-trained Pitbull remains more dangerous than a well-trained [insert literally any other dog breed here].
I absolutely love dogs, including Pitbulls. I despair at what humans have done with selective breeding, by giving Pugs a lifetime of health problems, Pitbulls a greater chance of being euthanised, greyhounds a brain the size of a pea etc., etc. The right thing to do is to vote with our feet and stop the demand for breeds that shouldn’t exist. The real villains here are the people creating pure bred pits for profit.
And the people who pay those breeders for these types of dogs are part of the problem.
Dogs aren’t individuals. They’re animals. You don’t need a pitbull. There are plenty of other beautiful breeds like Retrievers/Laboradors or Border collies, etc.
With pitbulls you have to train them specifically not to fight to lower the chances. They shouldn’t be available to own to the general public.
Humans are also animals. Part of the animalia kingdom, like everything else of flesh and bone.
Animals may not be sapient (being capable of human level generalist brain processing), but they’re absolutely individuals with individual personalities.
You’d know this of you’ve lived with a few cats, or dogs, or worked on an animal farm for any length of time.
Yes, and humans also get judged based on their own actions.
You aren’t going to lock up the parents of a serial killer because they didn’t train them well enough.
Dogs are individuals as well. Some still show their wild instinct even when trained well enough. Or are you saying dogs can’t have a personality?
Well, that depends on whether or not the parents were abusive, now doesn’t it?
Not sure what country you’re from, but abusive parents tend to get locked up.
You’re missing the blindingly obvious solution that should be taken: spay and neuter them so that no new ones are bred.
Or - and hear me out - we could castrate and render infertile every person who suggests the elimination of an entire breed so that they can’t spread their idiocy to their children.
The irony of the down votes you’re getting. XD
Nah, we should give police orders to shoot every pitbull on sight.
Hol’ up, there’s some sort of incongruity here that I can’t quite put my finger on…
You should be embarrassed to support eugenics.
r/whooooosh
Could you explain why you think they’re not serious?
I suspect they’re half-serious but both ironic and hyperbolic. Just seems the most likely.
Maybe? I hear shit like this for real all the time, even here.
Or, ya know, people could be responsible pet owners.
No amount of responsibility can overcome what 200 years of artificial selection at a rate of every 2 years.
Responsibility includes accounting for possible aggressive behavior :/ If you’re responsible for a chainsaw, you know to keep it oiled. You know to use it only in the correct environment, and you don’t have it anywhere near children.
So yes, you can responsibly own a pitbull. Responsibility is being responsible for a subject; its well being, its actions, and the consequences of its existence.
And yes, responsibility can overcome what 200 years of artificial selection at a rate of every 2 years has done. That is literally what responsibility is charged with.
You’re trying to twist and turn here. Accounting for? You can’t overcome it. I say again, you can’t overcome 200 years of artificial selection.
My aunt has lived with two pitbulls for almost a decade now. Raised two small children in the same home. Nothing but sweethearts. Dogs are individuals, just like people. Just like having another person around your baby, you need to be responsible with any dog breed.
You don’t want to know how many “family dogs” like your aunts end up mauling people to death.
Every single one of them said their dogs were sweethearts and would never hurt fly. Now they are dead.
It’s about propensity, probability, likelihood, etc.
Yes, you can.
If it was about weeding out the fight drive of the dogs, a lot of things could be done, without the need to drive the breed to extinction. Inside the pit bull gene pool there are two lines: the fighting dogs and the bait dogs. The last ones are those that display the lowest drive for fighting and aggression. There is nothing wrong with these animals except their lack of will to fight other dogs and this trait makes these animals less desirable to people breeding these dogs that know they can make good money by keeping the fight drive of the breed. These are the people that often show off dogs hanging from ropes off the ground, growling and twisting on it, to showcase the bite force of the animals.
Increase the frequency of theses individuals in breeding pools, weed out the naturally more feisty, and you can modify the race or any race very fast. Pugs and Yorkshire Terriers area two examples that come to mind of breeds that suffered radical changes on very short time spans because of aesthetic trends. No obstacle on doing the same thing to improve a breed for good reasons instead of shallow ones.
There are a good number of breeds out in the world much more dangerous than the Pit Bull. The Tosa Inu, which was specifically bred to be a fighting dog, the Presa Canario, also bred for fighting, the Rodesian Ridgeback, and many others. In the 90’s, Dobermans had the dirtiest reputation for being very dangerous. Nowadays, not so much.
So, your statement is misinformed.
note to mods: don’t like what I wrote, just give me a permanent ban and be done with.
Top misinformation post of the month contender.
First I like that you acknowledge there is a fight drive.
Second, so you’re discussing selective breeding to get it out, which is entirely different than people thinking you can coddle it out. You missed the entire conversation.
If we could rely on every member of any sizable group of people to all reach even the lowest bar of decency, the world would be a very different place. Any solution that relies on the idea of “if everyone just does x” is not a real solution, as much as I’d like it to be.
https://eu.jacksonville.com/story/news/crime/2016/08/04/pitbull-kills-owners-girlfriend-sheriff-says/15719416007/
Pitbulls are a breed designed to kill.
You can have a Border Collie and it will be shepherding sheep on a screen, or dust motes on the floor, because it’s in their DNA.
Killing and aggression are in the DNA of Pitbulls.
Stop being weird.
Unfortunately there is a feedback loop somewhere.
Pitbulls have a reputation for being dangerous tough guy dogs, so “tough guys” get pitbulls and proceed to not treat them well, this give pitbulls the reputation of being dangerous tough guy dogs.
I live in Copenhagen, however, and I’ve seen some very nicely treated pitbulls, even one that was part of a family. They can be so gentle.
That’s exactly how everyone talks about their pitbull until it rips their child to pieces.
So can guns.
Guns are weapons. Not lifeforms.
Guns don’t get old and have a bad day killing their owner. Pitbulls do unfortunately. I’ve seen good ones and bad ones but when they are hurting or just grumpy old farts they can go off. The difference between a shitzu and and pitbull doing that is the pitbull is powerful and the shitzu is annoying.
Counterpoint, hipoints
“heres anecdotal evidence to support my worldview”
Searching “pitbull kills baby” gets way too mant results for my liking
so does “golden retriever kills baby” or “insert any dog breed kills baby”
It’s just less common compared to the relative popularity of the breeds
Hej fra København og jeg tror du har ret
Now hypothetically, if every breed except Chihuahuas was banned, and those tough guys were forced to buy those and not train them.
Do you think there would be more, less or equal amount of dog mauling?
Less. Chihuahuas can be aggressive, bitey little shits without proper training. Most people I’ve seen with Chihuahuas don’t train them. It’s just a small little dog, what harm can it do?
It doesn’t matter about the mauling. What is more likely to kill you? A pitbull or a Chihuahua. If a Chihuahua tried to maul an average healthy adult, the healthy adult could probably fight it off quite quickly with minimal small bite injuries. You can’t say the same about a pitbull.
Great, so you agree breed is a variable that shouldn’t be underestimated.
Yes
Sad.
If you know what breed it’s talking about, that suggests there’s probably some truth to it
That’s not a valid argument, since it can be used elsewhere. Using that argument would confirm any racist or sexist stereotype as well, since you know what they mean. Just because someone has heard let’s see, that Jewish people are lizard aliens who drink blood and adrenochrome from babies doesn’t mean there’s some truth to it.
I’m not using the above as an argument against pit bulls having aggressive natures; I mostly stay out of that argument (though the one pit I remember was a lovely pup). I am saying that as an argument backing up the aggressive claim, it’s a bad one to use.
Why are you comparing Jewish people to dogs??? That’s a bit antisemetic
Stereotypes about groups of humans are politically motivated. Not true of dog breeds.
You might want to adjust your thoughts on the second. Studies have shown that pit bulls are associated with black people, and that people who have unfavorable views of black people, especially as being violent, also have a correlation to negative views of pit bulls. You can find one such study here: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11213322/
Question: “If you had to guess, do you think Black people or white people are more likely to own the following dogs?” Source: Pooled Lucid Surveys, June-July 2020, August 2021.
Not everyone dislikes based on racial association, but to claim there is none only illustrates that your argument is both invalid and uninformed.
Not OP, but - this has nothing to do with racism, WTF are you talking about?
“Studies have shown”… My god, studies have shown that a breed created for violence and bloodthirst has a higher probability of being violent and bloodthirsty than those that weren’t, that’s literally all the context there was!
You kneejerked answered without even reading the linked study, didn’t you?
Of course I didn’t read the study, because it’s off topic.
Pitbull kills white dog trainer.
Pitbull of a black dog trainer kills another dog
Race of the human has nothing to do with the fact that the fucking dogs were designed to maim and kill, dude.
My comments and the links were all about the stereotypes part,not really the pitbulls. This particular comment reply chain, at least where I got involved, was just about how stereotypes alone isn’t a basis for truth. A counter argument was made that such a judgement doesn’t count for dog breeds, and the study shows that it indeed can count.
That may be true in the US. Here in the UK there is no such correlation, and yet pitbulls here still cause more injuries and deaths than all other breeds combined. Odd, that.
It’s because of your bias towards drug dealers /s
My argument wasn’t that it cancels out any studies showing pitbulls being aggressive; as I stated before, I wasn’t interested in participating in that argument. My argument was that stereotypes aren’t a valid argument that something is true. They then stated that dogs aren’t political, u like other stereotypes to which I demonstrated that yes, dogs breeds can be associated with political biases. I
Do you think that stereotyping applies here, then? You seem minded to agree that pitbulls are more dangerous in fact than other breeds, given you won’t participate one way or the other. So if pitbulls are in fact more dangerous then if would be reasonable, rather than irrational stereotyping, to be more wary of them, and to label them as more dangerous.
“If you had to guess” sounds like you are relying on hearsay there bud
Question is to what extent it is the breed versus the owners drawn to or scared away from the breed. These things can be self fulfilling.