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?
Pitbulls are responsible for more human attacks than any other breed.
For the data to be useful it needs to be normalized.
What’s the rate of bites per number of that breed in the country?
The problem is that breed ownership numbers are only drawn from voluntary club registrations, which isn’t particularly representative and going to be biased against low income owners and rescues.
Did pit bulls bite the most often because they are the most violent, or just because they are very common? Are there environmental factors, such as pit bulls being more commonly a rescue dog and rescue dogs being more likely to bite?
Are there breeds that are much more prone to biting that just aren’t as popular in ownership such that absolute numbers on bites doesn’t reveal them?
The article is 1,000% right that the existing numbers and studies suck and are next to worthless.
Edit: Apparently 84% of fatal bites are from dogs that aren’t spayed or neutered, and 76% are by dogs that aren’t kept as a family pet which are the types of environmental factors that might be quite a bit more relevant than breed, especially given that only 20% of dogs aren’t spayed or neutered and yet represent 84% of fatal bites. Also, glossed over in the link I was responding to is that 82% of the fatal bites are an “Unknown” breed, which is wildly higher than one might have expected.
Edit 2: Additional resources - apparently the data point from the commenter below is from a poor 2000 study that relied on tenuous breed identification and the research world has been trying to correct ever since, with the 2012 study cited above being by one of the same authors of the 2000 study and presenting a very different picture, and more recent research such as:
- Ancestry-inclusive dog genomics challenges popular breed stereotypes (2022) from a joint Broad Institute and MIT research project
- Comparison of behavioural tendencies between “dangerous dogs” and other domestic dog breeds – Evolutionary context and practical implications (2022)
Pit bulls are estimated to only be about 6% of the dog popualtion, and account for 70% of fatal bites.
By your logic pitbulls would have to be 70% of owned dogs, and let me tell you walking around 7 in 10 dogs are not pitbulls.
First off, you’d need to also factor in the percentage of large dogs, as no matter how vicious a toy breed or even medium sized dog is, it isn’t going to have a high fatal bite count. So out of the 36% of dog households that have a large dog, pitt ownership might be more than 6% of the total.
Then again, we need to look at other factors as well.
Maybe 70% of rescue dogs are pitts and 100% of fatal bites were from rescues? (Or vice versa, that 100% of fatal bites were from rescues and 70% of the rescues that went on to bite were pitts, which is a more subtle but still very different picture of events which might reflect fairly narrow causal environmental factors like prior fight training.)
Without the additional layers of data, the best we can do is draw potentially misleading conclusions around causative factors when we barely have correlative ones.
And the ways in which this could be dangerous in terms of social policy is if actions are taken around the mythos of it being a breed specific trait, it not being that, and then unexpected outcomes occurring, such as a popularity shift towards an even more dangerous breed as pitt ownership declines or ignoring or even exacerbating underlying causal relationships to environmental factors.
We’ve seen how bad data science applied to human crime rates can lead to supremely (supremacist?) misleading claims around the contributing factors with an over representation of demographic data that’s simply correlative to underlying causative environmental factors.
So if we both know full well that saying “XYZ demographic is 2-3x more likely to commit violent crimes so we should get rid of XYZ demographic from the population” is an outrageously bad faith argument predicated on poor data analysis, I’m curious what you think is materially different about the data evaluation aspects that you support the analogous claim here?
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.
Yeah frankly the statistics are pretty conclusive. You can argue about bad owners all you’d like, and theres probably at least some truth there (if you’re an asshole who wants a violent dog, you’re of course going to choose a breed with a reputation for violence), but it’s clear to any unbiased observer that pit bulls have a high tendency towards violence.
No one is advocating that we round up all the pit bulls and euthenize them (no sane person anyways), but that we stop breeding new ones. Frankly there needs to be a lot more regulation on dog breeding, besides violent breeds, there’s no reason we should be breeding more (as an example) pugs, who are doomed to spend their whole lives suffocating just because some people like their squashed faces
The statistics aren’t conclusive at all.
In over half of dog related injuries the breed is not reporter.
Add to that, even vet staff cannot visually identify dog breed with any level of accuracy.
And when you talk about banning dog breeds, yes you are talking about rounding them up in euthanizing them. Period.
And when you talk about banning dog breeds, yes you are talking about rounding them up in euthanizing them. Period.
I’m absolutely not. I’m advocating restrictions on breeders, not owners. No one should have their dog taken away, and pit bulls in shelters should still be adoptable in my view. I just don’t believe we should be deliberately breeding more dogs with known issues, whether it’s issues with their own health (like pugs) or issues with aggression.
Please don’t presume to tell me what I’m advocating.
I’m not trying to nitpick and start an argument with you but the guy you’re replying to has conflated two very different things. Likelihood to bite and ability to damage with bite. You are most likely to be bitten by a Labrador retriever. You are most likely to be fucked up by a Pitbull. I will not deny that pit bulls have the ability to fuck you up. Just like I won’t deny the ability of a German Shepherd to rip a fist-sized chunk out of your leg.
Furthermore he is pretending to quote with a sense of authority however reading his own linked article will disprove his claim. The number one identified breed with the ability to cause damage was “unidentified”. The article claims the number two breed was “Pit Bull” which is not a singular breed and encompasses many subreads. The third was “mixed” fourth was German Shepherd.
I have owned many pits over the years. We currently own one that is 25 percent husky and 75 percent pitt that looks nothing like a pit he came out looking like a hound everybody loves him always asked to come up and pet. At the same time they are afraid and scared of our smaller mutt dog with a blocky head and call it a pit, but he’s just a mix of retrekver shepherd and terrier.
I do alot of work and give a fair amount of donations to a animal rescue facility that fits thru about 400 dogs per year. Pit bulls have without question been the most likely to be aggressive out of all the dogs that file thru. We get many other aggressive dogs but the pits are the only ones that stand out.
This may be due to their strength or due to the above average likelihood of them being raised in aggressive environments. There are also nice pits but regardless I am completely against breeding them and more so, there is no logical argument to be made breed them.
That is simply not true. More injuries are attributed to “pit bull type” breeds but that is far different from “more human attacks.” It’s also wildly tainted since it’s based on self reporting and any time it’s not an obvious German shepherd, husky or golden (etc) if someone can’t quite guess what it is most people are predisposed to assuming pit bull because of bigots like you that just hate the breed.
Small dogs like chihuahuas are far more likely to attack humans than pit bulls, although serious injury is less likely for smaller breeds. Even that is skewed based on human factors and handling since small dogs like chihuahuas are often carted around and over handled with complete disregard for their comfort or tolerance level because they’re “pocket sized” and too many assholes have no problem just picking them up whether they want it or not.
The only thing your link shows is that the majority of unknown large dogs that caused injuries were assumed to be pit bulls by one person or another.
The only thing your link shows is that the majority of unknown large dogs that caused injuries were assumed to be pit bulls by one person or another.
FTA:
Essig also explained why “unknown” tops the list of breeds: “We often didn’t know what type of dog was involved in these incidents, [so] we looked at additional factors that may help predict bite tendency when breed is unknown.” Those additional factors included weight and head shape. The findings showed that dogs with short, wide heads who weighed between 66 and 100 pounds were the most likely to bite.
So if a dog is 10% pit bull, 20% German shepherd, 10% beagle 15% husky, 20% lab, 5% golden and 10% Belgian Malinois it counts towards “pit bulls” but no other breed? Got it. It’s almost like another form of historical discrimination by race said any percentage counts as belonging to the undesired race that is being targeted…
“Of unidentifiable dogs that have average dog characteristics we attributed generic criteria that meet any number of breeds but also fit the specific ones we wanted to target with our predetermined conclusion prior to executing this study. We were able to validate our desired outcome with this specific targeting.” #Science!
