Thanks for the photo of Petey and Spanky! My Buster did not have the eye circle.....
Sadly, these days with all the scum inbreeding Pits, there are quite a few that are now dangerous.
Bad as dog fighting was back in the day, before scum and holder’s people gangers started collecting and breeding them, those that fought them at least had to good sense to put down Pits that “put a tooth” on a human and did a pretty good job of filtering out that bad trait.
Nah. I would have to disagree. I have always had Wolf/Malamute, Sheppard/Malamute, or a combo of that, some up to 150 lbs. Sled dogs are closer to wolf than anything else, and any one of mine would have (and have) taken down a pit bull for fun. But I never had a problem with them doing any real damage to people (unless I told them to). They might nip a kid getting out of line, or something, but nothing like the OP would ever happen.
All dogs, ALL of them, are socialized into their GOOD habits. ALL dogs, left to their own devices, would revert to the wild. The breakdown here is not in the species, but rather, most definitely in the training, and most particularly in the socializing...
I have a Mini Ozzie Sheppard now, precisely because I can no longer stretch a Malamute out - They will go batsh*t if they are kept in a yard all the time, not to mention a pen. But the principles in training that Ozzie are the very same I used in training my Malamutes. And socializing is what teaches them what is prey and what is not.
One has to remember that Man's relationship with the dog has been changing exponentially - Even in my Father's day, the dog was a part of everything, not just shut up in a yard and left alone. Go to a farm sometime, where dogs still have the same relationship they always have had with Man... Farm dogs are vicious to strangers of any kind, and they will pack up to face the threat. But all it takes is a word from the farmer, and they settle right down. The same with cow dogs, which the pit is part of. His job is to 'pit' the bull, so the other dogs can work the herd effectively. Sure Pits on the range are bad ass (keeping the bull settled is a tough and tricky job), but they are not like the one in the OP.
There is wisdom in that.