Tell ya what brainiac - you go right ahead and buy a border collie and train it not to herd. But a scent hound and take it for a walk and train it not to stop and sniff every 3 feet. Good luck with that. After all, it all depends on the owner.
Honestly, I just don't get it w/ some of you pit bull apologists. A hypothetical - You all would have no difficulty thinking the woman who got her friend killed because she kept a chimp was stupid. You would have no trouble acknowledging that Siegfried and Roy worked in a dangerous profession (HIV not withstanding). That guy who lived w/ grizzlies until they ate him knew there was an elevated risk. Why? Because that is the nature of what those animals are.
YOU ALL know that a larger stronger dog poses a greater risk than a smaller and less powerful dog. And yet if it is a pit bull it is automatically no more dangerous than any other dog? Michael Vic didn't buy pit bulls because they are wonderful family dogs.
The statistics for Pits and Rotties show that they are disproportionately involved in attacks, and not just by a little. The evidence also shows that pits are much more likely to act beyond typical territorial defense responses - it will leave it's own property - go out of its way - to attack other dogs and people, sometimes when their territory was not even approached. Accounts of pit attacks indicate that, unlike other breeds, once an attack has started pit bulls will not break off the attack.
Pit bulls are very strong dogs. They have large powerful jaws - close to the top of the scale for dogs. They are disproportionately owned by idiots who do not train them properly. They have been bred to be agressive and fight. Only ONE of these three things is not a part of the breed itself.
But you can keep believing that all of this is complete hype - unfounded bias. I hope and pray you never have first hand reason to believe differently.
“Tell ya what brainiac - you go right ahead and buy a border collie and train it not to herd. But a scent hound and take it for a walk and train it not to stop and sniff every 3 feet. Good luck with that. After all, it all depends on the owner.”
Have you ever heard of a Lab going on an unstoppable fetching spree? Some dogs become neurotic and uncontrollable due to boredom. Pit bulls weren’t bred to be human-aggressive, so your point about genetics is pretty much fallacious as an argument. They were bred/trained to work as gripping dogs and later to fight other dogs, all the while being pliable and submissive to people. If they weren’t, they were, for the most part, taken out of the gene pool.
There’s a reason why successful dog fighters took the time to work and train their dogs for fighting. Genetics can make it easier for some breeds to succeed at their jobs, but you wouldn’t expect an untrained border collie to be entered in a herding competition, just as dogmen didn’t just throw two dogs together.
And for the record, you can train dogs to obey commands, no matter if they’re hounds or border collies or labs or pit bulls. As a dog owner, it is up to you to direct the dog, not the other way around. Anyone who lets their dog do whatever it wants and blames genetics is an irresponsible idiot.
“Pit bulls are very strong dogs. They have large powerful jaws - close to the top of the scale for dogs.”<<<<<<
This has been proven false by the University of Georgia. They performed a study using a computerized bite sleeve to measure bite pressure from German Shepherds, Rottweilers, and Pit Bulls. The pit bulls had the weakest bite of the three, and none of the breeds tested had more than 350 psi, hardly the 2,000 that some jerk reporter made up years ago (which for some reason people took as gospel without even asking for proof).
“The statistics for Pits and Rotties show that they are disproportionately involved in attacks, and not just by a little”
That’s not true either. Pit Bulls are more popular than labs in some areas, mainly big cities. They represent close to ten percent of the entire population of dogs, according to registration numbers and shelter statistics. The amount of pit bulls that are involved in dog attacks are infinitesimally small compared to their population. Less than one percent cause any trouble, and for a population ten million strong, this means that you are using the exception to the rule to judge all of them, which is backwards.