I already know all the “stats”.
Post your proof.
This comes from a sane, reputable site:
Most people skim it and look at the table and way ‘wow, Pits and Rotties’. But if you dig around you find that the authors used media reports to develop their database.
Quote:
Our search strategy involved scanning the text of newspapers and periodicals for certain words and word combinations likely to represent human DBRF followed by a review of articles containing those terms.
And look at what they say in the discussion:
Quote:
Considering only bites that resulted in fatalities, because they are more easily ascertained than nonfatal bites, the numerator of a dog breed-specific human DBRF rate requires a complete accounting of human DBRF as well as an accurate determination of the breeds involved. Numerator data may be biased for 4 reasons. First, the human DBRF reported here are likely underestimated; prior work suggests the approach we used identifies only 74% of actual cases.1,2 Second, to the extent that attacks by 1 breed are more newsworthy than those by other breeds, our methods may have resulted in differential ascertainment of fatalities by breed. Third, because identification of a dog’s breed may be subjective (even experts may disagree on the breed of a particular dog), DBRF may be differentially ascribed to breeds with a reputation for aggression. Fourth, it is not clear how to count attacks by crossbred dogs. Ignoring these data underestimates breed involvement (29% of attacking dogs were crossbred dogs), whereas including them permits a single dog to be counted more than once.
In other words, since bites by certain breeds are more likely to be reported, the data in the table are skewed towards those breeds. Also, they admit that people are lousy at correctly identifying breeds and say that the reputation alone may increase the reporting tendency. Since there is a tendency for the press to misreport dog bites as far as breed, the raw data are biased and frankly, without good data you can’t really develop any reliable conclusions. So IMO the whole thing has a basic flaw.
Continuing on, there was a more recent study done where vets actually saw dogs that had bitten children. The Title was “Behavioral assessment of child-directed canine aggression” published in Injury Prevention Unfortunately the full-text version is no longer available online, but there are excerpts.
http://www.livescience.com/animals/071002-dog-bite.html
http://www.huliq.com/36585/behaviora...ine-aggression
And this is what I had found in there about breeds:
Quote:
A total of 103 dogs had bitten a child under the age of 18 years. ...
Forty one breeds were represented. English Springer Spaniels and German Shepherd Dogs each comprised 9% of pure-bred dogs (7% of all dogs), followed by 5% each of Labrador Retrievers, Golden Retrievers, and American Cocker Spaniels (4% of all dogs)
But then you have this:
There is a Dog Statistics done on every dog each year that shows which breeds are more aggressive than others.
Atts - American Temperament Test Society
[Anything above 80% is good]
Dalmation 81.8%, Husky 86.6%, German Shepard/ cop dog 83.5%, Rotts
82.6%, Mastiff 83.9%, American Pit Bull Terrier 84.3%, American Staffordshire 83.4%, Staffordshire Bull Terrier 85.3%, and Boxer
84.3
Now the nice little dogs.
Collie 53.3%, Bichon Frise 79.3%, Corgi 75.4%, Chihuahua 70.3%,
Dachshund 70.2%, Setter 75%, Schnauzer 75.5%, Lhasa Apso 69.2%
Oh I have seen the oceans of ‘information’ posted by pro pit people. Doesn’t change the well earned reputation of pits for unprovoked, sustained damage most often resulting in death. I have tried talking through that kind of padding that the pro pit throws - it was like speaking to a wall. The need for the pro pit lobby to deny the actual, documented behavior of pits is too strong to give way to reason.
Note that you are already spinning - I never said brain swelling (a la dobermans - never heard of that before). I said I read a study and you demand I provide my ‘proof’. Oh I can see where this is going because I have posted the study before and I have gotten back the nonsense stats falsely elevating the ‘hazard’ other breeds offer etc. Anyway, this is a study re the heritability of behavior:
Since people like me read up on the number of deaths, maimings etc., read victim accounts, watch videos and can’t find any mitigating evidence, I am not swayed by angry denials, name calling, or the posting of pit bulls pictures that look ‘cute’. Since many of the pro pit lobby have a psychological need to believe that it’s all made up lies/persecution/ignorance, all the posts in all the world documenting the disproportionate damage this breed does will be ignored/denied etc. The only ones left are those who have been duped into buying a pit for their family because ‘everyone says they are unfairly maligned and are safe if you treat them right’ and those who just have never heard of the issue and are new to it.
From the article:
“Research now shows that, through selection
for aggressive performance, we have in fact been consistently selecting for very specific
abnormalities in the brain. These abnormalities appear in many breeds of dog as an accident
or anomaly, which breeders then attempt to breed out of the dogs. In the case of the
aggressive breeds, the opposite was true. Rather than excluding abnormally aggressive dogs
from their breeding stock, breeders focused on creating lineages in which all the dogs would
carry these genes (i.e., dogs which would reliably exhibit the desired impulsive aggressive
behavior). They succeeded. Now that we know exactly which brain abnormalities breeders
have been selecting, the assertion that this aggression is not heritable is no longer tenable. It
is also not tenable to assert that not all the dogs of these breeds will carry these genes. The
lack may occur as an accident where selection has failed, just as the golden retriever mayhave
the genes due to failing selection against the genes. But the failure to have the gene is, in the
aggressive breeds, just that – a failure. It is therefore misleading to assert that the aggressive
breeds will only have the selected genes as a matter of accident, or that most of them will be
fit to interact safely with other animals and humans. We have selected intensively for these
genes in these breeds, for hundreds of years, and the accident that may incidentally occur is
lack of the selected genes”
If the pro pit lobby wants to believe that their is no medical explanation for the body count pits leave behind - it doesn’t really matter to me. Parts of the country are enacting breed specific laws because they just can’t afford the societal costs behind the killings, maiming, and police calls pit bulls provoke so the problem is slowly working itself out on its own -whether the pro pit lobby screams ‘it’s all lies! ALL OF IT!’ or not.