I think pit bulls were purchased by a lot of people with their stimmy checks and now they’re roaming around attacking people. I feel the same about pit bulls as most people feel about mosquitoes and tics.
I went and checked "deaths by fireworks discharge" for 2018-2024. I've often cited the massive number of home fireworks shot off on July 4, 2020 as evidence that people had more cash on hand during the pandemic than economists assumed.
Most years deaths were below 10, which the CDC won't show to protect privacy, but in 2022 they reached 10. And in 2020, when July 4th in Los Angeles was absolutely nuts, they hit 17.
So, stimmy checks, the rent moratorium, and various pandemic-related scams (e.g., Hellcat LLC) all put more money into the hands of the kind of people who like pit bulls, fireworks, guns, and Dodge Hellcats.
So, during the pandemic/reckoning combo, Ford-F150-Americans hunkered down and bid up suburban real estate to insane heights, and Dodge-Charger-Americans just went insane.
I can’t speak to rates, but the Daily Mail seems to have another death by pit bull story every few months. They call them Bully XL over there, I believe. I think the UK has just banned a few breeds.
Homes with any dog that even slightly resembles a pit bull are, along with helicopters, off limits to my family.
Without specific training in attacking humans, a single dog should be no match for an adult. Just spitballin’, I’d say we are combining the dangerous capacity of favored breeds with the dangerous stupidity of dog owners and unleashing the pair against an incredibly wimpified younger population.
More unfenced pit bulls due to explosion of homeless would be my guess. Deadly dog attacks are opportunistic. Restrained/confined dogs don't generally have the opportunity.
Didn’t say they weren’t in a sense but this isn’t where these attacks are occurring. The victims are overwhelming children with some elderly, and these are almost always HOUSEHOLD pets.
Household is being generous. My elderly neighbors have a junkie daughter with a pit. Technically it's her "household," but actually she sleeps elsewhere. Many such cases.
There’s an index of fatal pit attacks.. go to the ban pitbull subreddit. It’s almost all little kids who are being killed by their parents’ or relatives’ pet pit. Many of the parents are ardent breed defenders.
Have you interacted and subdued them when they are shitbulling at you? I watched a YouTube video that showed the choke out technique. In my mind's eye grabbing the collar and body slamming the dog is a escalatory end of subject methodology but that's for big dudes, anyone can choke one out if they get at it from behind. Possibly you have a pew pew and handle it that way, those videos are satisfying to watch as the owner cries out he's friendly he wasn't going to bite you to the stranger who is being bum rushed by the shit bull and who felt threatened enough to shoot their barking attacking dog.
Then there's cops shooting nice dogs and supplicating towards vicious pits, I've seen that too.
In order of impact: the explosion of the pit bull population, “adopt don’t shop” derangement, and demographic change (which has a role in the explosion of the pitbull population.) it’s really impossible to overstate how pit bulls are devastating the genetic stock of American dogs - both purchased and rescued. True Labs are an endangered species, and most shelters are flooded with pits who due to no kill policies are adopted out into poorly prepared households drunk on the moral hedonism of adopting a dog rather than supporting breeders who adore and respect their breeds.
But mostly - this is due to pit bulls.
Another interesting trend is dog theft, specifically of frenchies, who resemble pits but fetch a premium price. This was unheard of 10 years ago but every vet practice operating near an “urban” environment will be familiar with this issue.
I can't agree with you on the purebred dog thing. Breeders are way to focused on dogs looking a specific way, to the detriment of temperament, job performance and health. The pit bull danger is highly exaggerated. There are a lot of dogs for adoption and the average person is better off with a mutt. If you don't need a specific job done, it doesn't make sense to pay for an inbred freak dog. Some of the cutest most in demand purebreds have been engineered to possess traits that would be considered genetic disease in humans.
All that said, I did adopt a single breed dog during the pandemic and he turned out great.
There are plenty of ethical breeders, and there would be more if the focus was on choosing an ethical breeder instead of adoption at all costs. Sure.. most people would be better off with a nice mutt. But good luck finding one in a shelter. They get scooped up almost immediately. Go check your local shelter page or better yet one in a major metro area- pits, pit mixes, some aggressive huskies, and elderly dogs with health needs. Rescues will grab any small or medium sized mutt before it even goes online. It’s obvious you have no proximity whatsoever to this ecosystem.
And no, the pitbull issue is not exaggerated. They comprise a shocking and indefensible proposition of fatal attacks on humans and other dogs. This is well documented and not explained by “training” or abuse.
There are between between 5 and 18 million pits in the US and less than 100 fatalities each year. That's what we call negligible.
I don't know what you mean by proximity to that ecosystem but I live in Los Angeles and adopted a dog during the pandemic after a couple months of intense research.
I'm not failing the test. You are the one exercised about an essentially non-existent problem. It is one of the things that puzzles me about the Sailer comments section, all the pitbull fear and hate. It's a nothing problem. We will never get the number down to zero.
I’m exercised about it because I.. commented about it? It’s not just about human deaths, by the way. I have no doubt that the rate of fatal dog on dog attacks have increased and this is yet another symptom of the erosion of civic norms and our previously high trust society. As a dog owner, this impacts my life daily.
The pitbull problem is in fact fixable. More education would lead to less families bringing this breed around kids.
For every fatal dog bite there are about 10,000 dog bites requiring hospitalization (and maybe another 50,000 that go unreported). Many of these are permanently disfiguring attacks. Most of the victims are children. I wouldn't call ~1,000,000 hospitalizations per year "negligible".
Also note that like with homicide statistics, emergency medical care has been improving so much in the past decades that it masks the true degree of social dysfunction underlying the statistics. A lot of attacks (human and canine) that would formerly have been fatal now go into the larger injury category rather than the fatality category.
That is a valid response to my position. In fact that is the flaw in the argument that anti-vaxxers make when they bring up how low we had measles fatalities at the time the vaccine was introduced. Of course the solution to that last mile of measles was easy to implement. Eliminating dog bite hospitalization is more difficult.
While 10,000 hospitalizations is not negligible, it's not a big health problem and I find it difficult to have a passionate position on solving it.
It's a million hospitalizations per year nationally, not 10,000.
That's more than the hospitalizations from fentanyl or alcohol poisoning, which are both considered public health crises. And the dog attack victims are typically younger and less likely to be causing the harm they suffer, unlike self-poisoners.
About half of dog attacks are preventable with one easy fix (ban pits). There is no such easy fix for fentanyl or alcohol.
It's not just the South. Everywhere in the US shelter dogs are mostly pits and pit mixes. There is a massive over-supply and under-demand for these creatures.
Why is this irrational situation happening? Would it surprise you to know that it is an outgrowth of America's irrational race situation? The shelters won't say it, but most pits and pit lines now originate from ghetto breeders, who are at best incompetent or when competent breed for size and aggression.
The consequences of this include the upward-spiking chart Steve posted.
In the 1970s the authoritative book on Pitbulls had a section assuring people that the dogs could, in fact, serve as guard dog. Pitbulls had a reputation for being so friendly at the time that people assumed you couldn't train them for protection.
The reason they were so people friendly was dog fighting. The rules of dog fighting required that humans put their hands on the dogs frequently during the fight. Any dog that bit a ref (or whatever they were called) or other owner, would be euthanized. So pits were extremely dog aggressive and people friendly.
Starting the in 1980s a certain type of irresponsible person caught on that pits were ideal urban security dogs because they were compact yet strong and were cheap. Most of the top protection breeds had become expensive by that time but pits had never been in fashion.
So a few decades of that kind of person breeding them and now you have the unfortunate situation of the game personality, the compact strength and lots of people aggression. The shelters should be euthanizing the people aggressive ones.
Are pitbulls good at distinguishing what's a people? Infants and toddlers are disproportionately victims. They spend a lot of time crawling/horizontal and so resemble animal prey.
In any case, most pit breeding nowadays is by incompetent/human-aggressive ghetto 'breeders'. It only a takes a few generations to ruin a breed. It's been more than a few generations now.
Yep- I knew an Argentine pathologist who would lecture me on all the genetic diseases involved in making dogs look weird or cute. Most of the reasons people give are made up, backsplanations to try to rationalize what are cosmetic decisions made by humans and for which dogs suffer.
He indeed said that short legs are achondroplasia and had a bunch of others cued up. I doubt that was an advantage in herding. I read that bulldogs have brachycephaly because it helped them breathe while hanging on to the undercarriage of a bull. Problem is, bulldogs didn't look like that when bull-baiting was still done. Rather, people mixed them with pugs after the sport was outlawed to make them cute. And cute they are but they suffer for their cuteness. Dachshunds didn't have achondroplasia when they were working terriers either. The idea that it helped them follow badgers into holes is comical.
Yes and there are likely working golden retriever lines. The problem is that they are also popular pets and show dogs and if you breed for show (i.e. appearance) conformance you tend to breed in health problems too. If you breed only for temperament and working ability they will be better.
When I lived on Maryland's Eastern Shore the dog pound had a large ad every week in the local county paper to give away unwanted or stray dogs. The ad was all filled with pit bulls. As it was the county pound, I'd guess most ended up euthanized.
Has anyone studied how much pit bull parentage is required to create a dog as deadly as a pit bull? I suppose that would depend on what breeds it was mixed with.
Dogsbite.org has the most thorough statistics I'm aware of but uncertain onto specificity on that one pits Rottweilers and GS are top three, with a surprising amount of golden retrievers and labs.
Pitbulls combine terrier aggression with large size and strength. (A yippie Yorkie is annoying but a bitey pibble is deadly.)
So the answer to your question may not be be so much that there is a magic % threshold of pitbull ancestry that is deadly, but rather that simply more mass = more danger.
Increase in the pit bull population. I never used to see them - I see at least one daily out out walking and often more. The breed was bred to kill in dog fights by grabbing and not letting go and shaking to break the other dog's neck instead of releasing and backing off if the other dog signals submission. This instinct is very strong, yet breed advocates insist it's a "nanny" dog that "if raised properly" is safe around prey like infants and children and the weak (elderly, disabled, anyone who gives off vulnerability signals). First, they are not safe, no matter how well trained, as sad parents of now-dead infants have learned to their sorrow - the predator instinct is too strong; and second, in general, people don't seem to understand how MUCH training a dog requires in order to be a good companion. You can't just feed and water a dog and expect it'll figure out what you want it to do (unless you just want it to sleep and poop wherever). Ignorance, lack of curiosity, laziness, dishonest promotion of the breed - it's alarming. My sister used to live in El Paso (not to pick on EP - this is just my real life example) and said it was not safe (then at least) to walk alone due to packs of dogs that were allowed to run free and had become aggressive. I cross the street the second I see a pit - no way to defend myself or my puppy should it decide to attack.
I think pit bull fans are few but very enthusiastic. What could be more lovable than a Lab? My puppy is an Irish Terrier but I remember so fondly our Lab Christopher - a real "Ferdinand the Bull" type. Labs are amazing.
The absolute number of fatal dog attacks each year is so low that it's impossible to do anything but speculate. Might not be a real effect. Might reflect a slight bump in irresponsible dog ownership. Average year is less than 100. Not 100 per 100K population or anything like that. It's actually less than 100 per year in country with between 6 and 18 million pitbulls and mixes.
I adopted a giant scary ass dog during the pandemic. I asked his opinion and he said every one of those little shits had it coming.
Shit bulls have been banned in different nations and were banned in a Colorado City but dog nutter lobbyists got the ban rescinded.
In England the shitbull fans deflect from the law by saying oh this is a Staffordshire not a shitbull...
dogsbite.org publishes weekly and has a YouTube channel for fact-checking, shit bulls are top tier danger dogs with vise grip Jaws fighting intent and ill-equipped owners of midwit smooth brain culture.
Fwiw keep a dog be cool stick/utensil near at all times.
I've had a decade long lull from deranged dogs but my kids are grown and I don't walk the neighborhood with them anymore to be susceptible to the loose dog he's nice he doesn't bite drunken neighbor fallacy.
Usually followed by he's never done that before🤦
Recently false home invasions of dog owners on video have occurred and as long as the mutt is fed zero fucks given for the owner being manhandled by the home Invaders as the dog greedily guzzles food.
An overrated accessory with dangerous consequences. Dog free 30 years, sober 4 years, divorced 8 years a triage of happily left behinds
It was the best of times it was the worst of times
Wife moved out, parents got sick cross country, bad hookup from Craigslist resulted in a home invasion, robbery and scars, booze judgment 🤦
Drove cross country 10 times to empty my deceased parents home fell in love got ghosted barfed daily while consuming 20 boxer ice beers daily, my hands shook in front of my kids I was hospitalized three times perma gimp hand shed many useless folks in my life and found truth in my solitude and with the entirety of my being I know that life is better without booze
I assume it’s because a lot more of society’s least responsible people have picked up a lot of the most bitey breed as an accessory…what I am curious about is whether the increase in deaths are strangers or people in the owner’s household. I would guess the latter, the same way a lot of children are killed by guns when another kid finds mommy’s boyfriend’s piece laying out in the apartment.
Besides the pit bull thing, I'd guess a partial explanation is that people tend to be more fucked up and jumpy now. Dogs are like sponges - they feel exactly whatever you feel. If you've got "anxiety/depression/ADHD" or whatever downscale mental illnesses people have now, then your dog has it too. You know those weirdos who were wearing "Saint Luigi" t-shirts after that healthcare CEO got shot? A lot of those people own dogs. You can see it for yourself: go to Google Trends, type in "Reactive dog" (codeword for "I make my dog nervous"), and check out the trend for the previous 5 years i.e. post-legitimacy collapse. The graph accelerates around January 2020, and really kicks up summer of 2020 - it's almost too perfect. And we're not just talking about pitbulls here. There's some "reactive dog" meetups in my neighborhood where a bunch of dog owners get together to desensitize their dogs to crowds. The meetups have every breed: retrievers, labs, even those little small ones.
Babies and toddlers die the most from dog attacks, followed by people 55-74. Young people 15-24 die the least.
In the 2020s, looks like the races are pretty similar at death rates: blacks appear to have the highest death rate, but not by much over whites, with Hispanics a little lower than whites.
Yep - sometimes they attack toddlers outside the household, but in many cases it's inside the household. So in many cases, it's the dogholding parents who are stupid. It doesn't have to be pit, Rottweiler or Adolf's favorite German Shepherd (Blondi) are quite bity too.
My brother adopted a rescue Golden Retriever against all advice. Within days his young daughters were wearing socks around the house. They were covering up bite marks as they knew the dog would be gone if their parents found out.
My brother got rid of the dog, then did the same thing in 2020.
In Britain the American Bully XL was unknown until about 5 years ago. Since then they have killed 19 people. All other dog breeds combined only managed 18 victims.
I'm in broad agreement with the 'profusion of the pitties' hypothesis, but I'll add just a couple of observations.
First, there's been a sea change in how people treat their dogs. They used to be 'pets', and now they're 'furbabies' whose owners think of themselves as 'Mom and Dad'. This sentimentalism is pretty harmless if you've got a Pomeranian, but can be fatal if you've 'adopted' a pit bull.
Second is 'dog saviorism'. At some point I must have signalled to Mark Z's algorithm that I like dogs (which I really do; he's not wrong), so I get plenty of canine-centric content when I look at FB. I've noticed the profusion of 'dog redemption' videos, i.e. little canned stories about how even the dankest, mangiest, snarliest street dog can be transformed into a cuddle-buddy if you just luv luv luv him enough. I'm sure that works sometimes, but I suspect sometimes it doesn't. Some dogs are just mean.
And since so many dog rescuers are looking to be saviors (cf. my views on 21st century western culture and politics), some of them are inevitably going to seek out the 'hard cases', e.g. vicious pit bulls, to demonstrate how powerful their saving graces really are.
I have bred and trained dogs for years. They don't go bad when any control is exercised on them. How many people got dogs when they started working from home or unemployed only to have to leave the house now?
Yeah dogs live a pretty long time. Today those covid puppies are only 5 years old. They're out of their "dog teenager" years but they're still energetic.
The response to it's-not-the-breed-it's-the-owner-cels is "Sure, but we can't outlaw the owners, so we have to outlaw the breed."
(Technically it IS the breed too, but just like nurture and nature so often self-reinforce, so too with owners and breeds. We have to break the cycle of dysfunction somewhere, and breed is the easier link. "It's not the breed it's the owner" is just rhetoric to prevent the cycle from being addressed at all, so rhetorically disarming it is the first step.)
My money is on increased ownership of pit bulls.
That’s what I’ve heard too.
But the pit bull fad started well before the increase in reported deaths.
The American Bully is popular now.
I think pit bulls were purchased by a lot of people with their stimmy checks and now they’re roaming around attacking people. I feel the same about pit bulls as most people feel about mosquitoes and tics.
Sounds plausible.
I went and checked "deaths by fireworks discharge" for 2018-2024. I've often cited the massive number of home fireworks shot off on July 4, 2020 as evidence that people had more cash on hand during the pandemic than economists assumed.
Most years deaths were below 10, which the CDC won't show to protect privacy, but in 2022 they reached 10. And in 2020, when July 4th in Los Angeles was absolutely nuts, they hit 17.
So, stimmy checks, the rent moratorium, and various pandemic-related scams (e.g., Hellcat LLC) all put more money into the hands of the kind of people who like pit bulls, fireworks, guns, and Dodge Hellcats.
So, during the pandemic/reckoning combo, Ford-F150-Americans hunkered down and bid up suburban real estate to insane heights, and Dodge-Charger-Americans just went insane.
I'd not say "went insane" but rather "were given money with which to exercise their criminal negligence."
Smoke detector americans and F-150 Americans seem to both like pitbulls.
RAV4-Americans seem to avoid them.
Haha I have a Toyota rav4 and 2 huskies. Can confirm.
Climb started in 2018. Stimmy checks weren't until 2020.
I had a dog ripped to death by two pit bulls in a kennel of all places. Needless to say, the kennel went out of business shortly thereafter.
Aren’t you being racist against Pit Bulls there?
Breedist
I can’t speak to rates, but the Daily Mail seems to have another death by pit bull story every few months. They call them Bully XL over there, I believe. I think the UK has just banned a few breeds.
Homes with any dog that even slightly resembles a pit bull are, along with helicopters, off limits to my family.
I believe the XL is a sub-breed engineered to be especially huge. Understand the Pro version is being released in 2026.
Without specific training in attacking humans, a single dog should be no match for an adult. Just spitballin’, I’d say we are combining the dangerous capacity of favored breeds with the dangerous stupidity of dog owners and unleashing the pair against an incredibly wimpified younger population.
More unfenced pit bulls due to explosion of homeless would be my guess. Deadly dog attacks are opportunistic. Restrained/confined dogs don't generally have the opportunity.
It’s not bum pits killing babies. These are people’s pets.
Homeless people's dogs are pets. I have some bums with pits in my 'hood. They know better than to let their pits off leash when I'm walking around.
Didn’t say they weren’t in a sense but this isn’t where these attacks are occurring. The victims are overwhelming children with some elderly, and these are almost always HOUSEHOLD pets.
Household is being generous. My elderly neighbors have a junkie daughter with a pit. Technically it's her "household," but actually she sleeps elsewhere. Many such cases.
There’s an index of fatal pit attacks.. go to the ban pitbull subreddit. It’s almost all little kids who are being killed by their parents’ or relatives’ pet pit. Many of the parents are ardent breed defenders.
Have you interacted and subdued them when they are shitbulling at you? I watched a YouTube video that showed the choke out technique. In my mind's eye grabbing the collar and body slamming the dog is a escalatory end of subject methodology but that's for big dudes, anyone can choke one out if they get at it from behind. Possibly you have a pew pew and handle it that way, those videos are satisfying to watch as the owner cries out he's friendly he wasn't going to bite you to the stranger who is being bum rushed by the shit bull and who felt threatened enough to shoot their barking attacking dog.
Then there's cops shooting nice dogs and supplicating towards vicious pits, I've seen that too.
I follow the local law. Off leash aggressive dog can be exterminated if it presents a credible threat of injury.
Not interested in getting my hands dirty over it, but if I had to I'd probably crush its guts with my knee. I'm big enough to do that.
Saying that pitbulls mostly kill their stupid owners' children so-why-the-fuss is like saying blacks mostly victimize other blacks so-why-the-fuss.
In order of impact: the explosion of the pit bull population, “adopt don’t shop” derangement, and demographic change (which has a role in the explosion of the pitbull population.) it’s really impossible to overstate how pit bulls are devastating the genetic stock of American dogs - both purchased and rescued. True Labs are an endangered species, and most shelters are flooded with pits who due to no kill policies are adopted out into poorly prepared households drunk on the moral hedonism of adopting a dog rather than supporting breeders who adore and respect their breeds.
But mostly - this is due to pit bulls.
Another interesting trend is dog theft, specifically of frenchies, who resemble pits but fetch a premium price. This was unheard of 10 years ago but every vet practice operating near an “urban” environment will be familiar with this issue.
I can't agree with you on the purebred dog thing. Breeders are way to focused on dogs looking a specific way, to the detriment of temperament, job performance and health. The pit bull danger is highly exaggerated. There are a lot of dogs for adoption and the average person is better off with a mutt. If you don't need a specific job done, it doesn't make sense to pay for an inbred freak dog. Some of the cutest most in demand purebreds have been engineered to possess traits that would be considered genetic disease in humans.
All that said, I did adopt a single breed dog during the pandemic and he turned out great.
There are plenty of ethical breeders, and there would be more if the focus was on choosing an ethical breeder instead of adoption at all costs. Sure.. most people would be better off with a nice mutt. But good luck finding one in a shelter. They get scooped up almost immediately. Go check your local shelter page or better yet one in a major metro area- pits, pit mixes, some aggressive huskies, and elderly dogs with health needs. Rescues will grab any small or medium sized mutt before it even goes online. It’s obvious you have no proximity whatsoever to this ecosystem.
And no, the pitbull issue is not exaggerated. They comprise a shocking and indefensible proposition of fatal attacks on humans and other dogs. This is well documented and not explained by “training” or abuse.
Special moment when we get attacked in the comments for caring about kids getting torn to shreds.
There are between between 5 and 18 million pits in the US and less than 100 fatalities each year. That's what we call negligible.
I don't know what you mean by proximity to that ecosystem but I live in Los Angeles and adopted a dog during the pandemic after a couple months of intense research.
Yes and they still commit well over 52% of fatal attacks. Steve Sailer readers failing this test is embarrassing.
I'm not failing the test. You are the one exercised about an essentially non-existent problem. It is one of the things that puzzles me about the Sailer comments section, all the pitbull fear and hate. It's a nothing problem. We will never get the number down to zero.
I’m exercised about it because I.. commented about it? It’s not just about human deaths, by the way. I have no doubt that the rate of fatal dog on dog attacks have increased and this is yet another symptom of the erosion of civic norms and our previously high trust society. As a dog owner, this impacts my life daily.
The pitbull problem is in fact fixable. More education would lead to less families bringing this breed around kids.
Dogs killing humans is what I would call a zero tolerance issue.
The response to "the number is increasing" is not "so what, we'll never get the number down to zero."
Per dogita.
And there are only a couple deaths by shark every decade (in US waters). That doesn't mean sharks aren't dangerous.
For every fatal dog bite there are about 10,000 dog bites requiring hospitalization (and maybe another 50,000 that go unreported). Many of these are permanently disfiguring attacks. Most of the victims are children. I wouldn't call ~1,000,000 hospitalizations per year "negligible".
Also note that like with homicide statistics, emergency medical care has been improving so much in the past decades that it masks the true degree of social dysfunction underlying the statistics. A lot of attacks (human and canine) that would formerly have been fatal now go into the larger injury category rather than the fatality category.
That is a valid response to my position. In fact that is the flaw in the argument that anti-vaxxers make when they bring up how low we had measles fatalities at the time the vaccine was introduced. Of course the solution to that last mile of measles was easy to implement. Eliminating dog bite hospitalization is more difficult.
While 10,000 hospitalizations is not negligible, it's not a big health problem and I find it difficult to have a passionate position on solving it.
It's a million hospitalizations per year nationally, not 10,000.
That's more than the hospitalizations from fentanyl or alcohol poisoning, which are both considered public health crises. And the dog attack victims are typically younger and less likely to be causing the harm they suffer, unlike self-poisoners.
About half of dog attacks are preventable with one easy fix (ban pits). There is no such easy fix for fentanyl or alcohol.
When we looked for a shelter dog they were almost 100% pit bulls or pit bull mixes in the American South. It was astonishing.
It's not just the South. Everywhere in the US shelter dogs are mostly pits and pit mixes. There is a massive over-supply and under-demand for these creatures.
Why is this irrational situation happening? Would it surprise you to know that it is an outgrowth of America's irrational race situation? The shelters won't say it, but most pits and pit lines now originate from ghetto breeders, who are at best incompetent or when competent breed for size and aggression.
The consequences of this include the upward-spiking chart Steve posted.
Excellent points. The only solution I see is the euthanasia shot, millions of them. Or secretly fly them to countries we don't like.
There’s a federal judge somewhere who will require the immediate repatriation of such dogs. I wish I were joking.
In the 1970s the authoritative book on Pitbulls had a section assuring people that the dogs could, in fact, serve as guard dog. Pitbulls had a reputation for being so friendly at the time that people assumed you couldn't train them for protection.
The reason they were so people friendly was dog fighting. The rules of dog fighting required that humans put their hands on the dogs frequently during the fight. Any dog that bit a ref (or whatever they were called) or other owner, would be euthanized. So pits were extremely dog aggressive and people friendly.
Starting the in 1980s a certain type of irresponsible person caught on that pits were ideal urban security dogs because they were compact yet strong and were cheap. Most of the top protection breeds had become expensive by that time but pits had never been in fashion.
So a few decades of that kind of person breeding them and now you have the unfortunate situation of the game personality, the compact strength and lots of people aggression. The shelters should be euthanizing the people aggressive ones.
Are pitbulls good at distinguishing what's a people? Infants and toddlers are disproportionately victims. They spend a lot of time crawling/horizontal and so resemble animal prey.
In any case, most pit breeding nowadays is by incompetent/human-aggressive ghetto 'breeders'. It only a takes a few generations to ruin a breed. It's been more than a few generations now.
Like the short legs in Corgis. This related to dwarfism. But they were selected for this trait long ago (they’re herd dogs).
Yep- I knew an Argentine pathologist who would lecture me on all the genetic diseases involved in making dogs look weird or cute. Most of the reasons people give are made up, backsplanations to try to rationalize what are cosmetic decisions made by humans and for which dogs suffer.
He indeed said that short legs are achondroplasia and had a bunch of others cued up. I doubt that was an advantage in herding. I read that bulldogs have brachycephaly because it helped them breathe while hanging on to the undercarriage of a bull. Problem is, bulldogs didn't look like that when bull-baiting was still done. Rather, people mixed them with pugs after the sport was outlawed to make them cute. And cute they are but they suffer for their cuteness. Dachshunds didn't have achondroplasia when they were working terriers either. The idea that it helped them follow badgers into holes is comical.
The golden retriever was bred for many attributes, including the best temperament.
Yes and there are likely working golden retriever lines. The problem is that they are also popular pets and show dogs and if you breed for show (i.e. appearance) conformance you tend to breed in health problems too. If you breed only for temperament and working ability they will be better.
But they do suffer from hip problems like many thoroughbreds.
When I lived on Maryland's Eastern Shore the dog pound had a large ad every week in the local county paper to give away unwanted or stray dogs. The ad was all filled with pit bulls. As it was the county pound, I'd guess most ended up euthanized.
Has anyone studied how much pit bull parentage is required to create a dog as deadly as a pit bull? I suppose that would depend on what breeds it was mixed with.
Dogsbite.org has the most thorough statistics I'm aware of but uncertain onto specificity on that one pits Rottweilers and GS are top three, with a surprising amount of golden retrievers and labs.
Yes, retrievers nip you on the hand and pit bulls rip open your jugular. Both dog bites!
https://youtu.be/SIzku3TGK8M?si=sLigmU9W1vzR4OHK
All terrier breeds show a genetic predisposition to aggression.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/dog-breeds-tested/#comment-5732050
Pitbulls combine terrier aggression with large size and strength. (A yippie Yorkie is annoying but a bitey pibble is deadly.)
So the answer to your question may not be be so much that there is a magic % threshold of pitbull ancestry that is deadly, but rather that simply more mass = more danger.
Increase in the pit bull population. I never used to see them - I see at least one daily out out walking and often more. The breed was bred to kill in dog fights by grabbing and not letting go and shaking to break the other dog's neck instead of releasing and backing off if the other dog signals submission. This instinct is very strong, yet breed advocates insist it's a "nanny" dog that "if raised properly" is safe around prey like infants and children and the weak (elderly, disabled, anyone who gives off vulnerability signals). First, they are not safe, no matter how well trained, as sad parents of now-dead infants have learned to their sorrow - the predator instinct is too strong; and second, in general, people don't seem to understand how MUCH training a dog requires in order to be a good companion. You can't just feed and water a dog and expect it'll figure out what you want it to do (unless you just want it to sleep and poop wherever). Ignorance, lack of curiosity, laziness, dishonest promotion of the breed - it's alarming. My sister used to live in El Paso (not to pick on EP - this is just my real life example) and said it was not safe (then at least) to walk alone due to packs of dogs that were allowed to run free and had become aggressive. I cross the street the second I see a pit - no way to defend myself or my puppy should it decide to attack.
There is a big media campaign on, very subtle, to convince everyone pit bulls are more lovable the labradors. I’ve never seen a breed pushed so much.
I think pit bull fans are few but very enthusiastic. What could be more lovable than a Lab? My puppy is an Irish Terrier but I remember so fondly our Lab Christopher - a real "Ferdinand the Bull" type. Labs are amazing.
The absolute number of fatal dog attacks each year is so low that it's impossible to do anything but speculate. Might not be a real effect. Might reflect a slight bump in irresponsible dog ownership. Average year is less than 100. Not 100 per 100K population or anything like that. It's actually less than 100 per year in country with between 6 and 18 million pitbulls and mixes.
I adopted a giant scary ass dog during the pandemic. I asked his opinion and he said every one of those little shits had it coming.
Shit bulls have been banned in different nations and were banned in a Colorado City but dog nutter lobbyists got the ban rescinded.
In England the shitbull fans deflect from the law by saying oh this is a Staffordshire not a shitbull...
dogsbite.org publishes weekly and has a YouTube channel for fact-checking, shit bulls are top tier danger dogs with vise grip Jaws fighting intent and ill-equipped owners of midwit smooth brain culture.
Fwiw keep a dog be cool stick/utensil near at all times.
I've had a decade long lull from deranged dogs but my kids are grown and I don't walk the neighborhood with them anymore to be susceptible to the loose dog he's nice he doesn't bite drunken neighbor fallacy.
Usually followed by he's never done that before🤦
Recently false home invasions of dog owners on video have occurred and as long as the mutt is fed zero fucks given for the owner being manhandled by the home Invaders as the dog greedily guzzles food.
An overrated accessory with dangerous consequences. Dog free 30 years, sober 4 years, divorced 8 years a triage of happily left behinds
The four divorced years b4 you renounced strong drink, were they good?
It was the best of times it was the worst of times
Wife moved out, parents got sick cross country, bad hookup from Craigslist resulted in a home invasion, robbery and scars, booze judgment 🤦
Drove cross country 10 times to empty my deceased parents home fell in love got ghosted barfed daily while consuming 20 boxer ice beers daily, my hands shook in front of my kids I was hospitalized three times perma gimp hand shed many useless folks in my life and found truth in my solitude and with the entirety of my being I know that life is better without booze
I assume it’s because a lot more of society’s least responsible people have picked up a lot of the most bitey breed as an accessory…what I am curious about is whether the increase in deaths are strangers or people in the owner’s household. I would guess the latter, the same way a lot of children are killed by guns when another kid finds mommy’s boyfriend’s piece laying out in the apartment.
I'd guess the latter as well.
Besides the pit bull thing, I'd guess a partial explanation is that people tend to be more fucked up and jumpy now. Dogs are like sponges - they feel exactly whatever you feel. If you've got "anxiety/depression/ADHD" or whatever downscale mental illnesses people have now, then your dog has it too. You know those weirdos who were wearing "Saint Luigi" t-shirts after that healthcare CEO got shot? A lot of those people own dogs. You can see it for yourself: go to Google Trends, type in "Reactive dog" (codeword for "I make my dog nervous"), and check out the trend for the previous 5 years i.e. post-legitimacy collapse. The graph accelerates around January 2020, and really kicks up summer of 2020 - it's almost too perfect. And we're not just talking about pitbulls here. There's some "reactive dog" meetups in my neighborhood where a bunch of dog owners get together to desensitize their dogs to crowds. The meetups have every breed: retrievers, labs, even those little small ones.
Yes. Out walking you occasionally encounter someone who will shriek at you that they have a “reactive” dog. I always think to myself “you don’t say”
Is anything known about the socioeconomic status and race demographic of the victims and maybe of the dogholders too? Victim age?
Babies and toddlers die the most from dog attacks, followed by people 55-74. Young people 15-24 die the least.
In the 2020s, looks like the races are pretty similar at death rates: blacks appear to have the highest death rate, but not by much over whites, with Hispanics a little lower than whites.
Yep - sometimes they attack toddlers outside the household, but in many cases it's inside the household. So in many cases, it's the dogholding parents who are stupid. It doesn't have to be pit, Rottweiler or Adolf's favorite German Shepherd (Blondi) are quite bity too.
My brother adopted a rescue Golden Retriever against all advice. Within days his young daughters were wearing socks around the house. They were covering up bite marks as they knew the dog would be gone if their parents found out.
My brother got rid of the dog, then did the same thing in 2020.
In Britain the American Bully XL was unknown until about 5 years ago. Since then they have killed 19 people. All other dog breeds combined only managed 18 victims.
You beat me to it, I was going to say this. I will add a link to Ed West's post about this.
https://www.edwest.co.uk/p/it-is-not-the-owners-it-is-the-breed
Might add "it's also the owners" as they selected the breed.
And the XL-Bully is a breed-within-a-breed, so it's really that a sub-sub-breed has killed more than all other dog breeds combined.
Seems like an easy fix.
I'm in broad agreement with the 'profusion of the pitties' hypothesis, but I'll add just a couple of observations.
First, there's been a sea change in how people treat their dogs. They used to be 'pets', and now they're 'furbabies' whose owners think of themselves as 'Mom and Dad'. This sentimentalism is pretty harmless if you've got a Pomeranian, but can be fatal if you've 'adopted' a pit bull.
Second is 'dog saviorism'. At some point I must have signalled to Mark Z's algorithm that I like dogs (which I really do; he's not wrong), so I get plenty of canine-centric content when I look at FB. I've noticed the profusion of 'dog redemption' videos, i.e. little canned stories about how even the dankest, mangiest, snarliest street dog can be transformed into a cuddle-buddy if you just luv luv luv him enough. I'm sure that works sometimes, but I suspect sometimes it doesn't. Some dogs are just mean.
And since so many dog rescuers are looking to be saviors (cf. my views on 21st century western culture and politics), some of them are inevitably going to seek out the 'hard cases', e.g. vicious pit bulls, to demonstrate how powerful their saving graces really are.
Emotional support pit bulls, etc. My pandemic pittie sadly died (cancer) recently, but at least now he won't ever be a statistic.
I have bred and trained dogs for years. They don't go bad when any control is exercised on them. How many people got dogs when they started working from home or unemployed only to have to leave the house now?
Yeah dogs live a pretty long time. Today those covid puppies are only 5 years old. They're out of their "dog teenager" years but they're still energetic.
I think some breeds need to be outlawed as it’s obvious the owners of them are not investing in training.
The response to it's-not-the-breed-it's-the-owner-cels is "Sure, but we can't outlaw the owners, so we have to outlaw the breed."
(Technically it IS the breed too, but just like nurture and nature so often self-reinforce, so too with owners and breeds. We have to break the cycle of dysfunction somewhere, and breed is the easier link. "It's not the breed it's the owner" is just rhetoric to prevent the cycle from being addressed at all, so rhetorically disarming it is the first step.)
"It's not the breed, it's the owner."
https://i2.wp.com/stonetoss.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/pitbull-comic.png