The home secretary is seeking "urgent advice" about banning American XL Bully dogs as footage shows one of the animals attacking an 11-year-old girl and a man in Birmingham. Suella Braverman has said the animals are a "clear and lethal" danger after the video of the attack in Bordesley Green emerged on the social media platform TikTok. West Midlands Police are investigating after two men, who were bitten and left with injuries to their shoulders and arms, were taken to hospital to be treated for their injuries after the incident on Saturday.
In the US, Pit Bulls caused 65% of dog bite deaths between 2005 and 2016.
About 15 years ago I volunteered with a pitbull rescue, then did a bunch of research on pitbull attacks in grad school. The problem then was that most statistics like this were unreliable once you saw what they labeled a pitbull. In most cases it was just any “mutt” was considered a pitbull. I don’t know if things have changed, never really looked into it since then, but I’m still a bit wary of stats like this without knowing their data is accurate.
My little dog doesn’t have an ounce of pitbull in her. Her mom was a border collie/lab mix, and the Father was the Neighbor’s boston terrier/english pointer mix. The only thing remotely pitbull like about her is her underbite. That said, I’ve lost count of the times somebody at the dog park, usually someone with a little ankle biter dog of the teacup persuasion, has gotten uppity about me having a “pitbull” off leash. People are dumb.
That about sums it up
Every breed you listed besides lab are nippers but are not notorious maulers. Sorry your little nipper is getting lumped in with the murder muffins.
It doesn’t help that a lot of strays/rescues have a good chunk of pit bull blood in them.
Both of my dogs are rescues from programs in the southern US. One of them certainly seems to have some pit in him…beautiful brindle coat, block head, incredibly strong jaw, stocky-muscular build. He’s dumb as a bag of rocks but incredibly loyal and affectionate. Because of the stigma around pits, though, I’m afraid to get him DNA tested.
Actually it’s more likely a pitt is labeled incorrectly like a lab etc to get them adopted to people too ignorant to know better. So that’s gonna invalidate that statement.
Seems like an issue specific to wherever you went to school.
Most rational people would immediately draw clear separations between mutts and pitbulls or pitbull mixes.
I don’t think this comment is indicative of the problem at all.
Curious where you went to school though, lol. Might want to get a refund for that degree.
Most rational people would, but it was an indicator that people who report dog bites did not know the difference.
And I’m not sure what my school had to do with it. At that time I was sourcing data from external sources, using data reported on police reports or by other organizations. Someone else commenting referenced the breed specific legislation advocacy group that was a source for some of that data.
My comment might not have been clear, I was criticising the data I was finding.
The studies I’ve seen that people cite to say “you can’t identify a breed by looking at it” usually are playing a semantic game - and what often is not emphasized is that the same research shows that when people identify a dog as a “pit bull,” that those people are quite accurate in identifying–by morphology alone–the presence of genetics from one of the several aggressive breeds people call “pit bulls.” And that the morphology is positively correlated with higher aggression.
I remember when climate change deniers were not sure about the science either…
Being skeptical of data and their sources is a fundamental part of science.
were?
And it’s probably worse if you do rate by breed.
But I suspect that it’s mostly due to a combination of breed and neglect/non-training. The kind of people who want a pit bull in particular, and the kind of people who just chain up their dog outside and never train or socialize it, probably have significant overlap.
Wrong. You’re misrepresenting the stats. You’re leaving out the fact that in over half of all dog bites the breed is unknown.
Also, in studies where vet personnel are asked to visually identify the breed of dog, they are wrong two out of three times. So if vet personnel can’t even do it, dog bite victims, police reports, and hospital reports, from where these statistics on dog bites are obtained, are definitely not getting right.
The truth is that we have absolutely zero legitimate idea what dogs are causing injuries. Even if the numbers on pitbulls were accurate, the breed is unreported in more than half of cases, which statistically speaking means there could be another breed of dog that you’ve never even heard of that’s responsible for more than half of all bites.
The other issue for me is the inherent racism by those who advocate for these policies. In every conversation, it eventually devolves to the proponent of breed bans doing one of two things: admitting that they are targeting certain types of people, not breeds, and arguments that rely on false assertions of history, genetic and behavioral science, that are identical to those put forth by eugenicists. The easy example is the false assertions that pitbulls were “bred for fighting.”
They were bred for hunting and loyalty to their families and children. The guy to originally bred them wrote several books which you can read on Google Books and discusses at length their loyalty to people and kids as a primary characteristics, moreso than any violence. It was their strength and determination that made them useful for hunting, not aggression.
They were used only for dog fighting decades after the big game hunting they were bred to do was banned, and even then, dogs that showed aggression to humans were banned from the “sport” if not outright euthanized.
The studies that you would cite to support your “you can’t tell a breed by its look” also tend to show that people are quite accurate at identifying that one of the many breeds that are called pit bulls are present in a particular dog. in other words, they can’t accurately say “this is a pure bred Staffordshire Terrier” but they can say, “this is a pit bull” and they’re correct, unless you’re playing stupid semantic games.
I don’t see where the study says that.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109002331500310X
That study seems to state a conclusion precisely the opposite of what the experimental results were. Based on a small sample set, there’s a high degree of match, far more accurate than random chance, between the observations and the genetic findings.
So, at intake, 18 dogs were identified as pit bulls but only 2/3rds were at least 12% pit bull.
During the study, 56 dogs were identified as being pit bulls, but only about 1/3rd were in fact at least 12% pit bull.
This is the classic ‘base rate fallacy’. The false positive rate isn’t that high, and the false negative rate isn’t that high either. But because the true positive rate is pretty low, the ratio of true positives to false positives is much worse than you’d intuitively think.
Tests for rare diseases and attempts to behaviorally profile terrorists at airports runs into the same problem. Sometimes, a 99.9% accurate test just moves you from searching for a needle on a farm to a needle in only a single haystack.
And yet still wrong two thirds of the time.
Source?
https://www.dogsbite.org/dog-bite-statistics-multi-year-fatality-report-2005-2017.php
This site is an advocacy group for breed specific legislation.
And it’s all very well cited. Makes sense why an advocacy group exists for this
The National Rifle Association will offer a very well cited claim that strict gun laws increase violent crime. The Violence Policy Center will offer a very well cited claim that the opposite is true. Reality is likely more nuanced.
The hole in dog breed bite statistics is usually accurate identification of the breed.
I’d like a good citation on that claim in your second paragraph. I’ve seen that claimed a lot yet I’ve seen nothing to support it.
Maybe I’m missing something, what does this advocacy group stand to benefit from banning pitbulls? The NRA is backed by weapons manufacturers. This seems to be people who actually see a problem and are taking actions to help protect people.
People often hold strong beliefs that are not related to personal gain nor particularly rational. I don’t think their intent is nefarious, but I think it’s likely mistaken.
If research is determining otherwise then what would it take to convince you to accept this?
They are pushing arguments in favor of eugenics and genocide and have coopted dog-related injuries to push lies about history and genetic science.
Just go on their site and wherever they mention pitbulls, replace it with “Jews” and you really start to get the flavor of their bullshit.
The problem is that an advisory group trying to push legislation is much more likely to cherry pick and misrepresent their citations.
Okay but what is the motive for them to do this. You are claiming malice but you aren’t providing a motive for said malice
Not exactly. Studies on this are hard to accurately. In breif, people suck at id breeds, and mort studoes only ask the peraon what breed bit you
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=N7F4OfDSvPU&pp=ygUYcmViZWNjYSB3YXRzb24gZG9nIGJyZWVk
Thanks for telling me the same thing people have been parroting for an eternity. Check out Occam’s razor
What wrong with the counter studies
It’s not well cited because in over half of dog injuries the breed is unknown.
Also, two thirds of dogs identified as pitbulls by veterinarian staff have zero pitbull DNA.
Yeah that study probably relied on faulty data. Most dog bite data just the person what the breed was.
Did tou know putbull is not 1 breed but 3 different ones.
Most people cant reliably tell an american pitbul from other breeds in a line up.
Actually, “pitbulls” are now well over a dozen different breeds people just randomly consider “pitbulls”
If it’s a stocky mutt with short hair . It’s a pitbull!
Did you know that all of the breeds that are identified by the name “pit bull” rate high in aggression? And that the same studies that pitbull afficianados cite for “you can’t tell a breed by appearance” also support the idea that when people call a dog a “pit bull” based on morphology alone, that the dog stands a very high chance of having decended from one of the several breeds identified as a pit bull?
Not in the study i reaf. They lined pure American pitbull and some pitbull mutts and dogs with no pitbull. They only to reliably guees who was the pitbull, even counting the mutt as pb, was if the dog was showing teeth.