It is true that pit bulls make up a hugely disproportionate number of reported dog attacks, it's also true that they are especially dangerous and have caused the most deaths by dog bite.
What many of these statistics fail to account for are environmental factors (pit bulls tend to be the most abused and most regularly abandoned dogs because of dog fighting and also because they are just a handful to properly train and care for.), it is also very difficult to gather accurate data on breed specific attacks/aggression because while pit bulls are the highest reported in most dog bite statistics, they are also not a breed as much as a group of breeds that includes:
The American Pit Bull Terrier
The American Staffordshire Terrier
The Staffordshire Bull Terrier, and
The American Bully
A study found that dogs classified as Pit Bulls only had 43.5% DNA from Pit Bull-type ancestry.
The study, carried out in two shelters in California and Arizona, also found that 62% of dogs labeled as Pit Bulls had less than a 50% DNA concentration from Pit Bull-type ancestry, Pit Bull facts and statistics show.
Identifying the right breed of dog in attacks and death is incredibly difficult. This is why the CDC stopped collecting breed-specific data in dog bite-related fatalities (DBRF) in 1998.
The fact that there’s no official data to go by makes it even harder to separate myths from facts regarding Pit Bull attacks in the US.
Okay cool, so pits might make headlines more because of their strength and ability to inflict fatal wounds easier than other breeds but that goes for most large dogs.
German Shepherds had a similar stigma back when Americans were still xenophobic toward German immigrants and there were similar attitudes around that breed in the mid twentieth century. Prior to WWII Pit Bulls were a working class icon and were as much or more known for their reputation as great working dogs and loyal and loving family dogs as fighting dogs or vicious guard dogs.
Pit Bulls were bred for a wide variety of reasons and selected for many different traits but like most dogs they were foremost bread for physical traits and secondly for their temperament toward humans.
So what happened?
Racism it's always racism.
No new owner may settle in the area so long as they possess such a dog. Critics argue that these bans are not based on sound scientific or statistical evidence—that pit bulls pose no greater risk than any other breed of dog. Advocates of these laws urge that the bans are crucial to protect the public health and safety from dangerous dogs. Yet, perhaps these concerns have less to do with dogs and more to do with the individuals who own them. Breed-specific legislation may be being used as a new form of redlining to keep minorities out of majority-white neighborhoods.
“We don’t want those people here,” a city council member said of the bans. Strong cultural ties exist between pit bull dogs and the Black community. The same is true of the Latino community. Research undertaken here to investigate this claim suggests that people of color are perceived to be the most likely owner of this breed of dog. While at the present time, actual ownership data is not available, if true ownership resembles the perceived distribution measured here, such a finding may form the basis for a legal claim. Under new law, breed-specific legislation could be challenged under the Fair Housing Act if it can be shown that these laws are disproportionately excluding minority groups.
-The Black Man's Dog: The Social Context of Breed Specific Legislation, by Ann Linder
https://law.lclark.edu/live/files/32171-25-1-third-articlepdf
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6107223/
https://www.avma.org/sites/default/files/resources/javma_000915_fatalattacks.pdf
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19644273/
https://twitter.com/GeeDee215/status/1338869829911146497
How do you square this with your argument that there is no good data available? This seems to me like you're trying to have your cake and eat it too. You're making an assertion (with no data) while dismissing all of the best data that's actually available for being imperfect.
My understanding is that pits have a different style of biting. They clamp down and don't let go for minutes, while thrashing from side to side to rip flesh. It's inherited from their history as bull-baiting dogs. This makes them more dangerous than dogs of even a similar size and strength.Dangerousness and aggressiveness are not the same thing. A rubber band gun is more likely to accidentally discharge than a firearm, but that doesn't make it more dangerous. It doesn't mean you can't love your guns or your dogs, just respect their danger.
When dogs attack something to kill it, they all do this. Every breed.
Maybe my understanding was wrong then. I thought other dogs preferred to inflict several bites or something. It looks like I could have accidentally absorbed a myth about pit bulls.
Do pit bulls have stronger jaws than huskies or poodles?
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Very comprehensive. Thanks. :rat-salute:
I don't know the stats but just from looking at pictures of pit bulls, they look like they tend to have wider heads/jaws in general. And the one that I had on the farm loved to chew on things like balls and sticks. We had to take away all the tennis balls the other dogs used to play with because he would just chew on them until the split in half. So he had some serious jaw strength and stamina but also was more obsessive about chewing on things than the other dogs so :shrug-outta-hecks:
Just giving a quick and sloppy look through Google search results, the numbers are all over the place. First entry for pit bulls was like 240 pounds of force, husky was 320 and poodle was 260. But all these numbers came from wildly different sources (one of which was a law firm :awooga:) and I don't have time to find some source that is more... academic/objective right now.
So if the instinct (or whatever we want to call it) to chew on things is higher in pit bulls then they could develop stronger jaw muscles and I'd imagine that a wider head/jaw would make it easier for them to bite and hold for longer periods of time.
The several bites thing is possibly that the animal is trying to warn or fight something to the point that it runs away rather than kill. (living on a farm and having lots of dogs, this has kinda been my experience).
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That's why I had to make this post. Remember none of us are immune to propaganda and it's most effective when we don't realize it's being done. All the hysteria around pit bulls that really took off in the 90s is a result of many overlapping factors from sensationalized headlines to racist stereotypes.
this is just how dogs kill prey - they clamp on and thrash to try and break their necks. every single breed does this, even during play, except where the behavior has been trained out. hell, you can get most dogs to do this by just playing tug-of-war with them, with a rope.
pits are just not unique. any well-founded fears people have of them apply to dogs as a whole. there's no excuse for wholesale slaughter.
Yes, I was mistaken on that part. I learn something new every day from fellow comrades.