On Tuesday, December 20, staff and students at Willard Intermediate South school were injured when two dogs identified as a pit bull mix breed made their way into the playground.
That's not a fucking pitbull then IS IT?!
The dogs were euthanized in order to be tested for rabies. The tests will be completed today, and we expect to have results within the next couple of days. During the investigation, it was determined that one of the dogs was not vaccinated and no proof could be provided that the other was up to date on its vaccinations.
So it could've been rabies but you go straight to the bullshit bioessentialism and insinuation that genetics can predispose one to violence.
Obligatory link to my effort post on this phenomenon (reddit link because the OG here is in archive limbo)
Realize I might be going against the grain here, but I do want to have an honest convo because I'm pretty skeptical of pit bulls as the owner of a small dog. For disclosure I've got pretty much two anecdotal data points for pits/bully breeds—one named Blessing who was very sweet, and one named either Bruno or Brutus who was quite aggressive towards my dog, such that his owner had difficulty reining him in.
I'm really suspicious of the term "dog racism" because to me it seems to be making a false equivalence between human races, which are largely socially constructed with no functional difference besides appearance (and things like propensity to sickle cell disease for those with African ancestry), and dog breeds, which have been subject to depending on breed, hundreds or thousands of years of selective breeding, which has real and tangible results. Bloodhounds, for instance, have souped up noses with more scent receptors than other breeds. On average, they're just better at smelling, because they have been bred to be so. This also occurs with behavior, and over enough time, certain breeds have predisposed instincts towards herding, guarding, and so forth. Why wouldn't aggression and temperament be subject to the same selective forces?
The term is less about being "racist" towards the dog and more about the breed being a conduit for human racism. If there wasn't a stereotype of pitbulls being a breed owned primarily by poor people of color, then the wouldn't be as much of a problem.
However, the pitbull is basically the only breed that's called out by name in rental applications. Owning one opens you to more harassment by people on the street, police, and landlords. And all of this just so happens to reenforce existing human racial dynamics.
Is there? I have never personally noticed this stereotype in my country. If this is a thing, then I'm shocked I haven't heard about it until now in the violent-dog-breeds debate.
It's an American thing for sure. Pitbulls are considered the black man's dog here and the parallels in reporting on black men and pitbulls are almost uncanny.
That's insanely untrue where I live, in new England. I see tons of white people with pitbulls
In the south it's a lot more prevalent, also California.
I can assure you that my hatred of dogs that are capable of killing people in public spaces is pure.
That's interesting, thanks for sharing.
Just look at this article, they chose an image of a seemingly violent pitbull with no context. Same as now anytime a black person is in any way involved in any sort of story they use mugshots or pictures of them from Facebook where they look violent.
Any sort of husky is generally included now along with mastiffs. Not sure on the mastiff side, but the explanation for huskies is that they are more destructive when left alone
Getting better I guess, but Pitbulls are still called out specifically in a lot of places here.
Oh yeah for sure, the last application I saw was like 10 bullet points of breeds and most were some form of pit and then •Husky •Mastiff
Small dogs are no less aggressive than large dogs. They are not reported nearly as much because the actual factor here is their physical ability. See @invalidusernamelol's comment about self reinforcing stereotypes
Also in the reddit post linked in the body text there is an excerpt from the book The Black Man's Dog about redlining.
Hell I'd argue small dogs by and large are more aggressive because no one bothers to train them because what's the worst that could happen but the actual physical ability seems very important and also a genuinely good argument for legislation? I can't football-kick a pitbull like a chihuaha.
I don't have too much of an opinion of US Pitbull Ownership or legislation but "actual real life consequences of what if it goes wrong" is taken into most legislations, this seems like a bad argument. You need a driving license for a car, a harder one for anything bigger and none at all for a bicycle. Or why an AR-15 is easier to get legally than a rocket launcher.
Okay but then you get into how that could possibly be implemented and a dog is not a car. They have coevolved with us for tens of thousands of years.
Size / Weight? It's not like a german sheperd coming for you is any less dangerous
Okay but that is the sort of thing that can't be addressed in any way within our current racist capitalist hegemony without disproportionally affecting minorities.
Again I stress the reference to the book The Black Man's Dog.
If you wear clothes you're probably exploiting children, but you can't just not wear clothes.
And sure you can not own dogs but then the argument becomes should you just not own dogs? Okay, but should we also allow all these animals to be put down because nobody will adopt them?
It's a very complex issue and people are bringing up things like this that have nothing to do with the issue at hand that there is a resurgence of scientific racism and this is a part of that.
On the one hand: I'd say make that argument then, on the other hand I think as a leftists you kind of have to grapple with the realities of living in a stupid, unfair system and still needing some legislation as for, let's put it generally, risk containment. I don't have the numbers to argue as to whether dog attacks constitutes a problem here, just generally.
Traffic enforcement is done way, WAY more against black people, which is bad, but abolishing any sort of traffic enforcement is also bad. Ideally you'd solve this via infrastructure, but if you start tomorrow with the biggest program ever seen to rebuild the world, you're still looking at two decades of needing traffic enforcement.
I think you should just stop any commercial breeding and require pets to be neutered / spayed and go for like phase out, mostly, excluding things like Service and Therapy Animals and probably some of the better job uses like rescue dogs.
I think people are getting into the weeds about how to handle a problem that is being manufactured by reactionary media to drive a narrative around bioessentialist notions of behavior that is directly tied to race science.
Eyes on the ball people this is very insidious and people are making light of it or being dismissive of how insidious this truly is.
Yeah, I'm not suggesting that a small dog can't be just as aggressive as a large dog, but I am suggesting that selective breeding can lead to change in temperament and aggression, this a predisposition towards violence, which you imply isn't true in the body of your post.
I checked out the reddit post and banning pit bulls as a means of soft-redlining makes sense, but I don't think that's super relevant to the selective breeding/instinctual behavior element I'm trying to figure out here. It claim the bans aren't based on statistical evidence, but that's there's no refutation about what evidence that gets presented(there might be in the full text but I don't have access to it).
Also in that post is DNA discourse, which I'm skeptical of—yes, a given dog might have only 40% pit bull DNA, but when it comes to behavioral heritability, as far as I understand, it's not the overall amount of genetic code but whether or not specific markers and all that are present, so if that DNA percentage happened to include the right genes then they get the behavior. I might very well be wrong on that, this is testing my high school biology knowledge so feel free to correct me!
There is no scientific evidence to support this though. There have been attempts to do so but there is no actual scientific study to support this outside of the thousands of years it took to cause dogs to become an entirely separate species from wolves.
Which it should also be noted happened because dogs chose humans as much as humans chose dogs.
If anything they are predisposed toward a communal relationship cross species which resulted in our symbiotic relationship.
This study seems to support breed genetic heritability of behavior, specifically including aggression of various types (owner, dog, stranger). I know there's other studies with different results, but I'm not at the level of literacy on (or, frankly, investment in) the topic to study up on methodology to decide which is more valid.
Species wide, yes, dogs are definitely predisposed to human-based altruism, but that doesn't mean breeds can't have higher levels of aggression than others within the same species.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox
Here’s a scientific study done in the Soviet Union regarding domesticating foxes. The researchers themselves noted significant behavioral differences. If that’s insufficient data due to bias, the researchers also noted significant hormonal differences (apparently hormones linked to stress response halved?)
yes but can this be attributed to genetics or the fact these animals were raised in captivity? What was the control group here?
The earlier generations here, also raised in captivity and being noted as being less domesticated, should work as a control group here or am I missing something?
I think the biggest question is how much of this behavior is taught (be it by humans or through their parents). E.G. it's already been demonstrated that crows can pass on information about potentially dangerous human individuals.
This study https://www.npr.org/2019/09/13/760666490/crows-are-they-scary-or-just-scary-smart
I'd argue even the tamest foxes from a 1950s estonian fur farm don't exactly have a great trackord towards humans
Hmm, at first glance training/teaching seems possible. After all, the foxes were apparently kept in cages in a barracks like structure - so they should be able to see each other and how other foxes react to humans.
However, this seems like it can’t account for much of it, just given the length of the study and amount of generations. It seems there were behavioral changes between the foxes - generation to generation - and this went on for 40 generations.
How many generations can foxes get the benefit of learning from other generations before we’d expect significantly diminishing returns? 1? 2? Maybe 3?
Meanwhile they have significant changes in their hormones (stress hormone halving every 10 generations, higher levels of serotonin, significantly changed reproductive behavior, significant changes to hormone producing organs) that correlate strongly with the behavioral changes.
It seems a bit silly to me to think that, given this background, a significant amount of the behavior is attributable to inter generational learning.
The page also mentions follow-on studies. Apparently the domesticated foxes had 40 different gene expressions compared to farm raised foxes. Additionally, it seems there was a different experiment ran with rats, in which, starting from the same rat group, they were able to breed hyper aggressive and hyper docile rats in short order, which apparently resulted in genetic differences between the two groups.
Well the issue is that pit bull statistics are pretty unreliable for a number of reasons.
One major factor is that people are more likely to identify a dog as being a pit bull if the dog is known to be violent, same goes for if the dogs owner is black. Breed identification is difficult so we can't just take those numbers at face value.
It's also important to note that even besides identification inconsistency, the pitbulls stereotype as a violent animal draws a very specific type of person towards them, people looking for violent animals to train into being violent. Many of them have serious trauma issues or other problems from this so even adopted pit bulls become dangerous for social reasons not natural ones.
It's not necessarily impossible that pit bulls are more violent overall but there's a lot of confounding factors that need to be sorted out, and even in the worst case scenario where pit bulls might actually have a natural tendency to violence it's still likely to be a rather small factor compared to all the other causes, especially when breed stereotypes are likely overrated to begin with. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk0639