• RBWells@lemmy.world
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    2 hours ago

    We had a Pit & another mutt - yes the pit bull was good natured and polite, gentle under normal circumstances, easy to train to be obedient to me - but she was strong as fuck, and if another dog, including our other dog, wanted to fight, she was all in, I do think they are bred to fight. Thankfully she moved out when my daughter moved down the street from us, we would have kept her or the other dog but not both of them. We still get to see her & my kid gets to see the mutt, they are practically next door, but it’s better with them living in separate houses.

    All that to say - yes they are just dogs, trainable and sweet. But so so strong and willing to fight, you have to be able to redirect them quickly if they see another dog get aggressive.

  • jpreston2005@lemmy.world
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    10 hours ago

    I’ve been around dogs my whole life. Big dogs. Mastiffs, Labradoodles, Rhodesian Ridgebacks, German Shepherds, Dobermans… Along with some experience with little dogs. The only dog ever to bite me, or attack my dogs, were pitbulls. Two attacks, my whole life, all pitbulls.

    I dunno, man. It’s just my personal experience, but shit. I know what kind of dog I don’t trust.

  • 11111one11111@lemmy.world
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    8 hours ago

    Ill die on the hill that no matter the breed the dog will always be as good as their owner but I also have enough empirical knowledge of seeing what pitbulls and other similar breeds are capable of. DONT ADOPT DOGSCUZ YOU WANNA RESCUE THEM! I know every leading heart dog lover will call me crazy but duck that. If you wanna be a good owner to your dog than the time it takes to be a good owner for a puppy you had from birth should be where you start. Then after raising 5 generations, THEN YOU FUCKING IDIOT AND ONLY FICKING THEN you should entertain he idea of helping at your pound with canines who need rehabilitation. All youre doing adopting is talking yourself out of getting another dog. I have seen more people than i can count growing up who go to the dog store, see the posters to rescue, get their dog and either never see it thru its full recovery before getting rid of it or it was the last dog that person pr couple ever got.

  • mx_smith@lemmy.world
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    17 hours ago

    From personal experience I had a friend who raised a pit bull from a puppy and his dog was well behaved and trained well. Then when the dog was about 5 years old, it just snapped one day and attacked my friend mauling my friends arm in his bedroom. When he got the dog into the back yard it started ramming the glass door with his head and then ran and scaled a six foot wall and took off never to be seen again. I knew this dog as a puppy and how it was raised so this was a a shock to everyone. This was also in Arizona, where the vet said they have cases of pit bulls “going crazy” from the heat but ever since I have been wary of pit bulls.

  • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
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    20 hours ago

    dobermans arnt really that aggressive, compared to pitbulls, which are bred for baiting bulls and likely fighting too. dobermans were originally used as guard dogs, or at least escort police in the past. the amount of people owning Huskies, GSD, Mixed breeds and pitbull far outnumber those of dobermans, and poorly trained they all have potential to be aggressive, some more than others due to them being bred to bitey. alot of people cant hand high demands of some breeds.

  • jordanlund@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    When you look at annual statistics of dog bite fatalities, pit bulls aren’t just the #1 cause of dog bite deaths, they account for more deaths than all dog breeds COMBINED.

    • Elting@piefed.social
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      1 day ago

      According to Wikipedia (I understand the irony here) dogsbite dot org has been accused of publishing misleading and inaccurate information. However, pit bulls are terriers and terriers don’t let go when they bite. Most terriers are small ratting dogs where this doesn’t matter so much.

      • Madzielle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 day ago

        When I was bit by a pit, I was in a fight with his uh, human. The dude was being a dick. The dog looked at me, looked at his “owner” and then lunged at me. I put up my left arm to block my face, thats where he caught me, in my upper arm. The guy jumpped on the dog, started punching it in the head (this guy was a complete moron) and he wouldnt let go.

        I played dead. It was isntict, I dont know. After what felt like enterity, I just, took out a deep sigh, pushed all the air from me, went limp. the dog let go, the guy whos dog it was threw him in the bathroom and locked him in there, and I went to the hospital.

        • Elting@piefed.social
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          1 day ago

          My neighbors had a pit that hated other dogs. My sister brought her dog over and it escaped the backyard and jumped through an empty screen door to attack her. I was right there on the porch though and got the dog by the collar. As soon as I got it away from my sister’s dog, it was wagging tail and happy face. Pit bulls are capable of intense focus when they have identified “prey.” Most dog owners are not equipped to deal with the reality of training a dog like that. Luckily I only got grazed in that altercation.

          • RBWells@lemmy.world
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            2 hours ago

            I worked with a lady who had an Akita that did this - she got a call at work one day that her dog had attacked the neighbor’s dog. Had busted through the screen door, jumped OVER the pool, busted through the pool screen, jumped over the fence, and attacked the neighbor’s dog, because she could see it in the neighbor’s yard.

    • guynamedzero@piefed.zeromedia.vip
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      1 day ago

      I think this graphic should also be taking into account the number of owned dogs by breed, kinda like per capita. Because what if almost everyone owns pit bulls, and all the others are just outliers, then yeah, most attacks are by pit bulls because there’s more of them.

      In my opinion, this would probably actually make pits look even worse, but whatever end result would actually be more representative of real data

      • velma@sh.itjust.works
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        1 day ago

        A lot of mixed breeds are labeled as “pit bulls” which can skew the data as well. There’s several different types of “pit bulls” like American Staffordshire Terrier.

        And as another commenter pointed out, this graph is coming from a biased source.

        • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
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          20 hours ago

          i have seen posts on other platforms of people being obsessed with the GSD, but they dont want to deal with the high energy of the breed, so they try to create new 'mixes with them to make them mellow and call it a “certified breed”.

        • jordanlund@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          If you look at the chart “mixed breed” is it’s own category and they excluded reports where the breeds were unknown.

          • kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            11 hours ago

            and they excluded reports where the breeds were unknown.

            And didn’t disclose how many there were of those. For all we know, that was the vast majority of cases.

      • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Even if pit bulls are a minority of the population and the majority of attacks that doesn’t mean they’re aggressive, it shows there’s a correlation, but not a causation link. Read my other reply, but in short, this is the same argument racists assholes use to say black people are aggressive, because they’re a minority of the population but are the majority of homicide offenders.

          • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
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            1 day ago

            You need to work on your reading comprehension, I compared arguments, not people. The two are an example of “a minority of a group causes the majority of the fatalities, therefore that group is dangerous”, showing an example of that same argument people can instinctively understand it’s wrong.

            • HM King Charles III DG FD@feddit.uk
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              1 day ago

              Except no- it doesn’t.

              Take a pitbull and a labrador. They aren’t simply the same animal with different colours.

              Labradors were bred to assist fishermen in retrieving fish. So this would mean being controlled and obedient, not eating what they were sent to retrieve, etc.

              Pitbulls were bred to fight other dogs- they were bred for fighting and destroying and that’s it. They’re essentially weapons that decide for themselves. Sure, any animal can be tamed, but it takes effort.

              For your argument to work, you have to “concede” (although I wouldn’t use that term because it’s an outright lie) to the racist narrative or what have you that black people are inferior and have less control and are inherently less civilised than white people due to their race. So your argument is a racist one, because it assumes and only works that black people are significantly different to white people, like a different breed of human.

              The differences between black people and white people in reality are negligible. They’re not different breeds, they’re both homosapiens. Essentially it would be like arguing black labradors are more violent than white labradors, which just simply isn’t true.

              Not only that, but you’re trivialising the struggle of black people against racist oppression to that of people whining against their fighting dog being banned for good reason.

              Worst of all, if they were the same argument, it’s like telling racists that comparing black people to white people is like comparing pitbulls to labradors, which would bolster their argument massively, as they’re completely different breeds of dog.

              I urge you to recant your argument, you’re basically saying black people are like a more aggressive, dangerous, and less controlled breed of human compared to white people which is an absolutely vile, disgusting, and false thing to say.

              • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
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                21 hours ago

                None of that matters to the point that “X is a minority yet produces the majority of Y” in a vacuum is an example of a “correlation does not imply causation” fallacy. More specifically it’s an example of Simpson’s paradox, where you look at the data as a whole and derive a statistically significant result that X is more prone to Y, but if you were to normalize for some factors (in both these cases standard of living) you would see that there’s absolutely no correlation between the 2.

                I never compared dog to people, I’m comparing the argument to show how it doesn’t make any sense. All of the new arguments you pulled there are an entire different can of worms, but in short while you’re correct that artificial selection of dog breeds has altered then genetically to a greater extent than what natural selection did for humans, it’s still the same species in both cases and your argument sounds straight out of a Nazi science book in Eugenics.

                Let me be very clear here since you seem to not be able to understand, I’m saying people who claim black people are more aggressive are stupid idiots who can’t understand basic statistics when it’s starting them in the face. I’m saying there are a lot of factors at play here and reducing things to a simple “the majority of attacks are caused by X subgroup” ignores all of them and is a BAD ARGUMENT.

                I think that the problem here is that you can’t seem to accept that the argument is bad, therefore when presented with the exact same argument applied to people you don’t stop to think that if the logic doesn’t apply here it also doesn’t apply there. It’s like someone said “I never met a green bird, therefore no bird is green” and I replied “that’s the same as saying I never met an asian therefore they don’t exist” and you went into a rampant about the struggles of Asians in our society.

                • HM King Charles III DG FD@feddit.uk
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                  16 hours ago

                  We all have a single common ancestor so where do you draw the line? All humans are genetically closer to each other than dog breeds are. That’s the fault of eugenics. The theory isn’t wrong as it falls off of the theory of evolution, the facts are wrong because humans are so generically close to each other regardless of race. Dog breeds are different to the point that it’s scientific fact that they have different traits. Your argument just digs your grave further as you have to say different races of humans are like different breeds of dogs. Which in fact is a racist narrative - once again you’re helping contribute to the eugenicist argument by saying humans are like dogs.

                  “Correlation doesn’t equal causation” yet when 99% of lighting strikes happen during a storm, maybe it’s worth investigating if the storms contribute to lightning strikes happening. People have investigated this with black crime statistics, and turns out that it was systemic racism. So thus it was debunked.

                  The argument for pitbulls is purely emotional. Sure they may be as aggressive as chihuahuas, but I can beat a chihuahua in a fight. A pitbull, probably not.

                  It’s a pikachu face when you’re dog bred to destroy other dogs just so happens to be dangerous, and maybe we really should wipe out that entire breed from existence.

      • jordanlund@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        The number of dogs doesn’t matter, it’s tracking the number of human beings killed by the breed.

        Yeah, Chihuahua might bite you, they aren’t going to kill you.

        • guynamedzero@piefed.zeromedia.vip
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          1 day ago

          What? The number of dogs absolutely matters. This is like, basic statistics.

          Again, what we’re shown here is the number of fatal injuries, but we don’t necessarily know the distribution of dog breeds. Imagine testing this by putting a child in a room with one of each breed of dog and seeing if they get attacked, except with one breed we put in 200 dogs instead of just one, odds are that yeah, one (or multiple) of those dogs is aggressive because there’s so many of them.

          This example is basically what the data above represents, it doesn’t consider that maybe pits actually very rarely bite people, but there’s just so many pits that more bites happen.

          It is my personal opinion that pits are a more dangerous breed, but I won’t let that cloud my vision of accurately representing data.

          • GreyEyedGhost@piefed.ca
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            1 day ago

            For this to be reflective of an even amount of bites per number of each breed of dog owned, half the dogs owned would have to be pit bulls. That doesn’t match my very casual observations. This site, whose accuracy and validity I haven’t bothered to verify in any way, puts pit bulls at about 20% of the dogs sent to shelters. It seems very likely that the dog fatalities are outsized relative to the number of pit bulls owned in America.

            • guynamedzero@piefed.zeromedia.vip
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              1 day ago

              I totally agree with that. The problem is that this graphic doesn’t represent it. The only reason that this graphic looks correct is coincidental. The fact that it’s not an equal #/each is exactly what I want to be shown, but the problem is that this graphic doesn’t show that

          • jordanlund@lemmy.world
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            1 day ago

            The number of dogs is irrelevant because the statistic is counting human deaths by dogs.

            You wouldn’t say “well, how many people are there?” either.

            • yes_this_time@lemmy.world
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              Think about it in the extremes.

              If there were a billion poodles out in the world, and they caused 10 human deaths.

              And there were 50 terriers out there and they caused 10 human deaths.

              Which breed would you buy for your grandmother?

              For every five terriers out there, one is killing someone on average. I would go with the Poodle.

            • guynamedzero@piefed.zeromedia.vip
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              1 day ago

              You haven’t made any argument against the information presented. You will not get a response from me unless you actually respond instead of repeating the same statement.

              • jordanlund@lemmy.world
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                Again, you are willfully misunderstanding what the statistic is stating:

                Here are the total number of PEOPLE killed by dogs.

                Of that number, here’s how many PEOPLE were killed by each breed.

                This isn’t tracking bites, or overall attacks, it’s tracking human deaths.

                A similar stat would be tracking vehicular accident deaths, if in a year you have accidents involving “brand x” accounting for more vehicular fatalities than all other brands combined, that points to a massive, massive problem with the brand.

                It doesn’t matter how many cars there are, that’s not what the stat is tracking.

                But if you really want to know, Google says there are around 90 million dogs in the US and 4.5 to 18 million pit bulls depending on how you count. So 5% to 20% of the dog population accounting for 66% of the human deaths.

                • guynamedzero@piefed.zeromedia.vip
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                  1 day ago

                  Then replace every time I said “bite” with “someone died”. That doesn’t change anything about my argument or the validity of it.

                  In your car example, that is exactly wrong, let’s say that 99 out of 100 cars are Toyota Corollas, and as a whole, they get in 50 fatal accidents every year, but the remaining 1 car is a Ford F150 which got in 1 fatal accident every year. Does this mean that corollas are more dangerous? No! It just means that there are more corollas and therefore more opportunities to kill.

                  The correct way to represent this is as a percentage of each car brand. 50 accidents divided by 99 corollas is a little less than 50%. 1 accidents divided by 1 F150 is about 100%. According to this, F150’s are actually more dangerous because 100% of them get in fatal accidents, whereas only 50% of corollas get in fatal accidents.

                  Good on you for looking into the actual data, but the problem is that this specific graphic isn’t showing the actual data. The only reason it looks correct is by coincidence.

    • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Repeat after me, correlation does not imply causation. Two things can be correlated without there being a cause/effect relationship.

      What you’re saying is essentially: Pitbull-like races are around 14% of large dogs, but are responsible for 55.9% of fatalities, i.e. more than all other combined. Therefore Pitbulls are dangerous.

      I bet you would agree with that logic… Except those are not dog numbers, that’s USA statistics on the African-American population. Congratulations on the racist argument.

      Similarly to how there are multiple factors that explain the disparity for African-Americans there are also multiple factors at play for dogs, for example:

      • People commonly miss identify pit bulls
      • Assholes who abuse their dog tend to prefer breeds that are known for being aggressive. Abused dogs tend to react violently. Thus creating a cycle where dogs that are seen as aggressive are responsible for more aggressions.

      I’m fairly confident that if you normalize for living conditions the numbers would not show any significant difference for breeds.

        • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
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          No, I showed how the argument of a minority of population causes the majority of fatalities is flawed by showing an example of the same argument no sane person would defend. The argument is ridiculous for pitbulls but people don’t see it, use the same argument for people and they see why it’s ridiculous.

          • HM King Charles III DG FD@feddit.uk
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            1 day ago

            Except no- it doesn’t.

            Take a pitbull and a labrador. They aren’t simply the same animal with different colours.

            Labradors were bred to assist fishermen in retrieving fish. So this would mean being controlled and obedient, not eating what they were sent to retrieve, etc.

            Pitbulls were bred to fight other dogs- they were bred for fighting and destroying and that’s it. They’re essentially weapons that decide for themselves. Sure, any animal can be tamed, but it takes effort.

            For your argument to work, you have to “concede” (although I wouldn’t use that term because it’s an outright lie) to the racist narrative or what have you that black people are inferior and have less control and are inherently less civilised than white people due to their race. So your argument is a racist one, because it assumes and only works that black people are significantly different to white people, like a different breed of human.

            The differences between black people and white people in reality are negligible. They’re not different breeds, they’re both homosapiens. Essentially it would be like arguing black labradors are more violent than white labradors, which just simply isn’t true.

            Not only that, but you’re trivialising the struggle of black people against racist oppression to that of people whining against their fighting dog being banned for good reason.

            Worst of all, if they were the same argument, it’s like telling racists that comparing black people to white people is like comparing pitbulls to labradors, which would bolster their argument massively, as they’re completely different breeds of dog.

            I urge you to recant your argument, you’re basically saying black people are like a more aggressive, dangerous, and less controlled breed of human compared to white people which is an absolutely vile, disgusting, and false thing to say.

    • Don_Dickle@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 day ago

      But I whole heartedly believe that pit bulls by nature were meant to be farm dogs. And if you get one and raise them from birth in a good and loving home than bites won’t happen. With this statistic did any owner say that yea I hurt my dog but only because he or she deserved it…etc etc etc. I didn’t think so. No one man or animal is inherently mean. That is a learned behavior. And with all avenues of information getting to people and children is more likely going to be people who are mean. But born that way. Fuck No. Anyone feel free to prove me wrong for this discussion.

      • superglue@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 day ago

        Speaking from experience. I adopted a pitbull about 10 years ago. Spent countless hours training it, sent it to a daycare to make sure it was socialized.

        Strike 1 was when he got kicked out of the daycare for fighting. Strike 2 was when out of nowhere he bit my friends dog. Strike 3 was when he turned on my border collie and nearly killed her. She was the dog he grew up with and spent every single day with. I had to beat him with a grill spatula to get him to let go, and I was bitten in the process.

        My observation with the breed was that they have an instinct built into them and when it triggers they become possessed and they lose all control. Humans don’t usually trigger it, but other pets tend to.

      • Lasherz@lemmy.world
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        It’s pretty well known they were bred to be fighting dogs for blood sports. It doesn’t mean they end up that way, but intervention is needed in places other breeds do not require it.

      • jordanlund@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        The real question is “why would you believe that?”

        They were bred to kill bulls, bears, and rats, in pits so that none of the animals could escape.

      • Lydon_Feen@lemmy.world
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        Truly one of the worst takes I have ever read. What you “believe” means nothing.

        Pitbulls were bred to be as aggressive and strong as possible. They are literally attack dogs made for fighting.

        It’s a shit breed that should be made illegal, period.

      • HM King Charles III DG FD@feddit.uk
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        Animals aren’t mean, but they can be bred to be aggressive and dangerous. A pitbull probably doesn’t feel malice, but the reasoning in it’s head is incapacitated by years of breeding to essentially be a weapon that will effectively kill and attack ruthlessly. That was it’s purpose. It’s just following it’s instinct. And that’s what makes them so dangerous as well, they don’t realise it’s wrong.

  • originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com
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    pit bulls are just better equipped for certain things like using their uniquely powerful, clamping jaws to rip animals apart. pair this with the lowest common denominator human and you have a possible recipe for accident.

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    I can’t speak for every dog and every dog owner, though many anti-pit bull people will tell you they can and that they’re all just waiting to bite the face off a child.

    What I can say is that, of the pit bulls and pit bull mixes I know, they’re lovable softies with their owners, and I know one (our neighbors) that I can say with confidence could not/would not hurt anyone or anything else, as even when another dog attacked him he would not fight back. This dog is in a house with multiple small children, numerous cats, chickens, a turkey, and over multiple years being their neighbor I’ve never heard of him being hostile towards any of them, he’s always been a Very Good Boy.

    What I believe it comes down to is that pit bulls are big, strong dogs, with strong jaws, and some people are neglectful owners who fail to socialize them and train them properly. A poorly trained and poorly socialized Yorkie will bite you all the same, it’s just you can punt one like a football. People who are not prepared to train their dogs to behave appropriately – which is a part of caring for them, just as important as grooming or feeding them if not even more important – should not own dogs, full stop, irrespective of breed.

    It is, however, much easier for other people to blame the dog, have the dog put down (and let me say, if they did something bad enough to earn an early departure across the rainbow bridge, rightly so), and then promptly forget about the owner who didn’t bother to train them. The owner who will, then, almost certainly, get another dog to neglect.

    • kolmaskommentoija@sopuli.xyz
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      17 hours ago

      Pitbulls also have strong tendecy for aggression towards other dogs, because of the background of the breed. Not all of them have dog aggression, especially the mixed, but many do. As an instinct, it is often way too difficult to all but experts, to train them not to act on it, and many people can barely do basic training, much less realize, what sort of precautions they need to take, to prevent incidents.

      This also means keeping them in places, with a lot of other dogs around - so almost every situation people live in these days - creates a big chance of them attacking other dogs. And when dogs fight, it is very common for humans to get injured, while they try to stop it, because the dogs are in a very agitated state. Since pitties are a strong breed with strong jaws, getting bit by one means usually a really bad time, even if it just an accident… which then leads to blaming the dog for their owner’s stupidity, as noted above.

      • kolmaskommentoija@sopuli.xyz
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        17 hours ago

        Also, as a personal anecdote: I have seen multiple pittie-type of dogs in dog parks, that are fine at first, but then after running and playing for a while, start to get agitated, which then triggers aggressive behavior towards the other dogs. The common theme with the incidents I have seen, is the owners not understanding their dog’s bodylanguage, and not realizing when they are starting to get agitated, and should have stopped and left.

        I am autistic person, grown up with dogs, so often I can read dog bodylanguage better than human one. I have taken my dog, and left from dog parks, when I have noticed the agitation rising in that type of dogs, because I do not trust the owners. These days it is honestly just safer to not go in there, if there is a pittie-types, even if they seem to be fine.
        I sadly find it is also pointless to try to point this behaviour out to the owners, as they get offended for implying their dog is aggressive, even though that is not the point. And then they get couple bad incidents, and quietly stop visiting dog parks.

        Do not take a dog from a breed, that has high tendency towards dog aggression, if you want a high chance to have a dog, you can take to dog parks.

    • originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com
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      17 hours ago

      the problem with them is, as with police… and the whole point of the ACAB movement… we cant possibly know what state any given [strange] pit bull is in, and so we kinda have to assume the worst for our own safety… until proven otherwise.

      often, that takes 30 seconds meeting the dog and the owner in the park, but i will never not assume a defensive stance with certain breeds and owners.

      weirdly, unmanaged/mismanaged german shephards are a big problem in my area to the point my dog now just hates all of them.

    • BeardededSquidward@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 day ago

      There’s also people who just want a strong, violent dog for various reasons and pit bulls fit that bill pretty well. They’re large, strong, persistent, and the person is a shit tier person who will likely beat the animal.

      • volore@scribe.disroot.org
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        22 hours ago

        Yeah, I don’t disagree with that, but that’s a problem with the owner and not the breed. If the breed were outlawed, all it would do is get a lot of dogs who don’t deserve to be put down, put down; and those kinds of assholes would just get a doberman, a rottweiler, or any other number of large, strong breeds they can mistreat and neglect into being a menace to society. The fact of the matter is that shitty people are the root cause of the problem, and we don’t hold the owner accountable enough when a dog bites.

  • Gerudo@lemmy.zip
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    1 day ago

    The vast majority of pit bulls are loving, loyal and make great pets. The problem is if they do attack, they tend to not want to quit attacking. I used to schutzhund train and our club was open to training any breed, we even had a border collie do it for fun. The catchers didn’t let pit bulls do it because the way they tend to bite and re-bite wasn’t safe for the dog or catcher. Even with my American Bull dog at the time, they asked to see when the last breeding with a pit in her breeding line was just to be safe, and they were more cautious in the beginning with her than the shepard’s, rotts, malinois and dobies.

  • Lasherz@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    The conversation is nuanced and long, but TLDR is that it is a breed which requires more training than other breeds. It’s also important to note that many owners’ version of training is ineffective or counter productive.

    Pitbulls are highly energetic and much like great Danes, grow up physically much faster than mentally. They end up being an extremely powerful dog, chalk full of muscles, who crave constant attention and behave like a puppy. Well, puppies bite, and when a dog bites you, you tend to address it (give it attention). Compounding this, they’re also not very smart and it takes a while to train them. Compounding this further, they have instincts like all dogs where pushing is met with resistance (something Cesar talks about a lot with food etiquette around dogs), and basically everything they do is exaggerated with their enormous energy.

    Comparing them to a breed like a Labrador, the obliviousness, energy, strength, and attention needs are not the same.

    They can be very good dogs, but effort was made to achieve that. There are dogs who have been bred to be home bodies and they much more naturally fall into a “good dog” category. Pitbulls were bred for dog fighting and blood sports. This is not a good start for family’s first dog.

    To put this into other terms. There are chickens who have been bred for cock fights. They can be good roosters, but watch your back and be ready to remove them if they attack your hens. That being said, predators beware. Different breeds have different specialties, if you want one for the look be very deliberate about what actions you are going to take to change the “natural outcome” of their behavior being the behavior you don’t want.

  • HM King Charles III DG FD@feddit.uk
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    1 day ago

    They’re bred to be fighting dogs. Attacking and killing is in their genes, both physically and mentally. The likes of german shepherds have to be trained to kill, pitbulls have to be trained not to kill.

  • southsamurai@sh.itjust.works
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    1 day ago

    Generally, it comes down to which statistics a “hater” believes. I’ll refer to twain here about lies, damn lies and statistics, since numbers always seem so certain, but can be cooked.

    It doesn’t help that “pit bull” isn’t a breed, it’s a “type”, which is vague as fuck all. There’s something like a dozen breeds that get called pit bull, each with their own range of traits. What they have in common is an origin as fighting dogs, including those bred to fight bigger animals.

    But if a dog just looks similar to any of those breeds, it’s a pit bull, including mutts with no known ancestry in fighting breeds.

    So, folks see a scary looking dog and that’s that, they hate scary looking dogs.

    Is the hate justified? IDGAF tbh. Assuming any of the statistics are accurate and applicable, I can understand wanting to limit breeding more, as well as the strict side of enforced euthanasia once a dog turns aggro. But with the vagueness of what gets counted as a pit bull in those stats, and the cherry picking that goes on in such debates, I can’t work up any emotional response to the subject.

    But that’s why the hate. They’re scary looking dogs, and when a dog that looks like they tend to look attacks, it’ll fuck its target up worse than something like a Chihuahua or poodle. That much is fact, a big muscular dog with strong jaws can fuck shit up.

  • etherphon@piefed.blahaj.zone
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    1 day ago

    It’s not so much the animal as that I don’t really trust people with that kind of animal, just as I don’t want to see people walking around with a lion, or a machine gun

  • bluGill@fedia.io
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    1 day ago

    The type of people who want a dog to bite are going to be getting something like the size of a pitbull. A much smaller dog and a human can easily fight it off, they can do some damage, but not as much as the people who want a dog to bite would like their dogs to give. A larger dog and the owners wouldn’t be able to control if the dog would attack the owners, so they won’t accept that.

    That is why, in general, (understand there are exceptions). Big dogs tend to be very friendly. Because any big dog that’s not friendly, the owner is going to put it down before it kills someone. Thus big dogs are bred to be friendly. A Pitbull is about the largest dog that you could breed to be unfriendly without risking harm to yourself.

    Again, this does not say anything about any particular dog breed. It says something about the type of people who would have a mean dog.