this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2025
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Ofcourse you can breed aggression, its so absurd to claim that you cant.
Yeah. That's just shit being thrown at the wall to see if it will stick.
The real question is, who's throwing the shit? It's either some troll trying to convince morons to believe something that isn't true, or it's those same morons looking for something to justify their stupidity.
We have bite statistics. Every year, pit bull and pit mixes far outnumber every other breed for human bite attacks, consistently, and always make up far more than half (to the tune of ~70%) of all total bites, by breed. Every single year.
Yet people ignore statistics and are eager to jump on the pibble defense train. “My little angel would never bite anyone!”
Maybe. But numbers don’t lie. Just stop breeding them. It’s cruel to people, and it’s cruel to the dogs themselves, that the breed continues to be perpetuated. Breed-specific behaviors are visceral and strong, whether you have a retriever, a pointer, a herder, or a throat mangler. The breed behavior can be invoked at any time, relatively easily.
It's not that pits are more likely to bite, it's that their bite is way more damaging. If a retriever (bred for a "soft mouth") bites me, I am way less likely to need medical attention than if a pit bites me. Even biting at lower rates than many other breeds, pits come out on top of medical reports because each bite is more damaging.
A friend of my wife and I got a pit bull a couple months ago. She was going on and on about how sweet he is and how he would never hurt anyone. Last week, it mauled her roommate. Nearly took his hand off while he was changing into his work clothes. His career is likely over and she's still defending the dog.
I think that dog is legally required to be put down no?
I have no idea. I know the city animal control has it now. She is trying to get him released, though.
I guess it depends on where you live yeah...
Lets hope it doesnt get to hurt anyone again.
And even with this personal evidence, you get defenders downvoting the story - not because it doesn't add to the discussion, buy because it doesn't suit their narrative.
I hope the roommate is able to find a good surgeon and get the help he needs, that sounds terrible if it could call for a career change.
I think you and I have different ideas about what the word "evidence" means. A story told by a random user about something that happened to their friend's roommate is not really something I consider or weigh heavily when evaluating things. There could be relevant details omitted from the story, or it could be invented whole cloth, in any case, it isn't statistically significant.
This is only said by people who've never actually taken a class about statistics.
Numbers may not lie, but they also don't make assertions. People suck at interpreting data and that fact is constantly utilized to mislead people.
I'm not saying this to defend pitbulls, just that bite statistics don't really tell us anything about innate aggression in dog breeds. Just like FBI statistics don't tell us about innate criminality in ethnicity.
Those bite statistics don't make any attempt to rule out misleading variables. It could be that pitt bull bites are reported more often because of the extent of harm they cause. It could be that people who gravitate towards breeds who are thought to be more aggressive are wanting and are training for aggression.
Statistics is hard, and can generally be used to shape opinions on just about anything.
We also don't really have bite statistics. Almost every citation I see for the data that gets posted over and over again traces back to one of two sources. One was a paper done in the 90s which both asserts that its methodology is inadequate to infer breed related risk and inexplicably combines rottweilers and pitbulls into a single category, a point which never gets carried through into other discussions. The other is that dogsbite site which openly states it is an advocacy site seeking the elimination of pit bulls and frequently gets its "data" from facebook stalking victims of dog bites for pictures of dogs they spent time around recently and then attempting to guess the breed involved from said picture. This is some real clown level shit, especially if you've ever read reports about even veterinarians trying to guess the breeds of mixed dogs that are their patients.
This. It's not neccessarily the breed itself. Look at who is likely to own the breed and what they are likely to do with it.
Yeah that's the point, chihuahuas are assholes too with wrong owners but due its size its not gonna maul children.
I rather give an dumb toddler a spoon than a tec9
We do have bite statistics, and the people most qualified to interpret them disagree with you
https://www.avma.org/sites/default/files/resources/dog_bite_risk_and_prevention_bgnd.pdf
I understand the bite statistics but you have to keep in mind how those are reported too.
No one is reporting their neighbor's chihuahua taking a bite at their boot. Bites from smaller breeds mostly go unreported.
It does give a point as to why pit bulls and other large breeds are dangerous though. Whether they are more common or not, they certainly are far, far more serious when it happens.
Responsible ownership has always been an issue with pitbulls, as irresponsible people tend to adopt and breed them.
If you can breed aggression, you can breed against aggression. Which means you can breed pit bulls to be less aggressive.
This massively differs per country. Pitbull bites are generally nastier than other bites so they're overreported. It's also partially the public image of pitbulls being nasty dogs that gets them reported more often.
Historically the "most dangerous breed" has changed quite a bit. For a while Great Danes were the worst, then it was Dogo Argentinis, Malinois, German Shepherd, Akitas, Labradors, Jack Russells, etc...
In France for example pitbulls only rank 12th for most bite incidents.
Research on it has been mixed, with studies focusing on nature finding that the breed matters surprisingly little when it comes to aggression. It seems more likely that there's a certain group of owners that handle their dogs irresponsibly, which tend to popularize specific breeds. This seems more likely because places that banned 'dangerous' breeds don't see a decrease in bite attacks; the owners of the dangerous breeds mostly get new dogs, which then just bite people again.
This is because pitbulls are a restricted breed and France. So either people don't have them, or they get the vet to say it's some other breed (more often than not)
Point being that different dog breeds are listed at the top of being most dangerous in France.
You're still allowed to own a pitbull in France, but you do require a training and need to muzzle them in public (but not at home).
Yes, when pitbull ownership is restricted, pitbulls fall from the number one spot for most dangerous
Obviously. Point being that these owners take different dogs which then rise in the ranking to take the pitbulls place.
Yes, and to the original point you used french rankings to attempt to make, the ranking of pitbulls is not because they are treated better or just culturally aren't regarded as dangerous, it is because they are restricted legally.
No, the point I was making regarding what's culturally considered dangerous didn't relate to France directly, that was about the US which went through various phases of panic regarding certain dog breeds. I only brought up France because there different dog breeds have risen to the top of the bite attack statistics. The restriction on pitbulls just let other dog breeds rise to the top. The breed matters less than who owns them. In France, the more irresponsible dog owners gravitate to German Shepherds and Labradors whereas in the US it's pitbulls.
I don't mind the French ban on pitbulls, because their attacks can be significantly more damaging than those of other breeds. But it won't really reduce the number of incidents.
Do you have evidence that other breed attack rates have risen, as opposed to the attacks by staffy/bully/pit breeds simply not occuring? I wasn't able to find this evidence in eurostat.
This source shows that pitbull bans did nothing to reduce bite attacks in Spain, showing the same numbers 5 years before and after the ban.
They also state this:
Then there's this one:
Council Bluff, Iowa, banned pitbulls, and saw Boxer and Labrador Retriever bites rise as those were the breeds people switched to.
Same source shows that it Winnipeg, Canada, instead saw Rottweiler bite attacks increase.
And from this source:
Bestfriends.org advocates for pitbull acceptance providing an opinion here, and I don't see the actual data that says the rates of dog attacks remained the same when staffy/bully/pit ownership is reduced.
If what you hypothesize is true, we should expect to see the overall rate of dog attacks stay the same, while proportionally other breeds become responsible for more of the total sum of dog attacks. Have you found actual statistics to back this assertion up? Your links all point to the home page of the sites, rather than stats.
I didn't put those links in there, that's just Lemmy auto-linking. The full cited source has a bit more info, but it's quite a rabbithole of sources tbh.
I found https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8730379/ which does have some hard stats, showing that a law enacted in 1991 did little to nothing to prevent bites, whilst also showing the most dangerous breeds bite about as much as other humans do.
This study seems to show that of 134 mammalian bites studied, about 73% were from dog bites both before and after the dangerous dogs act. I don't have full access to the article but the abstract seems to imply that dangerous breed attacks represented a small percentage of the total bite treatments.
I'm not sure it can conclude that the rate of attacks overall stayed the same when dangerous breed ownership rates as a whole reduced. The conclusion seems to be that "dog bites are still a similar percentage of mammalian bites" without regard to the overall rate of dog ownership and the impact of the law on dangerous dog ownership rates specifically (but perhaps it is inside the study?)
One would expect that this sort of statistic would be easy to find if it were true, given the advocacy of bully-breed groups.
The study measures the totals before and after the ban. If the totals did not change, then one can reasonably conclude there was little to no effect (as that was the point of the ban; reduce bite attacks). The only way you could still justify the ban worked is if dog ownership increased after the ban, which seems unlikely (and iirc the study touches on that).
I mean ultimately the burden of proof isn't on them. There are some statistics that seem to support them. If thess BSL bans worked, one would expect evidence to show that they did, but that's seemingly completely absent too. The vast majority of independent organisations seem to be against these bans.
If these bans worked, where are the statistics that show they do? What about the myriad of studies saying bite incidents are caused by neglect of the dog rather than breed?
They literally did the opposite with foxes. Some guy kept breeding the nicest ones until he got a "breed" that wouldn't want to murder you on sight. I'm pretty sure levels of aggression absolutely are something innate in some animals.
"Some guy"
Come on now, let's not buzzfeed our facts here!
Dmitry Belyayev is the guy, though work continued long after his death
Exactly. I mean, dogs are wolves that were bred to be less aggressive and more suitable to be companions to human. Of course it can go the other way.