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[–] 61 points 4 months ago (43 children)

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.

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  • [–] 42 points 4 months ago (8 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 15 points 4 months ago* (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 11 points 4 months ago* (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months 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.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

    It’s sort of a plus … obviously not in your scenario …. I believe pitbull breeds tend to be one of the protective and loyal breeds, and they do have a very strong bite. I have no worries about my pit bull with my kids but if you frighten her around them you’ll see her instantly change from a cuddle bug to on guard against hell and its minions

    Unfortunately they’re sometimes loyal and protective to people who don’t deserve them

    I also feel like I need to add that many breeds of dog are very loyal and protective. In the same situation a German shepherd is equally dangerous. Even little dogs are likely to come after you for attacking their human although obviously they can’t do as much damage. I feel like your situation was a general dog issue: many/most dogs are protective and loyal. You really can’t attack their human without them helping (and yes it doesn’t matter who started it or if he was a dick, to the dog you were attacking his human

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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    Dogsbite.org is super diligent about showing the supporting evidence. For example, the last complete year they have is 2019:

    https://www.dogsbite.org/dog-bite-statistics-fatality-citations-2019.php

    Each death marked with multiple citations.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago* (1 child)

    read any of their about us/other similar links and their bias couldnt be more obvious.

    especially funny is the page the dedicated towards complaining about how they're the target of a misinformation campaign.

    https://blog.dogsbite.org/2022/03/humane-groups-leveling-fake-racism-to-force-pit-bull-agenda-on-insurance.html

    majority of studies they link to don't list breed information at all (because it's rarely if ever recorded at hospitals).

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  • [–] 19 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (24 children)

    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

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  • [–] 23 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months 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".

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (9 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago* (8 children)

    Dude, you've spent a long time arguing from a point of view that fear of pitbulls is equivalent to racism.

    Doing this is trivialising racism and painting a breed bred for agression and fighting as innocent victims of oppression.

    It's bogus and offensive and trivialises racism. Stop it.

    You should be ashamed of yourself.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (7 children)

    And I suppose you also think that in this comment I'm trivialising the struggles of pit bulls by comparing them to apples.

    Bad logic is bad logic, whether applied to dogs, humans, apples or whatever. The fact that you can instinctively understand the argument is wrong when applied to people is the exact reason I used that, so people would understand it's a bad argument that proves nothing.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (6 children)

    Bad logic is bad logic, whether applied to dogs, humans, apples or whatever.

    Racism is racism, whether it's direct and obvious or just casually equating ethnic minorities to the most feared "dangerous" dogs whilst claiming that you're "just explaining logical errors".

    No, you don't get to pretend you didn't make an awful and offensive analogy (based on your irrational belief that the pitbulls are falsely maligned).

    If the logic is as flawed as you claim, there must be hundreds of analogies you can draw that aren't racist and don't equate black people in the USA with pitbulls.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (5 children)

    There might be, but I've only ever heard "X is a minority yet causes the majority of fatalities" used for two Xs, it's bad logic in both cases, it would be bad logic in any other case too, feel free to find me another example of that logic that people instinctively understand it's wrong and I'll use that next time.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (4 children)

    Just fucking stop the racism.

    It's not my job to write your reality denying nonsense for you.

    If your one and only recourse is to call black people violent dogs, you're the one whose logical thinking is broken.

    STOP with the racist crap.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (3 children)

    At no point in my reply did I mention race, I said the argument of "X is a minority, yet causes the majority of fatalities, therefore X is dangerous" is a bad argument. That is the whole of my point.

    Two possibilities exist: Either you think it's a good argument argument, or you don't.

    Which is it? Do you think the argument "X is a minority yet causes the majority of fatalities, therefore X is dangerous" is a good argument?

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (2 children)

    I think you're a closet racist who won't give up comparing black people to violent dogs even when asked not to, and that you like to hide behind generalities.

    Three possibilities exist:

    1. that you accidentally made a racist argument comparing black UK citizens to violent dogs, and you didn't realise, in which case on hearing that it might be offensive to compare black US citizens to violent dogs, you would obviously have realised, apologised and backtracked by now. These are the actions of someone who didn't mean to offend.
    2. that you deliberately made a racist argument and you aren't prepared to back down even when it's pointed out to you. This is exactly how you're behaving. For days now.

    I thought it was option 1 at first. It isn't.

    The way you're behaving reveals to me that it was your intent all along to make this false equivalence because you thought it was a cool own-the-libs arguing position. If that really isn't you, I beg of you, take a step back and reconsider how you're communicating.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

    I have at no point compared black people to dogs, or even mentioned anything related to race beyond a comparison of statistical facts to showcase how ridiculous the argument is. You're creating a Straw man to attack and deflecting my question, so we'll keep going in circles forever, because answering a straight yes or no would compromise you.

    Read everything that I posted so far and you will realize the entire time what I'm saying is "a small subgroup causing the most fatalities, therefore subgroup aggressive" is a bad argument. That is the whole of what I'm saying, and you haven't replied whether you think that is a good or a bad argument. The reason why you haven't done so is simple:

    • If you say it's a bad argument you're agreeing with me, therefore no reply is needed.

    • If you say it's a good argument then you're agreeing with any racist asshole who uses the same argument applied to people, and you should take a long hard look at yourself to see whether that's the kind of peraon you want to be. And honestly, I don't want to keep talking to anyone who thinks like this as they have been so brainwashed they won't get convinced by a random person online.

    In reality I'm fairly confident you want the argument to apply to dogs but not to people, and that's just not how logic works. Facts are facts, you can't disagree with them, the conclusion from those facts is logic, and that can be flawed (as is for the case of the proof of aggressive behavior). So when confronted with the fact that you're defending a logic argument that can be made about people, instead of thinking "huh, I guess it's a bad argument" you go "I'm not racist, you're racist", that is called deflection. So you attack a Straw man argument that I'm comparing people to dogs so that you don't have to admit that your prejudice against pitbulls made you agree with an undefendable racist argument. Still the conclusion is the same, there's no reason to reply to someone who's being fallacious at best and making bad faith arguments at worst. If you honestly expect any answer from me your reply should clearly state whether you consider the "X is a small subgroup yet causes the majority of fatalities, therefore X is dangerous" a good argument.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

    "I'm not being racist, but..." - you.

    The way you’re behaving reveals to me that it was your intent all along to make this false equivalence between black Americans and aggressive, child-killing dogs, because you thought all along it was a cool own-the-libs arguing position.

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  • [+] -8 points 4 months ago (9 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 13 points 4 months ago (7 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • 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

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  • [+] -7 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 9 points 4 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] -3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months 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.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    Sure it matters, if you don't normalize for sample size your data is meaningless. Here's a similar example:

    I have a farm that produces both red and green apples, last harvest I had to throw away 100 red apples because they went bad, but only 10 green apples for the same reason.

    You would think that red apples spoil 10x easier than green ones, but you're missing the crucial information that my farm produced 10.000 red apples and 1.000 green ones, so in both cases it represented 1% of the whole amount.

    This could be the same thing, if there are more Pitbulls than other races it would be expected that they bite more in absolute numbers.

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  • [–] 0 points 4 months 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.

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  • [+] [S] -13 points 4 months ago (7 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 13 points 4 months 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.

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  • [–] 17 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    the fuck you mean "by nature"? man made dogs.

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  • [–] 8 points 4 months ago

    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.

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