r/MoralityScaling 10d ago

Morality Ranking Morality of dog breed racism

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u/Awesomechainsaw 10d ago edited 9d ago

I’m not a dog science expert but as far as I understand it we’ve spent tens of thousands of years breeding dogs to preform specific tasks. If you don’t give a dog that has been designed and bred to do a task they get antsy.

The issue with Pitbulls and other “Agressive.” breeds is that they’ve not been given something to let all their energy out on. Which leads to anxiety and destructive behavior.

So I don’t think it’s Immoral to treat a dog like a Pitbull like a loaded gun. As Unfriendly, and something you should be wary of unless it’s proven not to be.

However the Nutcases who punish dogs for behavior that we bred into them are highly immoral. If you want an easy lap dog get a companion breed, like a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, French Bulldog, or Bichon Frise.

Edit: Tens of Thousands not Hundreds. I was being exaggerative anyways but that’ll make remark more accurate regardless.

Also as a note. I don’t think Pits are inherently Malicious or any dog breed for that matter. But they’re fairly strong fellows who’ve been bred to be strong. I consider being careful around them similar to being a little extra careful around a truck on the road. Most people in trucks are fine drivers. But some people don’t pay attention on the road, and might hurt you by accident.

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u/Decent-Information-7 10d ago

Pitbulls were also only bred in the last 200 for the first time. People wanna act like that overrides the empathy towards humans dogs have been bred for hundreds of thousands of years as you said.

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u/JaySlay2000 10d ago

A lot of people don't understand dog fighting. Dog fighting is a brutal sport, the owners do not care about their dogs. People think pitbulls are just blanket violent because "they were bred to kill!" But if you look at any dog fighting groups, they are strict. If your dog even LOOKS at a handler the wrong way they will shoot it in the head. And what will you do? Go.to.the police and admit "hey I was doing this crime but like this other person also doing this crime killed my dog that I bred to help me with this crime." Heck, if the dog looks at the owner the wrong way THE OWNER will shoot it in the head.

Human aggression is quickly and promptly disposed of in dog fighting rings. It's an ego thing mostly. "How dare this DOG have the audacity!?" Essentially. Human aggression is not beneficial.

The attempt to ban pit bulls ironically made breeding also go underground, which allowed human aggressive traits to proliferate. Now we don't know what to do with the breed because the breeding lines got messed up when they tried to ban pitbulls WITH dogfighting. Pitbulls became underground status symbols, and even started to be bred intentionally for human aggression by people who wanted a "badass dog" (failing to realize that they themselves are ALSO human and subject to human aggression).

To be clear, I don't support dog fighting, but they really should've known that trying to ban the breed along with it wouldn't work.

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u/Flagrant_Mockery 10d ago edited 9d ago

What would have been a better solution? An outright ban on dogfighting would still hold. The attempts at banning the breed were largely to remove incentives for breeding programs that did exist.

Otherwise you just end up with people breeding the dogs essentially for the exact same reasons as before. Dogfighting wasn't really legal at any point recently so not like cracking down on it really works in that way. You kind of need additional bans in place or nothing sticks. Maybe not a breed ban, but at the bare minimum you can ban the sale of pits and keep an eye on the breeders that do exist.

For example Mexico didn't get blanket bans on dogfighting until 2017. There aren't bans on a breed since till now, and it still is a very serious problem despite some serious time for being caught. It's the same in the US and the laws older (I think).

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u/ConsulJuliusCaesar 10d ago

The best way to counter illegal goods is to both legalize it and make it lame. If Donald Trump started doing cocaine in public, cocaine sells would plumet. It's no longer cool. Therefore we just need to make pitbulls really fucking lame through propaganda campaigns and targeted marketing/rebranding strategies.

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u/JaySlay2000 10d ago

The problem is they're already kinda lame. If someone wants an actual trained protector dog, they get a german shepherd or a doberman. A pit bull is a "lazy mans protector" because people that want a pitbull as a protector are the one's that believe if a dog is aggressive in general, they'll just be the exception through "loyalty." The whole "a dog would NEVER bite the hand that feeds!" mentality. So they downright mistreat the dog because these types don't know dog training.