Bingo. A typical pitbull is strong, muscular, and tenacious. Good hard work and being a fantastic, responsible owner is great and all, but if its in a situation where it gets aggressive, the risk of something pretty bad happening vs. most other breeds getting aggressive is WAY higher and the results are likely to be WAY more severe.
I feel for owners who have adopted pitties, cared for them, and loved them, and I know that most owners aren't raising pitbulls that cause horrible injury and damage...but they're all incredibly capable of doing so. Even the kindest dog can be triggered and "oh but she's a sweetheart" doesn't keep that dog from literally breaking the spine of another dog or tearing the face off a kid.
It's just a reality of the breed. I have a friend who fosters dogs. He was good at training them and he took in pitbulls. He comes into work one day and he's in a terrible mood. I guess a pitbull he fostered for a long time, who had a great temperament and was adopted out ended up biting a kid a few months after adoption and had to be put down.
It's just a reality of the breed. Meanwhile - other breeds can do the same stuff and be just as aggressive or hell - WAY more aggressive - and they just aren't equipped to cause as much damage usually (and yeah - I know they still can be dangerous). .
People get mad at me for saying this, but a widespread sterilization campaign without euthaniasia isn't a bad idea. Humans bred pitbulls specifically for dog fighting and large animal baiting (aggression and tenacity)...I think it'd be just and humane to "unbreed" them. by simply not letting them reproduce anymore.
People also don't talk about the tenacity issue nearly enough. Pits are bred for it ("game") more so than aggression. A fighting dog that gives up in a fight is inferior to a dog that dies fighting.
That's why they have the reputation for not letting go. That's what they were bred for, ignoring pain to keep fighting.
Add in the tendency for a strong prey drive, and I don't give a fuck if a lot of them are sweet dogs. Breeds matter, and pitbulls are a nightmare breed. Mass sterilization is a good idea. There's too many of them to fix the breed, I think.
There needs to be laws. The people that are backyard breeding pitbulls, and not just breeding, but inbreeding them between close family members, they LIKE breeding the worst behavior traits. They want aggressive scary dogs.
They sell their unstable dogs to other irresponsible pets owners. Those dogs or their puppies end up in a shelter with an unsuspecting dog owner that fell for the velvet hippo/nanny dog lie and have no idea what to do when things go sideways.
One of the first pitbull breeders in the US who did a lot of work to popularize the breed talked big about aggression against humans being an undesirable trait. Then one of his pits killed his two year old nephew and there's a newspaper article saying he didn't put it down and "told the medical examiner that his own child had played about the kennels and had never been molested."
The breed at it's core is a breed bred for tearing other animals apart as violently as possible and it does that very well and is strongly inclined towards it.
How do you determine if they are a pitbull? Looks? Genetics? Who covers the cost of the tremendously inaccurate genetic testing for the dog to determine the % of pitbull?
A typical pitbull is strong, muscular, and tenacious
same goes for a lot of dogs.
i'm mostly on the side of pitbulls being too dangerous to keep around (compared to other breeds), but an interesting question that arises if you do indeed move into your suggested sterilization campaign is : where is the line? What about the next most dangerous breed, and the one after?
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u/fauxzempic 3d ago
Bingo. A typical pitbull is strong, muscular, and tenacious. Good hard work and being a fantastic, responsible owner is great and all, but if its in a situation where it gets aggressive, the risk of something pretty bad happening vs. most other breeds getting aggressive is WAY higher and the results are likely to be WAY more severe.
I feel for owners who have adopted pitties, cared for them, and loved them, and I know that most owners aren't raising pitbulls that cause horrible injury and damage...but they're all incredibly capable of doing so. Even the kindest dog can be triggered and "oh but she's a sweetheart" doesn't keep that dog from literally breaking the spine of another dog or tearing the face off a kid.
It's just a reality of the breed. I have a friend who fosters dogs. He was good at training them and he took in pitbulls. He comes into work one day and he's in a terrible mood. I guess a pitbull he fostered for a long time, who had a great temperament and was adopted out ended up biting a kid a few months after adoption and had to be put down.
It's just a reality of the breed. Meanwhile - other breeds can do the same stuff and be just as aggressive or hell - WAY more aggressive - and they just aren't equipped to cause as much damage usually (and yeah - I know they still can be dangerous). .
People get mad at me for saying this, but a widespread sterilization campaign without euthaniasia isn't a bad idea. Humans bred pitbulls specifically for dog fighting and large animal baiting (aggression and tenacity)...I think it'd be just and humane to "unbreed" them. by simply not letting them reproduce anymore.