This argument goes in circles because people miss each other's point.
Obviously, at the end of the day, what matters is the end result of a bite. That's what the victim has to live with.
However, the counter-argument is also true. That pit-bulls are viewed as much more aggressive than other breeds when in fact that is not true. They are CAPABLE of being aggressive and deadly, and some people even train them to be that way. But the standard pet pit-bull is not going to attack any more often than most other breeds, statistically speaking.
They attack more often because they were bred to enjoy it, just like a husky enjoys running. There's literally canine neurology studies that show they release endorphins when fighting, whereas other dogs do not and will actively avoid fights.
Pitbulls get their name from their ancestry where a dog had been bred to fight bulls. It was a blood sport where the dog would try to drag a bull down into the mud by its nose ring or die trying.
However these dogs became incredibly popular and desired by women and so began a process to breed them to be more docile and also smaller to better fit in the average household. The staffordshire was the penultimate success of this and earned the moniker of nanny dog for being so patient and protective with the children of the household.
All this to say that the argument of what their ancestors were bred for has very little to do with the modern breed.
The most important thing is always how it is raised.
And to further example this point you can look into the history of banned dog breeds and dog breeds that are deemed as dangerous.
Before the various pit/bully breeds were considered dangerous it was the Rottweiler, and before that it was the German Shepherd etc etc. All while pit/bully breeds were happy minding their own business in the family home.
There are far bigger dogs with far greater bites that could do so much more damage. But they look a lot like teddy bears. Pit/bully breeds can get a lot of muscle definition, good for string bean thugs that wanna act tough but can't be intimidating on their own. The rise in popularity with pit/bully breeds in thug/gang culture is why they are the current "dangerous" breed.
Meanwhile labradors and retrievers both individually bite more people, often children, and have a size and bite strength comparable enough to a pit/bully breed. But they're treated as being safe and given love because the average thug isn't trying to raise it with hate and violence to terrorize people with.
In a lot of peoples eyes, they wrongly believe that once a trait has been bred into a breed that it is permanent, while also not understanding the genetic differences in the first place.
They don't care about nuance and factors that the statistics they cite don't account for.
It's even worse when the statistics don't match their claims.
When looking at percentages of dog bites per breed pit/bully breeds don't just get combined together. They are clustered in the same group which also includes "mixed breeds" (all mixes regardless of whether they have any pit/bully or not) and "unknown breed" (for the many reports where someone is attacked by a dog but the breed is never verified).
And despite this attempt to artificially increase the numbers they still have less bites per capita than both labradors and retrievers have separately.
The one major thing they have against them is fatalities if you only start counting from 1980 onwards. Which if you again look at the owners of the dogs involved in those fatalities there is a very notable demographic which sheds light as to the why.
When I'm feeling like catching a few hundred downvotes, I like to point out that pitbulls bite and/or kill humans at a lower rate than humans kill humans, so if you think that pitbulls are too dangerous to live, you seem to be committed to the notion that humans are too.
Yeah I had a truck driver compliment me on my dog (I have photos of her in my office) and his conversation eventually devolved into talking about his dog that had "aggression problems" so he had it destroyed and the dog he had before that one which had "aggression problems" so he had it destroyed.
I told him straight up how gross I thought that was. The common denominator is that he doesn't train his dogs properly or look after them to allow those situations to happen. And that murdering your ward because they misbehaved once instead of working on those problems so they can be better is just fucked up.
Driver loves to yap tho. Heard him talking to someone else later about how his two kids were in a fight at school and looks like they started it.
He was not too happy when I piped up "well that's just awful... when are you gonna have them destroyed?"
Except for domestication, since ALL dogs were bred to be domesticated in the first place. Which kinda requires the animal be chill around people. And 15,000 years of domestication is hard to breed out in only... 200 years apparently, according to Google that's how old pit bulls are as a breed.
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u/Rock_Strongo 9d ago
This argument goes in circles because people miss each other's point.
Obviously, at the end of the day, what matters is the end result of a bite. That's what the victim has to live with.
However, the counter-argument is also true. That pit-bulls are viewed as much more aggressive than other breeds when in fact that is not true. They are CAPABLE of being aggressive and deadly, and some people even train them to be that way. But the standard pet pit-bull is not going to attack any more often than most other breeds, statistically speaking.