They where breed to fight so yah I’m going to say they are more violent. My dog is loves to herd and watches the sky for birds. Why they where breed for that never been taught but still does it.
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This statement is a gross denial of the influence of genetics on behavior. A fox hunts because it’s partially hardwired to sate its omnivorous diet with small vertebrates. As does a snake, with no teaching influences from a parental figure.
Similarly, a short hair pointer dog points, not purely because it is taught.
Pitbulls were bred as fighting dogs in England from the 19th century onward. There’s a reason they have stocky bodies, frog mouths, and short fur.
Then you also have to consider the genetic background of breeds like German shepherds and Dobermann which were both bred as guard dogs. They have an instinct to protect their owner and attack strangers. Should they also be banned?
I mean their rates of attacks are much lower than the pitbulls.
Both german shepherds and dobermanns dont even make up half the attacks pitbulls cause.
Conclusion from that same (25 year old) study:
Because of difficulties inherent in determining a dog's breed with certainty, enforcement of breed-specific ordinances raises constitutional and practical issues. Fatal attacks represent a small proportion of dog bite injuries to humans and, therefore, should not be the primary factor driving public policy concerning dangerous dogs. Many practical alternatives to breed-specific ordinances exist and hold promise for prevention of dog bites.These difficulties are easily addressed by genetic testing of dog breeds that’s commonplace today, but that requires forcing genetic testing of dogs that have attacked people, which I don’t believe is law anywhere at the moment.
Purposefully obscuring breed type is scientific malpractice, and often encouraged in forums on pitbull type dogs e.g. r/pitbulls. If you pay attention to this discourse, you will know there’s an intent to obscure these statistics.
CDC stats seem to be only general and one page of this 28 page report issue: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/pdfs/mm7236-H.pdf
More recent work generally supports this old data:
https://www.palermolawgroup.com/blog/what-percentage-of-dog-attacks-are-pit-bulls?hs_amp=true
https://www.dogbitelaw.com/vicious-dogs-and-dangerous-dogs/pit-bulls-facts-and-figures/
Is that an instinct or a training thing? The previous comment was about nature vs nurture. To conclude anything about either from this chart is presumptuous. I’m honestly not even sure how to research it without doing horrible things to both dogs and people. Especially since owners are as likely to not know the signs of a stressed or aggressive animal as they are to accidentally train the same behaviors
Edit for follow-up question: How do these stats scale when normalized by the population of each breed? That would inform more about whether it’s an instinct thing, whether owner culture contributes, or whether it’s because there are so many of a given type of animal
That would increase the pitbulls standing.
I mean, I just want to see legitimate publicly funded research into this, rather than out of context graphs and personal opinions. The closest thing I could find is this study by Purdue, but I wouldn’t say it’s conclusive. Even in this, the data collection method is subject to owner bias to some degree and it’s not an enormous data set.
Half the discourse is that pitbulls are gentle giants and it’s due to poor or negligent training. Half the discourse is that they’re aggressive and deadly because of what they are. I just want to remove the pathos and see the logos.
If you follow discourse on this subject, you will see an intent to obscure research into dog attacks and mislead reports on dog type from places like r/pitbull.
This question could be answered by genetic dog breed testing of dangerous dogs, but that’s not law anywhere IIRC. That Purdue study is, for lack of a better term, normalized aggression research on breeds which is valuable. They mention Dachschunds being high on multiple stats, but a Dachschunds ability to maul is very different from larger type dogs like German Shepards or Pitbulls.
People who argue “bad training” purposefully ignore the idea and influences of domestication, as a whole, and don’t mention genetically influenced behaviors from other animal species.
We should all be supporting research into dog types and general safety / behavior of these (generally) wonderful creatures that we domesticated and live with in close proximity.
