Originally Posted By: ADK When I look at your post Plant.One, I can't help but to think that the numbers speak for themselves. All the breeds on that list egual only about half of the fatal attacks by Pit bulls alone. Now I'm not looking for a fight here, as I said I agree with everything stated above. Much of the responsibility is on the owner and breeder but some of the responsibility is on the breed.
i'm not looking for a fight either, but i'm more than willing to engage in a nice civil debate
so first things first - statistics are something that meant to be massaged. its a common tactic when you want to tell a story. we all know this - the media does it all the time.
so lets ask ourselves.... why did the study only use that year range? is that the only data that exists? or is it possible its because it showed the worst possible statistics it could to paint pits and rots in a bad light?
how much different would that fatality list look with a much wider data set?
what if we looked at data from 1995-2017?
what if we had data from 1955-2017?
what if we had data from 1917-2017?
things that make you go hmmmmmmm....
i will agree the breeds do have *something* to do with it, as mentioned above - some breeds need a high quality owner more than others do. I know first hand that pits have an adrenaline streak in them. they can easily get spooled up when their excited - and when they're spooled up thats when dumb things might happen - especially in
a poorly trained animal. but that can be said for many breeds.
however - you're not very likely to be mauled to death by a Chihuahua or terrier thats all spooled up because of their sheer size. they're still angry as [beeep], but when you can punt one across half a county if it comes at you.... it kinda takes the risk factor down. so it requires larger breed dogs to really get into the fatality category in the first place.
and i'm willing to bet a gourmet ham sammich that if we dug into the background of every one of those 284 fatalities related to pit bulls, most of them had owners who were questionable at best as dog owners - or even hoomans - in the first place. and it may not even be the current owners. some dogs come from the breeder already broken.
i wont disagree that there are some dogs - not breed, DOGS - out there that by their very nature that are just bad/dangerous animals. it happens. but based on my experience - and i've got the bite scars to prove it - every bad animal i've come across had a poor owner behind it.
my $0.02 USD