Thoughts on Pitbulls?

[tompaynter]

I understand your confusion if, as it sounds, you've never had experience with a shelter or a foster group. Or, it seems, with a lot of dogs. Abused dogs generally have a lot of signs they exhibit. Poorly socialized dogs, both with respect to humans and other animals, can be spotted pretty well, too, especially in an environment like a shelter that provides controlled interactions of both kinds. Abused and neglected dogs often come into such environments by way of police/animal control, as well, which provides further background. Animal fosterers in particular tend to have experience and knowledge on these matters, as well as focused attention on the animals.

Before you said that a wise and caring owner could rehabilitate an abused dog. Now you seem to be saying that most abused dogs are...filtered out by the system and put down? I'm not sure, because you aren't specific.

I'm seeing a tendency for an all-or-nothing pattern in your reasoning. Is any background on a dog exhaustive? Of course not. Then again, neither are FBI background checks... Like most things in life, it's a matter of risk analysis and mitigation, not certainty.



A house with children is a different environment than one without. I already mentioned something of how I managed that risk with children of my own, earlier. In our case, we didn't have dogs with the size or temperament to cause dire harm, and once one of them bit one child (because the child leapt on a dog he didn't see, startling the animal), we changed things to prevent that from recurring. This was because of our risk and benefit analyses, because we're grown folks, and we take responsibility for our duties.


If you are saying that people with children should not own pitbulls, I certainly agree.


As to the matter of neighbors, there are reasons we teach our children how to behave around animals, including not petting strange dogs. Why we have a fenced backyard. Why we've called the authorities, coordinated with neighbors, and even physically intervened when a pack of escaped neighbors' dogs were running the neighborhood. Why I carry a continuum of force tools for defending against threats. Why we pay attention to when they're outside. And so on - because that's our responsibility. We cannot control other people, nor should we want to. We must adapt to unknowns and things outside our control, and thereby not only care for our children, but teach them how to do the same in the process.

I interpret this as, "In order to preserve the right of people to own pitbulls, I am willing to 1) put a tall and sturdy fence around my backyard, 2) coordinate with my neighbors, 3) carry weapons at most or all times." Some of your other measures--teaching your children how to behave around dogs, intervening when you know there is a pack of dogs about, and paying attention "to when your children are outside", don't seem like effective measures to deal with the berserk pitbull from down the street that suddenly appears while your child is in the front yard. Which is definitely a scenario that happens. When seconds count, you and your EDC weapon are in the kitchen making lunch. Unless you meant "watch our children every second they are outside of the house or fenced backyard."

See, the thing is, your neighbor owning a "rescued" pitbull forces you to take all these precautions. And were you to "rescue" a pitbull, then your neighbor has to take all these precautions. Maybe your neighbor doesn't want a tall sturdy fence around his backyard, or to carry various weapons at all times. Because, although you may be the wisest and most caring dog owner in the world, and your rescue pitbull the most carefully vetted, your neighbor doesn't know that. Not for sure, not unless you give up an awful lot of privacy.

(And for what it's worth, in that neighbor's dogs scenario, the black lab mix dogs were the ones who charged at an elderly woman in a pack, and the pit bull in the group was the friendly, non-aggressive one that was happy to be led back to its house.)

I never once argued for unfettered large dog access to toddlers for any reason, nor did anyone else here. Again, you seem to be reducing these things to all-or-nothing scenarios.



Again, sir - all-or-nothing. Children and grandmothers have been killed by dogs of multiple breeds. Some people are better able to deal with more aggressive animals than others. Not all fatal or grievous maulings happen in the nightmare scenario of a berserk dog that just won't stop, either - some less intense situations cause such harm. Everyone makes judgement calls and everyone makes risk analysis. By the same token, as some have said here, there are people with experience with pit bulls that have never gone into blind killer rages. There have also been non-pits who have gone into such states.

You cannot eliminate all risk, and all the more so with children around. No one lives like a Pierson's Puppeteer, with no hard edges in the house, everything padded, nothing sharp or hard or dangerous at all. It's just not feasible. Otherwise, houses with children would have no electricity, no running water, hardly any furniture, etc. And even then, eliminating those risks would introduce others...

You don't want a pit bull? Fine. I fully respect and support your decision, and think no less of you for it. But to depict the decisions of others as deficient by filtering them through your personal calculus and not theirs is not right, either. Perhaps I'm misreading your argument there - if so, I will respectfully apologize in all good will.

Deep pull on the Pierson's Puppeteer. Props.

I guess my point is that the decisions of others to own pitbulls, particularly "rescued" pitbulls, imposes costs on me, not just on them. And I do not see the upside, other than some combination of 1) it's fun for some people to own an intimidating dog, 2) owning a pitbull allows people to feel smug and in the know, smarter than all of those folks who stereotype pitbulls as dangerous, 3) a feeling of moral righteousness about rescuing a dog from a supposedly misunderstood breed. I understand that they are sweet dogs most of the time, but I do not count that as an upside, because lots of other types of dogs are sweet too.

We have empirical disagreements about things like 1) how likely pitbulls are to go into killing frenzies compared to other dogs, 2) how dangerous they are in such a state compared to other dogs, 3) whether a dog that has been raised in a bad environment can ever be rehabilitated with sufficient reliability. I don't have statistics. I just have an impression, garnered from media reports over the years, that the sweet family dog that suddenly goes berserk and terribly mauls multiple people despite efforts to stop it is almost always a pitbull.

[Mark Rippetoe]

I just have an impression, garnered from media reports over the years, that the sweet family dog that suddenly goes berserk and terribly mauls multiple people despite efforts to stop it is almost always a pitbull.

Media reports? Are you serious, Tom?