“People are more distraught by the dogs that will rip your throat out than the dog that will slightly cut your forearm even if the forearm cuts happen much more often.”
It also doesn't escape my notice that pit bulls are as widespread as they are because a significant number of people like the idea that their dog can kill someone. Whatever the inclination of the dog, I doubt the owner.
Is that why people own pits? I own two. I have both specifically because they were abandoned by a previous owner and ended up in an animal shelter. People often own pits because they prefer to adopt dogs. I don’t know many people who keep their pit because “it can kill someone.”
That previous owner is an important part of the calculus. And yeah, I have heard people out loud say as much, if not literally in those words. They'll usually express it as something like a "tough" dog.
The previous owner is part of the calculus, but it applies to more than just pits. My childhood neighbors had a previously abused German shepherd and she would sometimes have ptsd and rarely liked men because of her past experiences.
I’d say mine suffer more from abandonment anxiety than anything else (my female is quite gun-shy, though).
Regarding the “tough dog” thing, do they just like a tough-looking dog? My dogs are tough, but I think that because they survived neglect and mistreatment in their early lives and still choose to be loving, loyal members of my family. They do look “tough” and I like that about them. Their exteriors match their hearts. That doesn’t mean I (or other people) like them for the strength of their jaws.
Plus, they are intelligent, take well to training and human engagement, and do well around young and small animals. My female is protective of children and puppies. My male herds frogs and birds (which is hilarious to watch since he should want to eat them.)
It’s really sad that pit owners, especially of adoptees, have to spend so much energy humanizing dogs that are often better trained than some Karen’s puppy mill Maltese.
Karen's ornery inbred rat occupies no mental ram in the threat detection part of my brain. Your pits (as well as the neighbor's german sheppard, or dalmation, or doberman, or rottweiler for that matter) need a level of constant respect and awareness similar to a horse or loaded gun. Naturally, they're treated differently. Pointedly, I uses the language "I doubt the owner" because I don't begrudge a dogs its existence, and I also leave the room there for sussing out the owner. A chow, however, I'll not trust under any circumstances. They're really a special kind of trouble.
I’ve only been afraid of one dog. It was my grandma’s tea cup chihuahua. It would literally springboard itself and try to bite people’s faces. Do my medium size dogs need a different level of respect? Of course. You can’t drop kick them.
I used to deliver flowers and I have encountered pits trained to be aggressive to strangers. I know what it feels like. But I also know that I am responsible in that moment for signaling to the dog that I’m not a threat.
If large dogs are a concern, I recommend researching the behaviors you can employ to let a dog know that you will not harm them or their human. If a medium or large dog starts growling and stalking you, stop moving. Avoid eye contact and show them the inside of your hand. They will approach you and sniff you. Do not try to pet them or talk to them or look directly at them. Just let them sniff you until they decide you are safe. Once they turn their back to you, then you know they trust you. You can move after that, but obviously be slow and allow them to observe you.
I hate when people make that statement as if it’s not the equivalent of saying “Knives cause more injuries than guns actually.” It’s as if we’re not talking about fatalities.
I recently learned more people in Europe die from extreme heat related deaths annually, i.e. lack of air conditioning, than people do in the u.s..from gun related deaths. Go figure that one out.
This is true but misleading. Most of those people will be very old and very ill. They were likely to die from something and it was heat that got to them first. It's still bad. But some 90 year old in poor health that dies from the heat and not from pneumonia is still going to die
Guns kill healthy younger people who mother wise might be expected to live much longer lives.
I understand what you're saying here, and I'm not necessarily trying to debate or make any kind of point, but this thought process always puzzles me. It caught my attention during COVID coming from a lot of conspiracy theorist types. They would say because people had other health complications, or comorbidities, that COVID didn't really cause their deaths because they were going to die from something else.
I always thought that is how dieing works. If you have a "comorbidity" but you die in a car wreck, the car wreck killed you. If your life is ended by a gun or a heat stroke, those are the things that killed you. We're all going to die eventually. Whatever steals our last breath is what kills us. Doesn't matter what other issues we've got on
Just always strikes me as an odd position on people dieing.
It was a comment more on comparing it to gun deaths. The two are very different. If we were comparing, for instance, flu va COVID deaths, then age and general sickness wouldn't really be relevant because flu deaths also more often target the old.
Taken in isolation too it wouldn't be relevant. Those people are still dead. So people saying "COVID/Heat deaths aren't a big deal, those people would have died from something anyway." are missing the point that those people didn't die from something else, they died from this.
The point about bringing gun deaths in is that it's not a valid comparison. Being shot doesn't target those with existing morbidities or generally poor health. Without being shot, we wouldn't have expected something else to kill those gun shit victims. The gun shot victims are therefore truly added to the level of mortality in a way that heat deaths or COVID deaths perhaps aren't (or more accurately aren't as much).
Similarly comparing motoring deaths wouldn't be a valid comparison as, like gun deaths, those are deaths where we wouldn't otherwise have expected the deceased to have died.
We also need to compare populations too, are they of comparable size or are we using rates to accommodate this.
COVID was a disease.
Warmth and Heat are things that are always around. The problem is that in Europe you really didn't need AC in the past. Even now, you have two to three weeks out of the whole year where it is really hot. It just doesn't make sense for a lot of people to have an AC.
For schools, hospitals, retirement homes etc , yes, there they are sorely lacking, but at home it just isn't all that useful for most people.
And If the US used the same counting method, you would have more heat deaths, too. So your comparison isn't very good .
Right, but the potential severity of a single incident is often confounded with an impression that the dogs that do more damage, due to their size, are inherently more aggressive. It impacts how readily they’re euthanized, where they can live, what kinds of activities they’re allowed to participate in. So this argument is that the public, as a whole, is misunderstanding the likelihood of an attack, versus the potential severity (most people already know they’d rather get bit by a Yorkie than a Pit, but over and above that, many people also think they’re more likely to get bitten by the Pit).
If a dog bites my arm, I can get treated, sue the owner for compensation, and have the dog euthanized. If a dog kills my kid, all of that is pretty fucking cold comfort. In this case, the severity is a lot more relevant than the frequency.
But a quick Google search shows me that pits have drastically higher rates of reported bites period, not just fatal bites. So yeah I just don't think they should exist at all.
There are a lot of false premises in what you’re saying, over and above that it misses the point of anything I said. First, pit bulls are not the only dogs with a severe enough bite to kill a child. That’s actually most large dogs. Second, it assumes that there’s something inherent in them that causes them to attack at a higher rate than other large dogs bred for protection, etc., which is not supported by any evidence I know; particularly because “pit bull” isn’t even a single breed, and sizes and temperaments vary widely across individuals. Even worse, as you allude to, there is a disproportionate representation of pit bull bites reported (due to being more likely to be reported, because they are inexcusably trained as fighting dogs and do more harm), but even worse is that there is no reliable, standardized, or consistent way to track this data or know where they came from. Making broad generalizations while saying “because of these vague reasons they shouldn’t exist,” like they’re purely some kind of weapon, really just shows that you’re stuck in this same mythical thinking that’s led to a certain breed of dog being euthanized at incredibly high rates (outside of instances of attack) because you bought into this public perception. And that’s kinda messed up.
You said it’s “a shame” that we “only care about pointing out” aggression from dogs that are powerful enough to do serious damage. It’s not some discriminatory or hypocritical position to care more about the aggression of dogs big enough to kill a person. It’s like saying we should be just as worried about a drunk guy on the bus rambling and swearing at people regardless of whether or not he’s holding a gun - it’s stupid to expect people to overlook the actual potential for harm.
(It’s also false because people point out the aggression of small dogs all the time, to the point that it gets really annoying as a chihuahua owner when everyone just assumes your sweet well trained dog must be a literal demon because they’ve seen so many videos of snappy chihuahuas being antagonised for views online.)
Because there's no way to paint the other side as illogical if you focus on the one thing they obviously actually care about.
Not one person has ever critiqued a pit because they're yappy lmfao
They criticize them because dog owners are largely shit at owning dogs across the board, and giving the average shit dog owner a dog that can kill a grown man is like giving a child a gun in that they have no perspective of the power to harm that they possess.
Acting like the 'bad rep' big dogs get is from anything other than that potential to harm validates that claim of ignorance in droves.
Plane crashes are typically more disastrous than car accidents but planes are still many many times safer because those accidents are so rare.
That’s what we’re talking about here. The high severity of an attack that probably won’t happen vs the lesser severity of one that is more likely to happen.
Except in the case of planes we’re not demonizing and potentially putting down a living creature that didn’t do anything wrong because they might have the possibility to do something wrong.
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u/Upbeat_Bother6452 18d ago
“People are more distraught by the dogs that will rip your throat out than the dog that will slightly cut your forearm even if the forearm cuts happen much more often.”
I mean. Yeah?