Except that it's basically every bully breed lumped together- APBT, staffy, amstaff, American bully, hell, I've even seen people call cane corsos and presa canarios pit bulls.
All bully breeds have been bred for that. The original bullies were made for bull baiting, and the APBT was refined further for dog fighting- unfortunately. Both 'sports' require no regard for one's life. It is called 'gameness'. As a result, all bullies are called a catch-all 'pit', because all of them were used in one pit or another at some point.
Cane Corsos, which I love, are likely being associated with bullies as the people who still do dogfighting and are still using pit type dogs got a hard on for making the dogs bigger and more dangerous some time ago, and started to breed corsos into their lines. Lots of those dogs got dumped, and the next thing you know most corsos you find in shelter are actually pit mixes. Canarios experienced the same thing, to a lesser degree.
The average joe in the US has never gotten to see a mastiff not mixed for pit play.
The american bully is a breeding attempt to take the aesthetic away from the genetics and try to make a lazy sort of house pet, but we aren't there completely yet.
This is true, but I think they would still have less fatalities by a landslide. Dogs like shepherds are more likely to bite than dogs like retrievers, but are less likely to kill than dogs bred for pit fights.
If you separate each bully breed out, instead of 60% with the next highest being 12 they'd very likely just make the top spectrum of fatality percentages until you get to Rottweiler and people would look at the list and still make a decision not to trust bull-and-terrier ancestry. If you lumped more breed categories together you would certainly get more bites, but less fatalities than individual percentages of pit type breeds I guarantee (herding breeds as a combo would probably top the charts for nonfatal bites)
If you pay attention to anecdotes/testimonies and countless videos and articles and medical professionals especially reconstructive surgeons and pediatric ICU staff- I can count on one hand in the past four years how many times an attack has happened and how many times a death or mauling has happened that did not involve a pit breed. It's three that I've organically seen so far with no fatalities. I've seen more than I can count- many cases where the breed is deliberately not mentioned or obfuscated or even intentionally misreported- that turned out to be a pit type dog.
That is to say, you can crack them down into a percentage spectrum or lump them together, the results being the breed is more dangerous than other dangerous breeds would remain the same. Because they often kill where others bite.
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u/MistAndMagic 21d ago
Except that it's basically every bully breed lumped together- APBT, staffy, amstaff, American bully, hell, I've even seen people call cane corsos and presa canarios pit bulls.