“The #1 breed requirement of our dogs is to be non-violent so every time they are violent they can’t be our breed” is some No True Scotsman nonsense that epitomizes the pitbull apologist mindset. Every attack is an exception, but every peaceful dog anecdote is the rule.
I’m a AKC dog breeder, and while I am not in the Bull or terrier world, it’s insulting that people think the demeanor of dogs can be changed in such a short period of time. It takes dozens of generations and careful crossings to breed out unwanted traits and refine them.
First off, what kind of dog? (Because, you know, dogs). Secondly, while I admire that someone would try and breed aggression out of them, you’re right, it’s going to take some time to get there. (And I suspect it will also come with some significant changes in physical characteristics associated with more docile breeds—less muscle, rounder bodies, etc.)
Cavalier King Charles spaniels! Unfortunately yes, it would take time and you are correct in that a lot of physical traits would follow the changing of the personality. If you’re interested in what cross breeding to change even minor characteristics would be like, look into LUA Dalmatians, or the Backcross project. This was to change ONE trait in Dalmatians by crossing them with a pointer, and it took 40 years for the kennel club to accept the stock. While that’s very much (lower case)political, It’s daunting to think what a project would look like for a class of dogs to essentially be bred to reject the original purpose of the breed.
It’s a breed plagued with a lot of health issues. People don’t seem to care about it as much because spaniels don’t outwardly look as deformed as pugs do.
OK but the AKC is a bit deranged in this department. Like the guy with huskies from Siberia but no, they couldn't be registered as Siberian Huskies. The Basenji folks managed it somehow. In general I'm not impressed with what happens to AKC breeds. I wasn't glad to see Beaucerons become an AKC breed.
Retrievers innately know how to retrieve, pointers point fresh outta the womb, herding dogs herd people and other critters, sled dogs love to pull shit, fighting dogs... are very sweet and don't do anything, what are you talking about?!
It’s weird, too, like breeding a panda with a taste for toddlers. It seems to me that you’d have a reason for doing this but I’m not seeing what it is, unless it’s as simple as “think fusion cuisine, but for eugenics.”
My brother's French bulldog was sweet, old, and lazy, but whenever she saw a plushed toy, her instincts kicked in and she tore it to shreds in seconds. And this is a breed that has had their hunting instinct bred out of them for more than a century!
She was from a breeder who specialised in longer-muzzled Frenchies. When she was younger, she could walk for several hours without tiring or being out of breath.
I’ve rarely seen a modern bulldog that didn’t look slightly mutant (and totally alien from how they looked 100 years ago.) They’re cute in a cartoonish sense, but I kinda think they would be better off if the whole line got cancelled then cross-bred with a bunch of mystery mutts going forward.
In the episode, Katie explicitly says pitbull only rank in the middle of the pack on the aggression scale. So, the idea pitbulls are especially violent is unsupported by data.
Reality suggests otherwise, but regardless, that is for human aggression only. They are very high for dog aggression. And more to the point, aggression level is only one factor; the level of damage they can do when they harness that aggression is more important. That’s why chihuahua bites might be underreported, but it doesn’t really matter because the reason they weren’t reported is they didn’t do much damage in the first place.
She quoted a lot of misleading pro-pit propaganda that's been knocking around for decades, unfortunately. I think that in her zeal to be evenhanded, she got taken for a ride.
Pits were like a lot of dogs, some were bred for fighting, some were bred for family.
I have a Boston Terrier sleeping next to me right now. America's first dog breed. She was bred for fighting and killing rats. Fighting and killing. All she does is fart, beg for food and snore like a defensive tackle.
Oof... Any breed can be pushed to its limit. Some get their faster than others. Generally speaking, I like Pitties, but at some point people have to just acknowledge they are not the dog for everyone.
Pitbull owner: "Look, you can't just leave your 52 year-old man unsupervised around a dog. Who knows what kind of mischief he might get into -- could have happened with a Chihuahua just as easily -- and then can you blame the dog for reacting like it did?"
He repaired and installed cabinets, had two kids, was visiting his elderly mother who lived across the street, it happened right near a primary school, he died a terrifying, horrific death. For anyone saying "We don't know the EXACT breed," okay, fine, Katie may be talking about one very specific breed for some odd reason. The rest of us are talking about big super-muscled dogs bred to fight to the kill with oversized jaws that have incredible crushing power. We are talking about ALL of those dogs, okay? Do you get it?
Do you generally think that the neighbors are right? Or do you think they are just being prejudiced?
As someone with a people-friendly/dog-neutral chihuahua mix, it usually doesn’t take long before my neighbors/the vets/my family are singing her praises even if they aren’t chi people.
One of my (many) bad experiences with pits was living next to one that clearly wanted to kill my cats. The owner’s caretaker admitted to leaving her cats behind to move in because the dog would kill them. Mine are indoor-only but they sometimes got out and explored the stairs. I was worried one of those escapades would be their death, and it wasn’t like the dogs owners were capable of restraining him. No, I did not appreciate them deciding on my behalf to take that risk.
Given what I know about the dog, people, and cat aggression in the breed I would probably not warm up to a pit bull on my street particularly fast even if it was friendly but I don’t think you can blame me. This isn’t about barking or even nipping.
I mean, I think it can go either way. I feel like I know a lot of pittie owners who have no business having anything more than a Shih Tzu, but I think there are also a LOT of unreasonable neighbors who just see a big dog and lose their minds.
My corgi nipped at my 4-year-old niece 3 years ago, and my brother in law thinks my marshmallow of a herding dog would rip a child apart limb from limb. For the record, everyone else in the family (except my sister and my niece who is now afraid of dogs) thinks he’s being unreasonable. Considering my priors, I’m generally more sympathetic to dog owners.
“The only acceptable moral stance?” Jesus who do you think you are? Oh wait, I already answered my question. I don’t even necessarily disagree with you but golly you’re an irritating prick.
This is an easy mistake to make, if you don't know that pit bulls don't attack for the same reasons as other dogs. They're bred to be capable of attacking when they're happy and calm -- such as when they're taken to a dogfight. Also, they're bred to fight without stopping for the usual reasons dogs stop fighting.
The danger of pit bull attacks has nothing to do with "being pushed to its limit."
Regular dogs can become dangerous because they've been mistreated or poorly trained or for a whole host of reasons why they've turned out messed up, and/or unhappy and/or mean. Pit bulls are dangerous because they're bred to be that way. It doesn't matter how nice an upbringing they've had. They can be truly loving, but they can even be fatal to the humans they love.
I think people have a hard time accepting you can’t just do something like code a biological system where 100% of the time it will behave a certain way. We’re not computers and neither are dogs.
That said, this is a mysterious one to me. I don’t know what the policy that would be to end this. I have a joking thought that in the far future you’ll have to have a license to own a dog but other than for that I don’t know how you enforce anything you write down.
Yeah, in my county dog owners are required to register their dog (which who knows how many of them do). I think it could be more well-enforced though, and I think there should be some serious fines/punishment involved if your dog becomes a public nuisance or hazard.
I also think there should be some legal requirements for breeding dogs. I'm not saying the AKC should be the governing body necessarily, but I think if you're breeding dogs, you should have a license for it and should adhere to standards of genetic testing and health.
Back yard breeders really get my goat. Sure your dog is cute, but unless you actually know what you're doing, you shouldn't be breeding your dog. I don't think you have to be an AKC breeder, but you really should consult an expert before breeding your dog and make sure they don't have any markers for hip displaysia, degenerative diseases, etc. This story pointed out that a lot of pittie breeders circumvent general breeding standards, and that really isn't okay.
Idk how it works in Germany but in my locality, you’re supposed to register your pet with the county and pay a small annual fee. This system is basically to ensure your pet is vaccinated against rabies. I believe this is pretty common in the US.
Really? When my dog was living I had to license her in every one of the five states we lived in over time. The process was pretty much the same across all of them.
Georgia - Basically you’re supposed to get them vaccinated against rabies every year. You don’t get the rabies vaccination tag until you register your pet with the county and pay the ~$20 fee. The tag comes in the mail and is supposed to be worn around the pet’s collar. I think the way it’s supposed to work is that if your pet bites someone, you can just show them the rabies vaccination tag and they can rest easy that they don’t have rabies. If you don’t have a tag, I’m not totally sure but stiffer legal penalties may apply if your pet bites someone.
In one county I’ve lived in, you can provide your pet’s microchip number to the county so that they can contact you if your pet gets found. So that’s kind of neat. And I keep saying “pet” because this applies to cats too.
So it definitely qualifies as a license/registry system but it’s not like they assess your fitness for animal ownership or anything like that.
In NYS, I registered my dog with the town for a small free & proof of rabies vaccination. Allegedly I’m supposed to renew this every year, but lol, no.
Most that I know of have requirements on the state, county or municipal level. It is not generally actively enforced.
If your dog is picked up by an animal control officer, or is reported for biting, you might be fined and required to get a license, with a low annual fee. In my town it's $6. It helps offset the expense of the ACO's salary.
I think annual registration is pretty common? I’ve lived in AZ and MI and have to pay a small registration fee each year. Mostly for rabies vaccine. They also charge more for non-neutered dogs.
Yes, I could not understand why she kept repeating this argument. Who cares if it’s really a pitbull and not an XL Bully - pitbulls were already banned in Britain.
That’s why they want to ban the bully: its a loophole where pitbull descendants are allowed into the UK. It’s allowing these large pitbulls to be legal until they hurt someone. I don’t care what breed this not-a-pitbull pitbull technically is. There’s a reason there are so many pitbull breeds: so people can no-true-scotsman any attack.
Right, this. And it’s logistically impossible to test every single dog out there.
Maybe this is also rather auth but it would make more practical sense for there to just make it more inconvenient for people to own poorly behaved large dogs — if a large dog bites someone enough for them to go to the doctor they should have a behavioral analysis done and euthanized if they’re considered a danger.
Yes. I really think the answer is not to ban or euthanize specific breeds, but to increase the dis-incentives for ownership of dogs that are uncontrolled and dangerous. This could be done via the US tort system (a slow moving oil tanker for sure), but other than that I'm not sure how you do it.
To your second point: Breed-specific legislation (BSL) does reduce the number of harmful dog-on-human attacks. (Bites from little dogs don't matter as much. Bites from dogs that bite and then LET GO don't matter as much. Bites from dogs that can be chased off don't matter as much).
Breed-specific legislation also reduces the number of pit bulls euthanized.
I agree that may be fallacy and said so in an earlier post. Just because Dave Wilson said-and probably believes-that he bred a docile pit bull doesn't mean he succeeded.
That’s why Kimbo was a registered pitbull (under one of the older fancy pitbull names). Bullies are a new pitbull variant and even if the breeders have tried to tone down the negative pitbull traits traits they have not had time to eliminate them.
The question is “is Kimbo an ancestor of many bullies” and if the answer is yes, then bullies are clearly pitbull derivatives.
Its like someone decided to breed low-energy aussies and one made the news a decade later for herding people or sheep and then a bunch of people saying it was clearly an Australian shepherd instead of an Australian no-herd. It really doesn’t matter--they are just an Australian Shepherd variant like show line vs working line labs. You expect them to show some of the working traits even the undesirable ones.
No. Specific breeds of dogs, and their variants. There are some weapons you want to ban. You want to ban all those of biological weapons from civilian ownership. That doesn't mean you want to ban knives because of their similarities to biological weapons.
No. The ep already made it clear that determining breed is especially difficult which is why experts disagree with breed specific bans. Moreover, your biological weapons bans is a category error, if that were to work you’d need to break down which bioweapons you’re trying to ban. You’re making my point for me.
Kind of like controlled substance analogues, except in this case it's controlled... animal analogues?
It makes sense, although it's hard to write analogue laws and even harder to understand where they apply and don't apply. That complexity unfortunately seems to be a byproduct of a complex world.
I have had so many bad experiences with pits--far outnumbering other breeds (and I have lived next to the kind of chihuahua that gives the breed a bad reputation.
1) A pit puppy ended up beneath my car as a child and we had to get animal control to remove it since it was snapping and growling when we tried to get close.
2) my upstairs neighbor had a Emotional Support Pitbull in a no-dogs apartment. It pulled its two owners around my apartment (he had more muscle than either put together) and fixated on my cats in the window. The owner admitted it was cat aggressive. I was worried for months that one day my cats would escape and then die.
I then moved into the house next to the demon chihuahua. I never worried about mine or my pets safety.
3) I was chased by two loose pit bulls while biking home from work a block away from an elementary school. No owner in sight, and I wasn’t going to get off the bike to find out if they were friendly to walkers. I have been briefly chased by other dogs, but they’ve all been controlled by owners.
4) one aggressive pitbull cleared out an entire dog park and lunged at the corgi who was the last dog out. The owner of a very large poodle mix spotted the car and said “this is a bad dog and we need to leave” and all five dogs and their people cleared out as fast as possible--to the point of sending me back for a water bottle since I didn’t have a dog to wrangle.
(The woman was a career high school security guard. She has honed instincts.)
5) a pitbull being walked by a jogger with headphones on growled at my chihuahua who I had pulled off the trail. I have NEVER been growled at by a dog being walked before or since--barked at, sure. Also, fuck that owner in particular.
I learned my lesson. If I see you walking your pit and can’t get away in time, I’ll pick my girl up. I don’t care if your offended, my dog is worth more.
I am sure some are fine, but I don’t trust them and I don’t trust their owners. The cost of “but he’s never done that before” is too damn high.
There’s a reason shelters are full of pitbulls and it isn’t haters like me--its the fault of the breeders.
Sorry to hear about your bad experiences. My sister's dog was attacked out of the blue by a pitbull one day. Her dogwalker simply opened the door to the apartment, my sister's dog stepped onto the sidewalk, and a pitbull (on a leash, with another dogwalker) happened to be there. Apparently it was surprised, and immediately lunged at my sister's dog and went straight for the neck. Happily, my sister's dog survived, though with a massive (and I mean massive) wound to her neck. What if it hadn't been a dog? What if it had been a kid walking out of that door?
Anyway, setting aside the possible problems of the breed's nature itself, what really kills me is that each time I hear a pitbull story, the owner is always absentee or indifferent or casual about the tremendous violence of their pet. I have yet to hear a pitbull story where a pitbull mauls another dog or acts aggressively towards a person and the owner goes out of his or her way to try and make the situation better.
Returning to my sister's story, my sister and her husband contacted the owner of the pitbull and asked for compensation for veterinary bills (not cheap, as you can imagine). The owners absolutely refused, demanded that my sister stop contacting them and their dogwalker, etc. It took me, an attorney, helping my sister draft a letter threatening to sue them in court before the owners would take responsibility. And the owners didn't give off the air of being destitute; the man was a civil engineer and the woman was a nurse.
Anyway. I want to be open minded about this, so I guess I'll ask in general: what's the strongest argument for allowing people to continue breeding pitbulls?
This really is the ultimate issue -- if the only "use case" for your dog is companionship, then there are dozens of incontestably less dangerous breeds to pick from.
I adopted mine because I didn't know. He was a 10 week old puppy who looked very much like a lab. I didn't think he was full bred but I didn't look at him and immediately think he was a pit. I did his DNA and he is 40% pit. Now he's almost a year and becoming aggressive, I'm hiring a behavioral trainer and taking him to Penn Veterinary Hospital department of Behavioral Medicine. I didn't ask for this, I didn't want a pit but now I have him. He wasn't free either, far from it.
In the Philadelphia area it seems like you have three options for dogs: shelter which is almost entirely pit, rescues who drive for South to bring back pits or get a dog from an Amish puppy mill and have your dog from some inbred disease early. It's bad
I'm sorry that you ended up with a tricky dog. I did too. I knew he was a bully mix but I didn't know what I was in for. Thankfully mine isn't at all human agressive but he is very dog selective. I've done a lot of work with my boy and he's incredibly well trained now and still has shown no sign of human agreession, he's eight, and he has a few dog friends that I supervise all interactions with. I would never allow him to meet a strange dog and have sevearl tools to prevent that.
All this to say that sometimes a good trainer can do wonders with a dog, because of how into dog training I became I have dog training contacts in the US should you want me check in with my contacts to find a reccomendation. Hopefully the trainer you have does the trick but there are trainers and trainers.
Good luck, it's not easy but it can be super rewarding.
My instagram is @annaandboodle if you want to dm me any questions or if you would like me to look into trainers in your area.
I never heard the phrase "dog selective" before today. I saw it on a list of code words shelters use to mask aggression in dogs. It means "might kill another dog."
I am really hoping that he is young enough that we can manage this with some changed expectations and a lot of work. I have been crying all weekend over it.
They are available right now for free or cheap. I had to drive 45 minutes out of state to adopt a small dog from a rescue. If I had wanted a pit ( or in my area, a husky) I could have gotten a discount and stayed in town.
Which kind of proves the point - shelter dogs aren’t usually the product of careful breeding, to say the least, and a lot of time they get surrendered because of behavioral issues.
Whether or not aggressiveness can be bred out of the pitbull, there are a *lot* of baby pits and pit mixes out there that were decidedly not a product of such careful genetics.
Shelters around my area always have pits/pit mixes.
I had a pit many years ago. Free. We took the runt of the litter, very submissive, a sweet-natured obedient good boy. At 60-65 lbs he looked scary, which I appreciated, as we were very isolated, far out in the country, and I was often home alone.
I got mine because I like powerful breeds, my first dog was a Rottweiler. I didn't realise how much more difficult training would be with this one, I got him at one year and I had my Rotti from a puppy. Now I enjoy dog training and bulldogs are fun to train. My next dog will probably be a Belgian Malinois, I can almost guarantee they will be the next dog that's banned because they're becoming popular, their lines are being watered down and they're ending up in the hands of people who have no business having them.
I'm in the minority, most people I know get bully breeds becasue they're up for adoption. Pit Bull rescue advocates have done the breed, American Pit Bull Terrior, an enromous disservice by putting them in flower crowns and saying they're the friendliest dogs. The back yard breeding is also a huge problem becasue we're seeing dogs that were bred to have tenacity and strength becoming nervous wrecks.
The problem with all these dogs starts with the breeding. Good breeders won't let someone with no dog experience have a powerful dog, they'll take back dogs that aren't a good fit. Back yard breeding is the real problem and it's why no one is talking about Cane Corsos or Fila Brasileiro. People don't know what they don't know and 'you can save them all', 'adopt don't shop' people are doing more harm than good.
I was attacked out of the blue by a pitbull! I was in my mid 20s so when it lunged at me it got my leg, not my face, but it could easily have killed a small child with the same bite. As far as I can tell my crime was looking at it from across the room while having a conversation with its owner. That was like 6 years ago and I still have scars. The bruise turned into a hematoma that lasted several months. I will never go near a pitbull again, especially not one that's off leash. I exercise caution around pit mixes too (hard to avoid them completely, I know so many people who own them).
I'm a lifelong dog lover and that experience put the fear of god in me re: pitbulls. The power behind their bite is, frankly, fucking insane.
I wish people would stop breeding all dogs and cats. At least until the shelters are empty and stay that way. I know that will never happen, but that's what I wish. I am sure there are exceptions to this, but most of the people I've ever met who have strong pro-pitbull opinions are rescuers or owners of rescue dogs who fear breed bans would mean the confiscation and euthanasia of their pit bulls or other rescue pit bull type pets (I'm not saying that laws that would do that are being seriously considered, I'm just saying that's what I think the real fear is for the people I know.) I can also say without a doubt that every single one of those people would cheer a ban on *breeding* them, as they are like me, and would cheer a ban on all breeding. (I love dogs, but I have no real skin in this argument, I do cat rescue.)
I 100% support mandatory neutering for all dogs unless they are literal AKC breeding stock with papers and even then owners should have to pay for that right (maybe with proceeds going to sterilization of other dogs)
Ah yes, the "emotional support" dog. I have always wondered what happens when someone's emotional support dog is aggressive. The whole emotional support animal thing falls under the Fair Housing Act, but if the animal is menacing people, it could be endangering other residents and I would argue that it's infringing on their rights. Nobody wants to get to the point where the ESA has to be euthenized because it's hurt or killed a human or another pet.
I'm a big dog lover, but I'm scared of the poorly behaved dogs in airports whose owners have clearly fudged their ESA documentation. Those owners are the last people I trust to control their animals if anything happens in a small space where I'm stuck with my kids.
Yeah, I love dogs but they need to be trained and if someone cannot train their dog, they should not have a dog. And this seems to be more common with people who claim to have ESA dogs.
I’ve had several chihuahuas who never bit (well, one did if we tried to trim his nails so he was muzzled), but the only time I’ve been “attacked” by a dog was when I was walking near someone’s house and a loose chihuahua (as in free, not freaky) ran out of nowhere and nipped my ankle. Just a tiny flesh wound but I reported that little fucker so her owner would get a hint.
I wouldn’t trust a Pitt with one of my chihuahuas, either. I worked in an animal hospital and a dog in for grooming, a bull terrier, attacked an killed a resident hospital cat that was in a wheelchair (named Carty). We all had bad feelings seeing that damned Target dog for years after. I understand why people can’t shake those feelings. I’m still traumatized just having read last year about a mom whose two little children were killed by their family Pitt bull. She almost died trying to save them.
My neighbors chihuahua liked to bark at anyone in his territory--which included my yard. He did get pretty close to me when my back was turned trying to start a lawnmower but backed off when I turned around.
I always figured the worst based scenario was a bandaid and some oral antibiotics.
Chihuahuas are a genuinely mistreated dog breed and they do have some breed characteristics that can make them unpleasant (they are often one person dogs). But they don’t kill anyone or any other dogs or cats, and I don’t think its just the size. They are a lot more bark than they are bite. (But they can be a LOT of bark.)
Mine is great toward people but not interested in other dogs. I follow her signals to get out of the way of over enthusiastic small breed pups but I worry about a big dog reacting badly to her snapping at them. I have seen it twice, with friendly big dogs who either backed up or failed to get the memo and kept sniffing her. I don’t let her great big dogs I don’t know, whatever their breed or any supersize dogs, even ones I know to be friendly.
I love, love, love chihuahuas. I had three. My last one made it to 17. We just got a Goldendoodle a couple of months ago and it’s not fair to him...I love him, but he’s no chihuahua. I think it’s harder for me to baby him like I did with my chis, so my relationship with him is different. When he was smaller I kept putting him on my lap, but he’s twice as big now. 😂
I keep telling my husband I still have a chihuahua sized hole in my heart. 😭
I really used to dislike Chihuahuas due to their image as Paris-Hilton-designer-handbag-dogs, but since my brother got one, they've really grown on me. His is like a squirrel on speed who's delighted about everything that's happening and everyone he meets (even strangers).
I now have a chihuahua mixed with something terrier but still small only 10 lb and I never thought I would like a small dog but it's a really special bond you get with them and she bonds to more than one person which helps.
Lazy since birth, she could just hang out on the front porch all day, unleashed. Once in a while she would get up and poke around in the front yard for awhile. She rarely barked. The most aggressive she got was glaring at people.
That's probably smart. I have a really docile big old dog that our local chihuahuas love to terrorize. He used to show his teeth at them, and I worried that he might bite, but now he just hangs his head down and walks away. I'm always amazed by the gumption of chihuahuas.
I swear on everything holy that when our two PB mixes were kenneled while we were on vacation that a chihuahua reached its head through a fence and bit a huge hole in one of my dog’s faces requiring a trip to the vet and seven stitches. Owner of the kennel saw the whole thing and said my dog was wagging its tail just curious and the other dog was aggressive for no reason.
ALL dogs have the capacity for aggression. Do I hate all chihuahuas? No.
It is a bit unfair that small dogs can get away with bad behavior because it doesn’t have bad consequences but if you want to own a dog breed capable of milling adult humans you will be held to a higher standard.
Chihuahuas can be very protective of their space and their body. It’s a negative breed trait but when literally everything around them can kill them it makes some sense.
One bite, stitches required attacks are bad, and I would support euthanizing a dog that did that unprovoked whatever the breeders. All dog breeds can do that. What kills people and dogs are the extended mauling attacks that fighting dogs were bred for. Not all do them, but enough do. And they wag their tails the entire time.
Sorry, tail wagging means nothing. Pit bulls wag their tails when they kill smaller dogs all the time. I will trust yours was being friendly and I’m sorry about the expense--but it was seven stitches. You didn’t worry about your dog dying.
Again, I was not there, but I'm going to trust the kennel owner who said that the attack was unprovoked. I truly understand how much you and others despise PBs, PB mixes and their owners; you've been quite clear on all of that.
I can only speak from my "lived experience" that we have never had issues with our dogs. I know that the horror stories are also true. Our vet told me that she's never been bitten by a PB but has lost count of the number of times she's been bitten by chihuahuas. Of course, bites by PBs are more serious because they are stronger and can do more damage. I don't know what the answer is.
“I can only speak from my "lived experience" that we have never had issues with our dogs.”
That’s what the story was about the family whose pitts mauled two young children to death last year, and almost killed the mom. (Hey, if I witnessed my dog kill both of my kids, knowing it was partially my fault for owning those death dogs, I’d pray it killed me.)
Tail wagging does in fact mean something. It means the same for pit bulls as for any other dog -- happiness, contentment, etc., in most cases. The difference is that they are capable of being content while doing things that other dogs only do under stress. The reason is that a sport-fighting dog must be willing to attack and fight on command -- as willing as it might be to lie down and roll over on command.
I’m sorry, I’ve been bit by German Sheppards, collies, what looked like a golden retriever..lots of dogs. In my experience it comes down to owners and what sort of life the dog has led.
When you were bit, did they hold on for dear life, clamping down and not letting go until something drastic happened? Would that golden retriever have torn a child to shreds while wagging its tail? If not, then your anecdote doesn't apply to Pitbulls.
I have less of a problem with the GSD reference, they're in a distant second place to Pitbulls when it comes to aggression and danger to children.
Yeah, of course. We kill a hell of a lot more animals than that, animals that are completely harmless, every single year. Hell, probably every single month. After keeping them in a desolate prison for their very short lives.
No, I don't pretend that this is realistic legislation. We live in a free country, and we are free to own a variety of different killing machines, including pitbulls.
While you’re absolutely right about the number of animals killed, those animals-the vast majority anyway- produce food or byproducts that are of use to us at scale. The dead dogs wouldn’t be unless we started to “make use” of the meat. It’s ugly no matter how you cut it-no pun intended.
Well of course it's ugly. We're talking about the dismantling of a whole violent section of society, and a conscious one at that. That's gonna be extremely ugly, even if the only consequence is a fine for being caught with one.
Not trying to be hyperbolic. This is an honest question. What do you propose we do with the vast number of these dogs? Banning them won’t make them disappear.
The anti-pit, pro-breed-specific-legislation people I know do NOT want any dogs killed (if they haven't attacked/mauled/killed). They advocate for education and neuter/spay.
This episode did that typical thing Americans often do of using american anecdotes and evidence to evaluate the laws of another country. For example Katie argued that banning American bully's would be hard because they are hard to distinguish from pit bulls, but pit bulls are already banned in the UK! If anything this will make laws easier to enforce, as the "it's not a pit bull it's bully" excuse won't work anymore. A lot of the other breeds that Katie mentioned as dangerous are already banned in the UK.
Similarly, the fact that some attacks weren't actually by American bully's seems irrelevant. If owners are registering dangerous dogs as American bully's to get around a ban then the ban will be useful, irrespective of what the breed actually is
Exactly this. Also, it was weird that Katie completely overlooked the unavoidable fact that US Bully XLs and UK Bully XLs are, by necessity, divergent strains of the same family. At best. It’s really common for purebred animals to be different between America and Europe, simply because the distance mean they are largely seperate genepools with some occasional crossover. Even if Bully XLs in the US are bred specifically for docility, that doesn’t mean the dogs sold under that name across a major ocean have the same genetics. In fact, it’s more likely that they don’t.
A major issue I found with was how Katie repeatedly cited the UKC or the United Kennel club. This kennel club was founded out of the American Kennel Club refusing to accept American Pitbull Terriers as part of it. They are not the gold standard of kennel clubs and are a FOR profit corporation that takes the misfits and problematic breeders who do not meet the standards of the AKC. I wish she spoke to breeders from the AKC who explained why almost all Pitbull type dogs are not allowed.
I listened to the entire thing and she really thinks they have a bad rep because the way the activist organizations and media framed the issue. I’m really disappointed at how she really didn’t question these breeders further and didn’t bother to learn the history of Kennel clubs.
It’s hard if you insist on disbelieving your lying eyes and needing breed papers to identify a pit bull as a pit bull. The stats use the same heuristics anyone would if they’re trying to avoid a violent dog — what it looks like. Dogs that have enough pit bull genes to look like pit bulls are, well, pit bulls, and dogs that look like that account for the vast majority of serious dog bites.
I agree with you, I was using her train of logic here. And I’ll add, the majority of Pitbull type dogs DO NOT come from breeders with any kennel club. It’s almost irrelevant any breeders say they are breeding for temperament given most pits are from very irresponsible backyard situations
The one thing I do like about Bronwen Dickey is that she says pit bulls are a shape, not a breed. I just reject her follow-up arguments that I'm racist to be scared of the shape.
Pit bull breeders & paedos, Katie seems to accept their claim with a low bar of skepticism.
I really wish they would/could do an ep on D. Caroline Coile — canine researcher, author of Pit Bulls for Dummies (& scores of other books), who swore off the breed due to their aggressiveness, and IIRC was viciously cancelled by the “pitties are misunderstood” crowd. But on the other hand, I expect Coile would rather not have it dredged up again.
Part of the reason you can have a “pitties are misunderstood” crowd is that the majority of pit bulls never do anything seriously wrong, and there are a lot of people who have owned well behaved ones. The problem with them is obviously a law of averages problem: because they have been eugenically bred for fighting and boar baiting, they are much more likely to go mad and savage a person or pet than other breeds. But the data are sometimes lost to the anecdotes.
I think this is all a metajoke about the credulity of the media on incredibly self evident truths that they can't see because of bias...that's what she's doing, right? Please just say yes
I hate to say it but I'm starting to fall off this podcast. If the issue being discussed is anything other than gender stuff, both hosts end up a frustrating mix of incurious, uncritical, and just plain lazy. Little things like their refusal to look up how to pronounce names correctly comes off as childish for two people approaching 40 and who, more importantly, making enough money off this podcast that Katie can afford two houses (her protests about how they're "shitty" to the contrary, the greater Seattle and Asheville areas are not cheap) and Jesse weeks-long European vacations. It's not cute or novel anymore.
I don’t think Katie was lazy in this episode and I appreciate that she put in a lot of work. I think her fatal error was being so concerned about her bias and confirming her priors that she overcorrected and accepted too many claims from the bully side uncritically.
Agree 100% in this case, but I thought Katie's repeated assertions that she worked really hard on *this* one kinda suggests that there might be some phoning it in at other times. I have left some episodes recently thinking, "is that it?"
Well, I think it was the time-sensitive component (because it's a hot news story) that was leaving her a little frazzled. Her previous investigative work, like the Unitarian Church blowup and the UofR sexual misonduct story were well out of the news by the time she looked into them, so it was more of a "cook it until it is done" situation and she didn't have to chase up phone calls and emails so frantically. I do think she did a lot of work here, but the main problem is that her conclusions all hang on one breeder of dubious reputation 1) actually trying to do what he claimed and 2) accomplishing what he claimed he was trying to do. I think that should have been regarded with extreme skepticism in the absence of any corroberating evidence, and I don't think it was.
By contrast, the episode that I thought Jesse got wildly wrong (CitiBike Karen) was because he failed to look into deeply enough to understand even the initial situation, much less the nonsense that followed.
If any of the dog breeder organizations told me the sky was blue I’d open a window and check the sky. These are the people who let people breed dogs who need to sit on ice after mild exercise.
"Go to a dog show. And see that they are not the monsters you read about them in the press."
That this argument made it into the episode infuriated me. Nobody says, that they are 24/7 rage machines - but that they have maintained certain traits that can cause them to suddenly attack in certain circumstances paired with a bite strength and behavior that further aggravates any attack.
And it’s dumb. The dogs that make it to shows are the best behaved. It’s almost like judging disciplinary policy in schools based on the behavior of students in the top private schools. Self-selected groups are not representative of the population.
You realize that the show dogs have the same genetics . If the show dogs are so well behaved it must be the handlers or bad samples of the breed that has nothing to do with the breed standard . Also by your logic you should ban the show dog bully but let the near feral border collie or whatever that might actually bite somebody be legally kept ?
I can’t stop laughing, my sides! Of course they can’t bring their dogs, if they brought their dogs and something happened that would be the end of any support for their cause.
There are other reasons to ban dogs from an event . Like the venue doesn’t want them. Also dogs shit and piss. Imagine having to clean up after hundreds of them
I would not trust the words of rogue breeders like Wilson further than I can throw their pure muscle, jaws of iron, inbred-and-therefore-psychologically-messed-up-and-likely-in-chronic-pain dogs. It's a huuuuuge moneymaking market, and it's all about, gosh, the concept of "bully," would you believe? The bottom line is, even beyond this clear market for violent dogs, we are breeding ALL dogs into pain, illness, inability to breathe, skulls too small for their heads, etc. Bulldogs cannot even give natural birth anymore. We are Frankensteins making monsters out of the species who have most been our loving companions. Humans suck.
Google "toad" dogs and other underground movements making monsters out of innocent creatures, bred for fighting. Look for this stuff on Instagram. It's real. It's sick. I can't imagine how this whole disgusting underground breeding system was missed in the reporting. I don't understand the focus on one specific breed. This is a much bigger story that any animal lover should be concerned about.
So glad to read your comments. This episode totally missed the much bigger story. The world of dog breeding is hugely problematic and often unethical. When breeders go rogue, things get worse, not better. I feel sorry for the humans who get attacked AND the dogs who often lead miserable lives because of terrible breeding practices. Lockdown in the UK caused a massive surge in people wanting dogs. Puppies of all sorts of breeds went for big bucks. Where I live, there are far too many dogs full stop. The parks are busy, there are a lot more dog on dog attacks than there used to be. I have no idea how we are going to get out of this mess.
Good call. I once took my toddler to someone's house for a baby-music class, and somebody released their (previously unknown to me) viciously anti-child Chihuahua at the end. Obviously, I knew he couldn't kill my kid, but when you're sitting on the floor with a small child, you have to take potential bites to the face seriously. Plus, the angry Chihuahua really did not help my kid's nascent fear of dogs, which was a setback for our dog-loving family.
You are right. The worst dog bite I've seen was from a small dog. It cut across the vermillion border (of the upper lip and the face) and I sent to plastics for repair.
I saw a YouTube video, something like, "plastic surgeon answers questions from Twitter." The plastic surgeon said his best advice to people is, "keep your kids faces away from dogs you don't know." A week later, my neighbor's daughter was bitten in the face by a strangers dog. No permanent damage, but ended up in the hospital. It definitely changed how I let my toddlers interact with dogs.
That was a terrible joke. More seriously, I also don't want to align with either the pro- or anti-pitbull crowd as described in this episode even though I have a dog that at least looks like an American Pitbull Terrier.
Judging dog owners by the breeds they own is entirely appropriate.
You barely mentioned the problem of bully culture. An obnoxious man does all sorts of things to project danger and intimidation. He takes the mufflers off his vehicles and says "fuck you" to thousands of people every time he drives across town. He gets scary tattoos on his face. He glares at people who say, "Hello."
And he walks an apparently vicious dog with the intention of creating terror.
The UK has every right to ban Pit Bulls and Bullies for exactly this reason.
The line that these things are "bred to be gentle" is the rationalization of a cretin.
On my lunchtime walk the other week, I tried to go into a Co-Op in Islington, but couldn't because this sort of berk was threatening a woman inside with a "little dick dog" like this, keeping it just at the end of its chain while everyone inside flinched away from it.
The man kep shouting "bring your boyfriend here so I can punch someone!". What a gent.
Just wipe these dogs out, because wiping out these people is apparently problematic. I have a three year-old, and I'm scared to walk around parts of my (very affluent!) neighbourhood because of this sort of thing.
You're right. The other half are generally people who adopt rescue dogs, or do rescue themselves. Those are also people who are pro-pit-bull, not because they support any kind of breeding, but because they love their dogs. Nobody I know with pit bulls wants to see them bred. I think they're mainly afraid of blanket laws that might euthanize any pit bulls for being alive if they're confiscated from breeders or whatnot.
The dangerous reputation is certainly why some people have pit bulls. Others have them because pit bulls are often very loving toward people. I have a dog that at least looks like an American Pit Bull Terrier. I didn't choose him, but I chose to keep him after he showed up in my brother's yard. He gets along with my other dog, but I generally can't trust him around other animals. OTOH, he loves every person he meets effusively and has never shown aggression toward a human. My biggest fear is that he would get into a fight with another person's dog, which is the only scenario in which I can imagine him hurting a human.
I was also struck by Jesse's seeming ignorance. But then Google tells me that the movie came out in 1983 and Jesse is only about 40. So I'll give him a pass.
I’m 27 and I know Cujo just as a cultural reference, even though I’ve never read or seen it. I detected more than a hint of feigned ignorance in Jesse’s tone.
Honestly could describe my reaction to any episode these days. He's done some good work, but the more I hear of him and learn about him, the more he seems like a manchild.
Stephen King Cujo is actually a really good book. The first few Stephen Kings were kind of amazing. I guess that after that he just wrote too much. Cujo is atypical for him, nothing supernatural about it, just bad luck, a chain of events and being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
The movie was less good, they also changed the ending, Understandably, there is no way the movie could have being made with the original ending.
Anyway Cujo was a bad dog not because of his breed, but because he had rabies.
I need to agree with Katie 100 times over on one thing, and that’s the smugness people have about adopting/“rescuing” their dogs. It’s insufferable. It makes me want to tell people who ask where I got mine that I stole them.
Yes! For all that people love to trot out that incredibly stupid “racist” argument, the vast majority of pits I’ve encountered are the project of middle-class white ladies who get them so that everyone knows that they got a rescue dog and aren’t they a good person because they got a rescue dog?
It's the difference between buying secondhand and buying new though. One isn't supporting breeding more dogs when there's already an overpopulation (in the us, not speaking to other countries). Whether or not that's something a person cares about or wants to consider when getting a dog is a personal decision and will vary, but just like thrifting is going to be cheaper, the fee you pay a shelter is going to be much cheaper than what a breeder costs
There isn’t an overpopulation of the dogs people want that make excellent family pets.
There was in the 90s but the shelters are full of pitbulls with a smattering of high-energy working breeds (which also aren’t suitable for most people, but aren’t as big of a menace and have a use). Look at Petfinder and compare the dogs available to the dogs you see walking around your neighborhood--its not the same distribution of breeds at all. Also, go to petfinder and filter for dog and child friendly dogs. It’s... enlightening
Chihuahuas are a special case: they are overpopulated in certain parts of the country but not others, so you see them in rescues a lot but depending on where you live there is a good chance they were brought in from Texas. IME there are always a few chihuahuas in the general area (Not always in my city) but they are either imports or owner death cases and they get adopted fast so it is a different chihuahua next week. I am fine with that; my girl has that backstory xe. And she was MUCH cheaper than my parents doodle.
People who live in regions of the country who have solved their overpopulation problem of normal, safe dogs should feel free to go to an ethical breeder.
There aren't golden retrievers or pure labs in shelters, that's definitely true. Huskies and german shepherds, as you say, aren't appropriate for everyone (not that that stops people from getting them and then dropping them off at a shelter). It is dependent on where you live and whether you're willing to be patient. I think the biggest problem is people feel entitled to the exact dog they want, as a puppy, when they want it, and if they're willing to pay 1000s of dollars for it, that's their choice. A lot of non-pit mixes get funneled to breed-specific rescues, which tend to have stricter adoption requirements (which is frustrating, but again, people want to be treated like a customer, not an adopter). This makes more space at gov funded shelters for pits/pit mixes. Small breed dogs of various mixes, especially chihuahua, mini poodle, Pomeranian, yorkie and shih tzu, as well as more medium size beagles and hounds are always available as adults, especially in rural areas. I really think it's less that only pit bulls are available than that people want a puppy, and/or they want the breed of dog they grew up with. I'm not against buying from a breeder. I'm against buying from puppy mills and buying dogs like pugs or french bulldogs that we've bred to have so many issues it's just cruel. I just think it's often possible to find a great dog from a shelter/rescue too.
I think we agree more than we disagree. I also oppose puppy mills and the breeding of dogs that can’t breathe. In my experience of small cities in rural areas is that small dogs are not super common in rescues but working dog breeds are.
I rescued because I did NOT want a puppy :) and I was cheap. I did want a dog when I wanted a dog, though. I was the same with cats.
But unlike cats, most dogs come from human-influenced breeding and so the better we can do the breeding and initial puppy placement the less rescues will be necessary and the shorter the dogs stay.
Whatever you think of the doodle people, doodles are not overflowing in shelters.
When I was a child, my parents got an adult golden mix from a shelter. She was an amazing dog. When they went looking for a retirement dog, mom said it was all pits and chis and she wanted neither. So they got a doodle.
I have an Airedale. There were no Airedales on Petfinder so he came from a breeder. If I’d wanted a Doberman, I could’ve gotten a whole pack of them from a local shelter...
Oh, for the days of Frasier and Wishbone when the shelters were overrun with JRTs. Granted, they’re not the best choice for families with small children, but at least they’re smaller than most toddlers.
She talks about it a little in one of her Moose Nuggets posts. I'd love a fully researched BARPod episode on how shelters source and market their animals.
You make the point which I kept hoping to hear in the pod, which is that idea of breeds and pedigrees, is relatively recent. Dates from the 19th century, like the concept of racial purity. And this article also mentions that the idea of breeding out behavioral traits in a few generations is not possible. https://www.npr.org/2022/04/28/1095390872/dog-breeds-behavior-study
I understand objecting to smugness about "rescuing", but what's wrong with that also involving buying the dogs? Re-homing dogs for free doesn't seem possible.
Isn't it more about the circumstances the dog is being taken out of, like being on the streets?
One of my dogs was lost by his former owner, and was loose on the streets long enough to become skinny. The county animal services who caught him rescued him - they saved him from starving or other equally terrible fates. He was already rescued by the time I swiped my credit card (required! no free dogs! which I am ok with). I took him home because we wanted a dog, not because we are heroically sacrificing anything to help him.
Saying I rescued the dog is a) factually untrue and b) county animal services erasure.
Right, I understand. It sounds like you're mainly opposed to a kind of smug use of the term "rescue" in that scenario, a hangup which I get but don't share. I would rather say both you and the county shelter had important roles in giving the dog a life off the streets, and of course you have no obligation to feel any ethical warm fuzzies for that if it was more of a transactional thing to you (no judgement!).
The way we judge it seems very dependent on whether the local shelters/rescues where one lives are overrun and will have to turn away or euthanize dogs for each dog they're keeping, or whether they can offer at least some meager shelter (usually a concrete pen) permanently. Where I live, near a big city where shelters and rescues are overflowing, each individual dog is like a drop of water in a leaky overflowing bucket. Dogs are turned away, sheltered dogs may be euthanized quickly, and adoption standards may sadly get lower as the organizations face pressure to place dogs in homes. In that situation if someone gives the dog a permanent home (assuming they are qualified as owners, all else being equal), it seems clear they're helping the dog whether or not anyone wants to call it "rescuing."
Also, I take it for a given we all agree that unethical breeding needs to be reduced and I personally think spay and neuter needs to become more the norm to help reduce the regional dog overpopulation issues upstream of shelters.
I think you’re right about local circumstances affecting your view - like Katie I live in the dog-mad PNW and I’ve had genuine “Good for you!”s on walks. No stranger gives me asspats for any other reason. Just this one.
People truly need to recognize that responsible breeding practices reduce the need for shelters in the first place. When Best Friends keeps sloganeering "Save Them All!" I want to punch someone in the face.
I don't agree with the concept of a no-kill shelter — I think shelters should selectively euthanize dogs that are aggressive. Also, WAY too many shelter dogs have emotional baggage that not every person can handle, and they are better off getting a puppy from a reputable breeder.
The shelter and rescue group I got my dogs from, they’re mostly dog-loving people- haters. So of course they don’t believe in killing dogs - every dog can be placed with a loving family and turn into a perfect pet, which you and I would agree is not always possible. I wish these groups were run by pragmatic people, but I guess they wouldn’t be so successful at placing dogs if they were.
I’m glad for the secondhand dog shelters, though, because I never wanted a puppy, and I think a mutt is just fine. If you want a two year old dog who has been well-treated and has no medical or behavioral issues, well, it’s kind of like getting a new liver. First, there aren’t so many livers out there, but there are a lot of people who want one. Second, you’re happy about the liver you got, but you got it because something went wrong with the first owner. It’s a bit of an odd feeling.
I agree. I think the hardest, most important thing about rescue work is accepting you CAN'T save them all. Education and low/no cost spays and neuters are much more important long-term than placing dogs. Private rescues can be no-kill because they're not open intake, which I think is fine. The issue is when there's the sort of unrealistic idealists running them who think every dog can be saved
I work with rescue dogs and that's just blatantly false. It might be true in like 1% of cases. Most rescue dogs just don't have another place to go. Poorly behaved dogs that don't have a place to go are usually put down, so the vast majority of the ones "worth" rescuing are very good natured just maybe a bit unstructured and under socialized
You've got to be joking. Shelter environments can have very negative impacts on dogs' behavior, as dogs generally need a lot of structure and attention, but that's not why they ended up there. Rescue dogs mostly need rescuing because people didn't get their dogs fixed or they were taken from neglect, hoarding/cruelty or backyard breeder/puppy mill cases, or their owners passed away or went into assisted living or government housing where they weren't allowed to bring their pets or lost their homes. A lot of dogs get dumped at shelters because they're old or have chronic health issues and the owners can't afford the vet bills but don't want to put the dog down. Absolutely there have been instances of organizations hiding a dog's bite history and adopting out dogs who should not be considered adoptable, but at a regular county kill shelter an unmanageable dog isn't making it to the adoption floor.
Some of the other rescue orgs have different standards though. But I agree the public shelter is going to be mostly dogs that were abandoned, found running free, surrendered, etc. There is obviously an adverse selection problem where the most friendly and young/attractive dogs are going to go first and so the ones who are there a while aren’t going to be the easiest.
Someone once jumped all over me when I incorrectly said my family had "bought" my childhood dog. (We'd gotten her from a shelter, not that it matters, and we'd paid the shelter a fee. I used the wrong verb because I'm middle-aged and we didn't "adopt" or "rescue" dogs in my benighted childhood.)
Anyway, yes, the idea that you're virtuous for "rescuing" the cheapest mutt available to you is ridiculous. Just take your floppy-eared slobber monster home and enjoy your time with it like the rest of us do.
Most municipal shelters are kill shelters. They kill the dogs that don't get adopted within a certain amount of time. People who adopt from a city-run or county-run shelter are absolutely saving the dog from possible death, and certainly rescuing them from a bad situation.
It would be great to have good data on this, but it can be hard for shelters to admit they euthanize, even if it’s never for space and always for issues that make adoption difficult or impossible (serious illness, high aggression).
This news story also includes this paragraph: ““Rescuing an animal has become a badge of honor,” said Matt Bershadker, the president and chief executive of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. “People proudly go to dog parks and walk around their neighborhoods talking about the animal that they rescued from a shelter.” “ they do! lololololololol
Yes, it's true. Euthanasia has decreased, but they euthanize regularly. If you don't believe me, that's fine, and maybe I'm only speaking for the extremely large metropolitan and suburban areas in my state. But I've been doing cat rescue for twenty years and I assure you that euthanasia of perfectly adoptable animals takes place ALL THE TIME here and in cities and counties around the country. The euthanasia of aggressive and therefore unadoptable animals also takes places, and I am not talking about that.
It just caught my eye as it doesn’t square with my knowledge of my area, but if you’d included in your post your experience I wouldn’t have questioned it at all. My neighborhood is not the world etc.
The fundamental unevenness of it is that you see adoptable animals being euthanized, whereas my local humane society has a sixty-five pound pit bull with a bite history up for adoption. Trade?
I’ve been dealing with guilt since we bought our recent pup (Goldendoodle, aka the Goldendude). But if I think about that while rescue dog thing the way I do about performative land acknowledgments, I can let it go.
I hate the term "rescue dog." It should mean a dog that rescues. I've owned two dogs that showed up in yards and one that I got from a county shelter. I don't use the word "rescue." I don't think there's anything inherently immoral about breeding dogs or buying one from a breeder. I don't care strongly about breed and prefer to give a home to dogs that would otherwise be stray or put down.
Katie spends a long time trying to specify what a Bully XL is, but in doing so misses the point that the Bully is to all intents and purposes an American Pit Bull. There have been so few generations it isnt meaningfully different.
In Britain, Pit Bulls are already banned and I dont think she appreciated that ppl say they have Bully XLs, staffy crosses etc. when the dog is clearly a pitbull. (Tbf sometimes they themselves dont know either.) The ban will close this loophole. I live near the welsh boy that was killed and remember deep diving into this and remember all the facebook chat about what exact breed the killer dog was.
Ultimately, all these deaths are from pitbull-type dogs and so there needs to be a ban that is broad enough to cover this. Its imperfect but dog breeds arent black and white categories either.
Right. The whole point is that the dogs that are responsible for all the recent attacks must be classed as Bullies, because if they were just classed as plain old pitbulls they wouldn't be allowed in the UK anyway. So banning the Bully is more about closing a loophole than anything else. And it's a loophole that badly needs closing.
Okay, this subject annoys me to no end. We have to acknowledge that it's part owner and part the breed.
There's a reason you never hear about vicious pug attacks. Their original purpose was to be a companionship for Chinese nobility. Unfortunately, pit bulls (and most bully breeds) were bred originally for bloodsport and protection. Breeders and shelters do the breed a service by trying to breed that out and selectively euthanizing aggressive dogs.
Also, people need to be more well-educated when they get a certain breed. It's very possible to get a pit bull and never have an incident with it, but you have to be the kind of owner that is willing to acknowledge its instincts and mitigate it. They have intense personalities and really need to be worked. Pit bulls are all muscle and have a hairline trigger of a personality. They are not the dog for everyone.
I have a corgi, and virtually every corgi owner will tell you that they are barky, bossy, and they nip. They are almost ALWAYS protective over their food. There are just certain situations I cannot put my dog in and most corgi owners will tell you the same thing about their dogs.
I just want people to stop treating it like a black and white issue! 😭
Actually I've known some really obnoxious violent pugs. The thing is, with their ridiculous flat face, they can't bite worth a damn. One of them realy came at me, bit my hand and I was like "really? Is that it?" Also, they are usually unable to run so most people can outrun them. They are cute, but these two were horrible little shits.
Dog breeds ARE NOT animal species. They are human creations. For any human creation, a safety standard of "it's probably fine" is not good enough to justify a potential dangerous animal roaming the streets.
Also: We are talking about phasing out a dog breed - not culling every last pitbull in the country. Considering the littany of health issues of this breed, it's also for the best for the dogs.
The only time I was ever attacked by a dog (very glad the dog didn't go for my then 4-year-old son) was by a Pitbull. Got me on the left knee and took me right down. I had an umbrella and beat it until it let go. The dog's owner came outside and asked, "He didn't get you, did he?" I said, "He did indeed. Do you see the blood coming out of my fucking knee!" The owner replied, "Gosh, he's never done that." They moved out two weeks later.
I've only been attacked once. It was a chihuahua. All those stereotypes about angry little dogs were true in this case. It bit my face, I picked it up and moved it. It broke skin but didn't draw blood and I was up to date on my jabs so just cleaned the wound and went about my day.
I find the "little dogs are more aggressive" argument so dumb. In my experience it's true, but who cares? I could kill those fuckers with one stamp of my modest sized lady feet.
When the couple moved into the other side of the duplex, they told us their dog was a Pitbull, but that he was well behaved - a family dog! Also, if it looked like a Pitbull, quacked like a Pitbull, and bit like a Pitbull, I'll conclude it was a Pitbull.
So it might be or might not be. Did they have papers on it ?
According to not only the podcast but also a book on the subject mentioned in the pod a LOT of people think they own PBs but dna testing shows them to be other breeds , something like 1/5 of dogs thought to be PBs without papers are not PBs .
The fact that it takes a DNA test to tell , should be evidence alone that breed ban laws are dumb
Just ban any dog which looks and acts like it could be a fucking pitbull, rather that endlessly walrusing about arbitrary distinctions between the races.
“The #1 breed requirement of our dogs is to be non-violent so every time they are violent they can’t be our breed” is some No True Scotsman nonsense that epitomizes the pitbull apologist mindset. Every attack is an exception, but every peaceful dog anecdote is the rule.
The idea that a breed that was bred for violence and literally no other job can be dumbed down into a docile marshmallow is incredibly naive.
I’m a AKC dog breeder, and while I am not in the Bull or terrier world, it’s insulting that people think the demeanor of dogs can be changed in such a short period of time. It takes dozens of generations and careful crossings to breed out unwanted traits and refine them.
First off, what kind of dog? (Because, you know, dogs). Secondly, while I admire that someone would try and breed aggression out of them, you’re right, it’s going to take some time to get there. (And I suspect it will also come with some significant changes in physical characteristics associated with more docile breeds—less muscle, rounder bodies, etc.)
Cavalier King Charles spaniels! Unfortunately yes, it would take time and you are correct in that a lot of physical traits would follow the changing of the personality. If you’re interested in what cross breeding to change even minor characteristics would be like, look into LUA Dalmatians, or the Backcross project. This was to change ONE trait in Dalmatians by crossing them with a pointer, and it took 40 years for the kennel club to accept the stock. While that’s very much (lower case)political, It’s daunting to think what a project would look like for a class of dogs to essentially be bred to reject the original purpose of the breed.
OMG I LOVE CAVALIER KING CHARLES SPANIELS!!!!!
It’s a breed plagued with a lot of health issues. People don’t seem to care about it as much because spaniels don’t outwardly look as deformed as pugs do.
I do too!! I want one but my husband doesn't like the look of them. Blurg!
Yeah, I had one, so smart. I developed a good arm after throwing the ball 10K every day.
OK but the AKC is a bit deranged in this department. Like the guy with huskies from Siberia but no, they couldn't be registered as Siberian Huskies. The Basenji folks managed it somehow. In general I'm not impressed with what happens to AKC breeds. I wasn't glad to see Beaucerons become an AKC breed.
It’s also insulting that people think PBs are somehow more dangerous than other similar breeds.
The science doesn’t support it
yes it does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_dog_attacks_in_the_United_States the vast majority of these dogs are pitbull type dogs.
Retrievers innately know how to retrieve, pointers point fresh outta the womb, herding dogs herd people and other critters, sled dogs love to pull shit, fighting dogs... are very sweet and don't do anything, what are you talking about?!
Definitely no inborn breed traits here!!
https://imgur.com/lPlHgYm
Cute!
All dogs fight or at least are bread from dogs that fight
All dogs bite , that’s what the teeth are for
Also all dogs can point, pointers are just better at it
It’s weird, too, like breeding a panda with a taste for toddlers. It seems to me that you’d have a reason for doing this but I’m not seeing what it is, unless it’s as simple as “think fusion cuisine, but for eugenics.”
Right, if you really want a medium-sized dog that’s a docile marshmallow, labs are right there. So what’s the point of all this?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” - another movie
Was the movie the one about the dog named Cujo whose title I can’t remember?
Uh, no, this movie has much bigger dogs.
The title of the movie about the dog named "Cujo" is "Cujo."
Labs are cuter, too!
Absolutely...
My brother's French bulldog was sweet, old, and lazy, but whenever she saw a plushed toy, her instincts kicked in and she tore it to shreds in seconds. And this is a breed that has had their hunting instinct bred out of them for more than a century!
It has also been bred not to be able to breathe properly, so that helps.
She was from a breeder who specialised in longer-muzzled Frenchies. When she was younger, she could walk for several hours without tiring or being out of breath.
I’ve rarely seen a modern bulldog that didn’t look slightly mutant (and totally alien from how they looked 100 years ago.) They’re cute in a cartoonish sense, but I kinda think they would be better off if the whole line got cancelled then cross-bred with a bunch of mystery mutts going forward.
My mom's maltese enjoys killing mice. He's 8lbs soaking wet and is also a breed that has had its hunting instinct bred out of it for centuries.
In the episode, Katie explicitly says pitbull only rank in the middle of the pack on the aggression scale. So, the idea pitbulls are especially violent is unsupported by data.
Reality suggests otherwise, but regardless, that is for human aggression only. They are very high for dog aggression. And more to the point, aggression level is only one factor; the level of damage they can do when they harness that aggression is more important. That’s why chihuahua bites might be underreported, but it doesn’t really matter because the reason they weren’t reported is they didn’t do much damage in the first place.
She quoted a lot of misleading pro-pit propaganda that's been knocking around for decades, unfortunately. I think that in her zeal to be evenhanded, she got taken for a ride.
Pits were like a lot of dogs, some were bred for fighting, some were bred for family.
I have a Boston Terrier sleeping next to me right now. America's first dog breed. She was bred for fighting and killing rats. Fighting and killing. All she does is fart, beg for food and snore like a defensive tackle.
Oof... Any breed can be pushed to its limit. Some get their faster than others. Generally speaking, I like Pitties, but at some point people have to just acknowledge they are not the dog for everyone.
A Pit Bull Terrier is never the right dog for the owner's neighbors. This is the only acceptable moral stance.
That is the biggest complaint I hear: The neighborhood had the biggest problem with the dog. 🤦🏻♀️
A 52-year-old man in the next county from me was killed by his neighbour's two XL Bully dogs last weekend. So, yeah. https://www.staffordshire-live.co.uk/news/local-news/man-killed-xl-bully-dog-8755463
Pitbull owner: "Look, you can't just leave your 52 year-old man unsupervised around a dog. Who knows what kind of mischief he might get into -- could have happened with a Chihuahua just as easily -- and then can you blame the dog for reacting like it did?"
He repaired and installed cabinets, had two kids, was visiting his elderly mother who lived across the street, it happened right near a primary school, he died a terrifying, horrific death. For anyone saying "We don't know the EXACT breed," okay, fine, Katie may be talking about one very specific breed for some odd reason. The rest of us are talking about big super-muscled dogs bred to fight to the kill with oversized jaws that have incredible crushing power. We are talking about ALL of those dogs, okay? Do you get it?
Well some of “those dogs” in the statistics were labradors.
Not for nothing, the dog breed isn’t established in the story. “Two *suspected* bully XLs”. This is a big part of the story Katie is telling.
Exactly—the precise breed responsible for these attacks is pretty unclear.
Holy shit. The article said this happened right across the street from a primary school.
Do you generally think that the neighbors are right? Or do you think they are just being prejudiced?
As someone with a people-friendly/dog-neutral chihuahua mix, it usually doesn’t take long before my neighbors/the vets/my family are singing her praises even if they aren’t chi people.
One of my (many) bad experiences with pits was living next to one that clearly wanted to kill my cats. The owner’s caretaker admitted to leaving her cats behind to move in because the dog would kill them. Mine are indoor-only but they sometimes got out and explored the stairs. I was worried one of those escapades would be their death, and it wasn’t like the dogs owners were capable of restraining him. No, I did not appreciate them deciding on my behalf to take that risk.
Given what I know about the dog, people, and cat aggression in the breed I would probably not warm up to a pit bull on my street particularly fast even if it was friendly but I don’t think you can blame me. This isn’t about barking or even nipping.
I mean, I think it can go either way. I feel like I know a lot of pittie owners who have no business having anything more than a Shih Tzu, but I think there are also a LOT of unreasonable neighbors who just see a big dog and lose their minds.
My corgi nipped at my 4-year-old niece 3 years ago, and my brother in law thinks my marshmallow of a herding dog would rip a child apart limb from limb. For the record, everyone else in the family (except my sister and my niece who is now afraid of dogs) thinks he’s being unreasonable. Considering my priors, I’m generally more sympathetic to dog owners.
“The only acceptable moral stance”…
“The only acceptable moral stance?” Jesus who do you think you are? Oh wait, I already answered my question. I don’t even necessarily disagree with you but golly you’re an irritating prick.
No direct insults, please. When you say something like that, it can be turned directly back against you and then the flush down the toilet begins.
This is an easy mistake to make, if you don't know that pit bulls don't attack for the same reasons as other dogs. They're bred to be capable of attacking when they're happy and calm -- such as when they're taken to a dogfight. Also, they're bred to fight without stopping for the usual reasons dogs stop fighting.
The danger of pit bull attacks has nothing to do with "being pushed to its limit."
Regular dogs can become dangerous because they've been mistreated or poorly trained or for a whole host of reasons why they've turned out messed up, and/or unhappy and/or mean. Pit bulls are dangerous because they're bred to be that way. It doesn't matter how nice an upbringing they've had. They can be truly loving, but they can even be fatal to the humans they love.
I think people have a hard time accepting you can’t just do something like code a biological system where 100% of the time it will behave a certain way. We’re not computers and neither are dogs.
That said, this is a mysterious one to me. I don’t know what the policy that would be to end this. I have a joking thought that in the far future you’ll have to have a license to own a dog but other than for that I don’t know how you enforce anything you write down.
Yeah, in my county dog owners are required to register their dog (which who knows how many of them do). I think it could be more well-enforced though, and I think there should be some serious fines/punishment involved if your dog becomes a public nuisance or hazard.
I also think there should be some legal requirements for breeding dogs. I'm not saying the AKC should be the governing body necessarily, but I think if you're breeding dogs, you should have a license for it and should adhere to standards of genetic testing and health.
Back yard breeders really get my goat. Sure your dog is cute, but unless you actually know what you're doing, you shouldn't be breeding your dog. I don't think you have to be an AKC breeder, but you really should consult an expert before breeding your dog and make sure they don't have any markers for hip displaysia, degenerative diseases, etc. This story pointed out that a lot of pittie breeders circumvent general breeding standards, and that really isn't okay.
I live in Germany and you have to have a license and pay a yearly tax to own a dog. No idea if it makes any difference though
That’s incredible because it would be so unthinkable in the states.
Idk how it works in Germany but in my locality, you’re supposed to register your pet with the county and pay a small annual fee. This system is basically to ensure your pet is vaccinated against rabies. I believe this is pretty common in the US.
Which state? Genuinely have never heard of this.
Every state I’ve ever lived in has required this, too. Enforcement is basically non-existent, though.
Really? When my dog was living I had to license her in every one of the five states we lived in over time. The process was pretty much the same across all of them.
Georgia - Basically you’re supposed to get them vaccinated against rabies every year. You don’t get the rabies vaccination tag until you register your pet with the county and pay the ~$20 fee. The tag comes in the mail and is supposed to be worn around the pet’s collar. I think the way it’s supposed to work is that if your pet bites someone, you can just show them the rabies vaccination tag and they can rest easy that they don’t have rabies. If you don’t have a tag, I’m not totally sure but stiffer legal penalties may apply if your pet bites someone.
In one county I’ve lived in, you can provide your pet’s microchip number to the county so that they can contact you if your pet gets found. So that’s kind of neat. And I keep saying “pet” because this applies to cats too.
So it definitely qualifies as a license/registry system but it’s not like they assess your fitness for animal ownership or anything like that.
In NYS, I registered my dog with the town for a small free & proof of rabies vaccination. Allegedly I’m supposed to renew this every year, but lol, no.
Most that I know of have requirements on the state, county or municipal level. It is not generally actively enforced.
If your dog is picked up by an animal control officer, or is reported for biting, you might be fined and required to get a license, with a low annual fee. In my town it's $6. It helps offset the expense of the ACO's salary.
MN has registration requirements for "Dangerous Breeds" :
https://mn.gov/elicense/a-z/?id=1083-230637#/list/appId//filterType//filterValue//page/1/sort//order/
Most cities also have ordinances. E.g., my city of Duluth requires a license for all cats and dogs in the city:
https://duluthmn.gov/city-clerk/licenses-permits/animal-licensing/
I think annual registration is pretty common? I’ve lived in AZ and MI and have to pay a small registration fee each year. Mostly for rabies vaccine. They also charge more for non-neutered dogs.
An anecdote!
Yes, I could not understand why she kept repeating this argument. Who cares if it’s really a pitbull and not an XL Bully - pitbulls were already banned in Britain.
That’s why they want to ban the bully: its a loophole where pitbull descendants are allowed into the UK. It’s allowing these large pitbulls to be legal until they hurt someone. I don’t care what breed this not-a-pitbull pitbull technically is. There’s a reason there are so many pitbull breeds: so people can no-true-scotsman any attack.
You seem to be ignoring two facts which cut to the heart of the breed -ban fallacy:
1. We don't really know what breed we're banning (and maybe don't care, it just feels good).
2. Breed-specific bans don't seem to reduce the total number of dog-on-human attacks.
Katie's whole exposé was really just about the idiocy of breed bans- but also how they seem to arouse a certain authoritarian boner in some people.
Right, this. And it’s logistically impossible to test every single dog out there.
Maybe this is also rather auth but it would make more practical sense for there to just make it more inconvenient for people to own poorly behaved large dogs — if a large dog bites someone enough for them to go to the doctor they should have a behavioral analysis done and euthanized if they’re considered a danger.
Yes. I really think the answer is not to ban or euthanize specific breeds, but to increase the dis-incentives for ownership of dogs that are uncontrolled and dangerous. This could be done via the US tort system (a slow moving oil tanker for sure), but other than that I'm not sure how you do it.
To your second point: Breed-specific legislation (BSL) does reduce the number of harmful dog-on-human attacks. (Bites from little dogs don't matter as much. Bites from dogs that bite and then LET GO don't matter as much. Bites from dogs that can be chased off don't matter as much).
Breed-specific legislation also reduces the number of pit bulls euthanized.
It's a myth that BSL doesn't do any good.
I agree that may be fallacy and said so in an earlier post. Just because Dave Wilson said-and probably believes-that he bred a docile pit bull doesn't mean he succeeded.
That’s why Kimbo was a registered pitbull (under one of the older fancy pitbull names). Bullies are a new pitbull variant and even if the breeders have tried to tone down the negative pitbull traits traits they have not had time to eliminate them.
The question is “is Kimbo an ancestor of many bullies” and if the answer is yes, then bullies are clearly pitbull derivatives.
Its like someone decided to breed low-energy aussies and one made the news a decade later for herding people or sheep and then a bunch of people saying it was clearly an Australian shepherd instead of an Australian no-herd. It really doesn’t matter--they are just an Australian Shepherd variant like show line vs working line labs. You expect them to show some of the working traits even the undesirable ones.
😂
No, ban all the variants of the thing you are tying to ban.
So, dogs?
No. Specific breeds of dogs, and their variants. There are some weapons you want to ban. You want to ban all those of biological weapons from civilian ownership. That doesn't mean you want to ban knives because of their similarities to biological weapons.
No. The ep already made it clear that determining breed is especially difficult which is why experts disagree with breed specific bans. Moreover, your biological weapons bans is a category error, if that were to work you’d need to break down which bioweapons you’re trying to ban. You’re making my point for me.
Kind of like controlled substance analogues, except in this case it's controlled... animal analogues?
It makes sense, although it's hard to write analogue laws and even harder to understand where they apply and don't apply. That complexity unfortunately seems to be a byproduct of a complex world.
I have had so many bad experiences with pits--far outnumbering other breeds (and I have lived next to the kind of chihuahua that gives the breed a bad reputation.
1) A pit puppy ended up beneath my car as a child and we had to get animal control to remove it since it was snapping and growling when we tried to get close.
2) my upstairs neighbor had a Emotional Support Pitbull in a no-dogs apartment. It pulled its two owners around my apartment (he had more muscle than either put together) and fixated on my cats in the window. The owner admitted it was cat aggressive. I was worried for months that one day my cats would escape and then die.
I then moved into the house next to the demon chihuahua. I never worried about mine or my pets safety.
3) I was chased by two loose pit bulls while biking home from work a block away from an elementary school. No owner in sight, and I wasn’t going to get off the bike to find out if they were friendly to walkers. I have been briefly chased by other dogs, but they’ve all been controlled by owners.
4) one aggressive pitbull cleared out an entire dog park and lunged at the corgi who was the last dog out. The owner of a very large poodle mix spotted the car and said “this is a bad dog and we need to leave” and all five dogs and their people cleared out as fast as possible--to the point of sending me back for a water bottle since I didn’t have a dog to wrangle.
(The woman was a career high school security guard. She has honed instincts.)
5) a pitbull being walked by a jogger with headphones on growled at my chihuahua who I had pulled off the trail. I have NEVER been growled at by a dog being walked before or since--barked at, sure. Also, fuck that owner in particular.
I learned my lesson. If I see you walking your pit and can’t get away in time, I’ll pick my girl up. I don’t care if your offended, my dog is worth more.
I am sure some are fine, but I don’t trust them and I don’t trust their owners. The cost of “but he’s never done that before” is too damn high.
There’s a reason shelters are full of pitbulls and it isn’t haters like me--its the fault of the breeders.
Sorry to hear about your bad experiences. My sister's dog was attacked out of the blue by a pitbull one day. Her dogwalker simply opened the door to the apartment, my sister's dog stepped onto the sidewalk, and a pitbull (on a leash, with another dogwalker) happened to be there. Apparently it was surprised, and immediately lunged at my sister's dog and went straight for the neck. Happily, my sister's dog survived, though with a massive (and I mean massive) wound to her neck. What if it hadn't been a dog? What if it had been a kid walking out of that door?
Anyway, setting aside the possible problems of the breed's nature itself, what really kills me is that each time I hear a pitbull story, the owner is always absentee or indifferent or casual about the tremendous violence of their pet. I have yet to hear a pitbull story where a pitbull mauls another dog or acts aggressively towards a person and the owner goes out of his or her way to try and make the situation better.
Returning to my sister's story, my sister and her husband contacted the owner of the pitbull and asked for compensation for veterinary bills (not cheap, as you can imagine). The owners absolutely refused, demanded that my sister stop contacting them and their dogwalker, etc. It took me, an attorney, helping my sister draft a letter threatening to sue them in court before the owners would take responsibility. And the owners didn't give off the air of being destitute; the man was a civil engineer and the woman was a nurse.
Anyway. I want to be open minded about this, so I guess I'll ask in general: what's the strongest argument for allowing people to continue breeding pitbulls?
The unanswerable question here is: What are people getting out of pitbulls that they can’t get from any number of lower-risk dogs?
This really is the ultimate issue -- if the only "use case" for your dog is companionship, then there are dozens of incontestably less dangerous breeds to pick from.
I adopted mine because I didn't know. He was a 10 week old puppy who looked very much like a lab. I didn't think he was full bred but I didn't look at him and immediately think he was a pit. I did his DNA and he is 40% pit. Now he's almost a year and becoming aggressive, I'm hiring a behavioral trainer and taking him to Penn Veterinary Hospital department of Behavioral Medicine. I didn't ask for this, I didn't want a pit but now I have him. He wasn't free either, far from it.
In the Philadelphia area it seems like you have three options for dogs: shelter which is almost entirely pit, rescues who drive for South to bring back pits or get a dog from an Amish puppy mill and have your dog from some inbred disease early. It's bad
Hi Julia,
I'm sorry that you ended up with a tricky dog. I did too. I knew he was a bully mix but I didn't know what I was in for. Thankfully mine isn't at all human agressive but he is very dog selective. I've done a lot of work with my boy and he's incredibly well trained now and still has shown no sign of human agreession, he's eight, and he has a few dog friends that I supervise all interactions with. I would never allow him to meet a strange dog and have sevearl tools to prevent that.
All this to say that sometimes a good trainer can do wonders with a dog, because of how into dog training I became I have dog training contacts in the US should you want me check in with my contacts to find a reccomendation. Hopefully the trainer you have does the trick but there are trainers and trainers.
Good luck, it's not easy but it can be super rewarding.
My instagram is @annaandboodle if you want to dm me any questions or if you would like me to look into trainers in your area.
I never heard the phrase "dog selective" before today. I saw it on a list of code words shelters use to mask aggression in dogs. It means "might kill another dog."
Good luck. I feel bad for people in your situation. You didn’t seek this out.
Thank you.
I am really hoping that he is young enough that we can manage this with some changed expectations and a lot of work. I have been crying all weekend over it.
I’ve heard “I can fix him” syndrome and that’s probably the best explanation (for female owners) that you’re likely to get.
They are available right now for free or cheap. I had to drive 45 minutes out of state to adopt a small dog from a rescue. If I had wanted a pit ( or in my area, a husky) I could have gotten a discount and stayed in town.
Which kind of proves the point - shelter dogs aren’t usually the product of careful breeding, to say the least, and a lot of time they get surrendered because of behavioral issues.
Whether or not aggressiveness can be bred out of the pitbull, there are a *lot* of baby pits and pit mixes out there that were decidedly not a product of such careful genetics.
Shelters around my area always have pits/pit mixes.
I had a pit many years ago. Free. We took the runt of the litter, very submissive, a sweet-natured obedient good boy. At 60-65 lbs he looked scary, which I appreciated, as we were very isolated, far out in the country, and I was often home alone.
I got mine because I like powerful breeds, my first dog was a Rottweiler. I didn't realise how much more difficult training would be with this one, I got him at one year and I had my Rotti from a puppy. Now I enjoy dog training and bulldogs are fun to train. My next dog will probably be a Belgian Malinois, I can almost guarantee they will be the next dog that's banned because they're becoming popular, their lines are being watered down and they're ending up in the hands of people who have no business having them.
I'm in the minority, most people I know get bully breeds becasue they're up for adoption. Pit Bull rescue advocates have done the breed, American Pit Bull Terrior, an enromous disservice by putting them in flower crowns and saying they're the friendliest dogs. The back yard breeding is also a huge problem becasue we're seeing dogs that were bred to have tenacity and strength becoming nervous wrecks.
The problem with all these dogs starts with the breeding. Good breeders won't let someone with no dog experience have a powerful dog, they'll take back dogs that aren't a good fit. Back yard breeding is the real problem and it's why no one is talking about Cane Corsos or Fila Brasileiro. People don't know what they don't know and 'you can save them all', 'adopt don't shop' people are doing more harm than good.
Sorry I went off on a tangent there.
This is very sensible
100% agree. I don't get it. I'd love to hear the argument for it.
This is what I was wondering, too.
THEY NEVER APOLOGIZE
I was attacked out of the blue by a pitbull! I was in my mid 20s so when it lunged at me it got my leg, not my face, but it could easily have killed a small child with the same bite. As far as I can tell my crime was looking at it from across the room while having a conversation with its owner. That was like 6 years ago and I still have scars. The bruise turned into a hematoma that lasted several months. I will never go near a pitbull again, especially not one that's off leash. I exercise caution around pit mixes too (hard to avoid them completely, I know so many people who own them).
I'm a lifelong dog lover and that experience put the fear of god in me re: pitbulls. The power behind their bite is, frankly, fucking insane.
I wish people would stop breeding all dogs and cats. At least until the shelters are empty and stay that way. I know that will never happen, but that's what I wish. I am sure there are exceptions to this, but most of the people I've ever met who have strong pro-pitbull opinions are rescuers or owners of rescue dogs who fear breed bans would mean the confiscation and euthanasia of their pit bulls or other rescue pit bull type pets (I'm not saying that laws that would do that are being seriously considered, I'm just saying that's what I think the real fear is for the people I know.) I can also say without a doubt that every single one of those people would cheer a ban on *breeding* them, as they are like me, and would cheer a ban on all breeding. (I love dogs, but I have no real skin in this argument, I do cat rescue.)
I 100% support mandatory neutering for all dogs unless they are literal AKC breeding stock with papers and even then owners should have to pay for that right (maybe with proceeds going to sterilization of other dogs)
Ah yes, the "emotional support" dog. I have always wondered what happens when someone's emotional support dog is aggressive. The whole emotional support animal thing falls under the Fair Housing Act, but if the animal is menacing people, it could be endangering other residents and I would argue that it's infringing on their rights. Nobody wants to get to the point where the ESA has to be euthenized because it's hurt or killed a human or another pet.
I'm a big dog lover, but I'm scared of the poorly behaved dogs in airports whose owners have clearly fudged their ESA documentation. Those owners are the last people I trust to control their animals if anything happens in a small space where I'm stuck with my kids.
Yeah, I love dogs but they need to be trained and if someone cannot train their dog, they should not have a dog. And this seems to be more common with people who claim to have ESA dogs.
I believe they can kick them out once that happens but that’s cold comfort to whatever person or pet drew the short straw.
I’ve had several chihuahuas who never bit (well, one did if we tried to trim his nails so he was muzzled), but the only time I’ve been “attacked” by a dog was when I was walking near someone’s house and a loose chihuahua (as in free, not freaky) ran out of nowhere and nipped my ankle. Just a tiny flesh wound but I reported that little fucker so her owner would get a hint.
I wouldn’t trust a Pitt with one of my chihuahuas, either. I worked in an animal hospital and a dog in for grooming, a bull terrier, attacked an killed a resident hospital cat that was in a wheelchair (named Carty). We all had bad feelings seeing that damned Target dog for years after. I understand why people can’t shake those feelings. I’m still traumatized just having read last year about a mom whose two little children were killed by their family Pitt bull. She almost died trying to save them.
My neighbors chihuahua liked to bark at anyone in his territory--which included my yard. He did get pretty close to me when my back was turned trying to start a lawnmower but backed off when I turned around.
I always figured the worst based scenario was a bandaid and some oral antibiotics.
Chihuahuas are a genuinely mistreated dog breed and they do have some breed characteristics that can make them unpleasant (they are often one person dogs). But they don’t kill anyone or any other dogs or cats, and I don’t think its just the size. They are a lot more bark than they are bite. (But they can be a LOT of bark.)
Mine is great toward people but not interested in other dogs. I follow her signals to get out of the way of over enthusiastic small breed pups but I worry about a big dog reacting badly to her snapping at them. I have seen it twice, with friendly big dogs who either backed up or failed to get the memo and kept sniffing her. I don’t let her great big dogs I don’t know, whatever their breed or any supersize dogs, even ones I know to be friendly.
I love, love, love chihuahuas. I had three. My last one made it to 17. We just got a Goldendoodle a couple of months ago and it’s not fair to him...I love him, but he’s no chihuahua. I think it’s harder for me to baby him like I did with my chis, so my relationship with him is different. When he was smaller I kept putting him on my lap, but he’s twice as big now. 😂
I keep telling my husband I still have a chihuahua sized hole in my heart. 😭
Small dogs are wonderful, and so unfairly maligned.
I really used to dislike Chihuahuas due to their image as Paris-Hilton-designer-handbag-dogs, but since my brother got one, they've really grown on me. His is like a squirrel on speed who's delighted about everything that's happening and everyone he meets (even strangers).
I love his dog based on your description alone!
I now have a chihuahua mixed with something terrier but still small only 10 lb and I never thought I would like a small dog but it's a really special bond you get with them and she bonds to more than one person which helps.
My sweet chihuahua Daisy was a gem!
Lazy since birth, she could just hang out on the front porch all day, unleashed. Once in a while she would get up and poke around in the front yard for awhile. She rarely barked. The most aggressive she got was glaring at people.
She could kill with those eyes, I bet. :)
I’m following you now here in case you post any chihuahua pics in Notes!
That's probably smart. I have a really docile big old dog that our local chihuahuas love to terrorize. He used to show his teeth at them, and I worried that he might bite, but now he just hangs his head down and walks away. I'm always amazed by the gumption of chihuahuas.
I swear on everything holy that when our two PB mixes were kenneled while we were on vacation that a chihuahua reached its head through a fence and bit a huge hole in one of my dog’s faces requiring a trip to the vet and seven stitches. Owner of the kennel saw the whole thing and said my dog was wagging its tail just curious and the other dog was aggressive for no reason.
ALL dogs have the capacity for aggression. Do I hate all chihuahuas? No.
It is a bit unfair that small dogs can get away with bad behavior because it doesn’t have bad consequences but if you want to own a dog breed capable of milling adult humans you will be held to a higher standard.
Chihuahuas can be very protective of their space and their body. It’s a negative breed trait but when literally everything around them can kill them it makes some sense.
One bite, stitches required attacks are bad, and I would support euthanizing a dog that did that unprovoked whatever the breeders. All dog breeds can do that. What kills people and dogs are the extended mauling attacks that fighting dogs were bred for. Not all do them, but enough do. And they wag their tails the entire time.
It's not all that unfair. One can kill you.
Sorry, tail wagging means nothing. Pit bulls wag their tails when they kill smaller dogs all the time. I will trust yours was being friendly and I’m sorry about the expense--but it was seven stitches. You didn’t worry about your dog dying.
Again, I was not there, but I'm going to trust the kennel owner who said that the attack was unprovoked. I truly understand how much you and others despise PBs, PB mixes and their owners; you've been quite clear on all of that.
I can only speak from my "lived experience" that we have never had issues with our dogs. I know that the horror stories are also true. Our vet told me that she's never been bitten by a PB but has lost count of the number of times she's been bitten by chihuahuas. Of course, bites by PBs are more serious because they are stronger and can do more damage. I don't know what the answer is.
“I can only speak from my "lived experience" that we have never had issues with our dogs.”
That’s what the story was about the family whose pitts mauled two young children to death last year, and almost killed the mom. (Hey, if I witnessed my dog kill both of my kids, knowing it was partially my fault for owning those death dogs, I’d pray it killed me.)
Tail wagging does in fact mean something. It means the same for pit bulls as for any other dog -- happiness, contentment, etc., in most cases. The difference is that they are capable of being content while doing things that other dogs only do under stress. The reason is that a sport-fighting dog must be willing to attack and fight on command -- as willing as it might be to lie down and roll over on command.
In their defense chihuahuas are notorious for dental problems and end up needing many removed. (Bad attempt at a joke, but this is also true.)
How difficult would it be to make owners liable for crimes committed by their dogs?
Your dog bit someone? You're liable as if you bit that person. Your dog killed a baby? You killed that baby.
You are responsible for your dog's behaviour and freedom, after all.
I’m sorry, I’ve been bit by German Sheppards, collies, what looked like a golden retriever..lots of dogs. In my experience it comes down to owners and what sort of life the dog has led.
When you were bit, did they hold on for dear life, clamping down and not letting go until something drastic happened? Would that golden retriever have torn a child to shreds while wagging its tail? If not, then your anecdote doesn't apply to Pitbulls.
I have less of a problem with the GSD reference, they're in a distant second place to Pitbulls when it comes to aggression and danger to children.
There was one that I thought I would have to kill. Short answer is no though. Is your solution to just kill them all?! That’s a lot of dog killing.
Yeah, of course. We kill a hell of a lot more animals than that, animals that are completely harmless, every single year. Hell, probably every single month. After keeping them in a desolate prison for their very short lives.
No, I don't pretend that this is realistic legislation. We live in a free country, and we are free to own a variety of different killing machines, including pitbulls.
While you’re absolutely right about the number of animals killed, those animals-the vast majority anyway- produce food or byproducts that are of use to us at scale. The dead dogs wouldn’t be unless we started to “make use” of the meat. It’s ugly no matter how you cut it-no pun intended.
Well of course it's ugly. We're talking about the dismantling of a whole violent section of society, and a conscious one at that. That's gonna be extremely ugly, even if the only consequence is a fine for being caught with one.
Not trying to be hyperbolic. This is an honest question. What do you propose we do with the vast number of these dogs? Banning them won’t make them disappear.
Not at all hyperbolic, it's a fair question. I'm familiar with the politics of banning; I'm pro-gun.
The anti-pit, pro-breed-specific-legislation people I know do NOT want any dogs killed (if they haven't attacked/mauled/killed). They advocate for education and neuter/spay.
This episode did that typical thing Americans often do of using american anecdotes and evidence to evaluate the laws of another country. For example Katie argued that banning American bully's would be hard because they are hard to distinguish from pit bulls, but pit bulls are already banned in the UK! If anything this will make laws easier to enforce, as the "it's not a pit bull it's bully" excuse won't work anymore. A lot of the other breeds that Katie mentioned as dangerous are already banned in the UK.
Similarly, the fact that some attacks weren't actually by American bully's seems irrelevant. If owners are registering dangerous dogs as American bully's to get around a ban then the ban will be useful, irrespective of what the breed actually is
Precisely the main point I came here to make. Thank you for saving me typing it out ✌️
Exactly this. Also, it was weird that Katie completely overlooked the unavoidable fact that US Bully XLs and UK Bully XLs are, by necessity, divergent strains of the same family. At best. It’s really common for purebred animals to be different between America and Europe, simply because the distance mean they are largely seperate genepools with some occasional crossover. Even if Bully XLs in the US are bred specifically for docility, that doesn’t mean the dogs sold under that name across a major ocean have the same genetics. In fact, it’s more likely that they don’t.
A major issue I found with was how Katie repeatedly cited the UKC or the United Kennel club. This kennel club was founded out of the American Kennel Club refusing to accept American Pitbull Terriers as part of it. They are not the gold standard of kennel clubs and are a FOR profit corporation that takes the misfits and problematic breeders who do not meet the standards of the AKC. I wish she spoke to breeders from the AKC who explained why almost all Pitbull type dogs are not allowed.
Maybe she turns it around, but thus far Katie is a bit credulous about accepting what the pro-pit people are telling her.
I listened to the entire thing and she really thinks they have a bad rep because the way the activist organizations and media framed the issue. I’m really disappointed at how she really didn’t question these breeders further and didn’t bother to learn the history of Kennel clubs.
Does she address the statistics at all?
To some degree, and to be fair she’s right in that it’s hard to find good stats about pitbulls which prove the narrative they are dangerous.
It’s hard if you insist on disbelieving your lying eyes and needing breed papers to identify a pit bull as a pit bull. The stats use the same heuristics anyone would if they’re trying to avoid a violent dog — what it looks like. Dogs that have enough pit bull genes to look like pit bulls are, well, pit bulls, and dogs that look like that account for the vast majority of serious dog bites.
I agree with you, I was using her train of logic here. And I’ll add, the majority of Pitbull type dogs DO NOT come from breeders with any kennel club. It’s almost irrelevant any breeders say they are breeding for temperament given most pits are from very irresponsible backyard situations
The one thing I do like about Bronwen Dickey is that she says pit bulls are a shape, not a breed. I just reject her follow-up arguments that I'm racist to be scared of the shape.
It’s like the BS from TRAs that we need more studies on whether men who identify as women REALLY have any advantages against women in sports.
You can wait for more research or, just, open your eyes.
Misidentification of mixed breed dogs as pit bulls is extremely high. Even by experienced professionals[1].
For non experts, misidentification is even higher.
Not to be flippant, but not believing your lying eyes is statistically the most rational position. (it's kind of what separates science from feels)
1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109002331500310X
She did talk to scientists , all of whom mostly agree that breed specific laws are dumb
Pit bull breeders & paedos, Katie seems to accept their claim with a low bar of skepticism.
I really wish they would/could do an ep on D. Caroline Coile — canine researcher, author of Pit Bulls for Dummies (& scores of other books), who swore off the breed due to their aggressiveness, and IIRC was viciously cancelled by the “pitties are misunderstood” crowd. But on the other hand, I expect Coile would rather not have it dredged up again.
Part of the reason you can have a “pitties are misunderstood” crowd is that the majority of pit bulls never do anything seriously wrong, and there are a lot of people who have owned well behaved ones. The problem with them is obviously a law of averages problem: because they have been eugenically bred for fighting and boar baiting, they are much more likely to go mad and savage a person or pet than other breeds. But the data are sometimes lost to the anecdotes.
They're like Russian roulette.
The prostasia episode really made Katie look like the kind of credulous clown she usually makes fun of
At first I read that last name as Collie and thought "nominative determinism viciously attacks again!"
She's a Border Colle
I think this is all a metajoke about the credulity of the media on incredibly self evident truths that they can't see because of bias...that's what she's doing, right? Please just say yes
Oh damn, that's one viscous burn. You're 100% right, too.
Man have I lost respect for Katie this week.
I hate to say it but I'm starting to fall off this podcast. If the issue being discussed is anything other than gender stuff, both hosts end up a frustrating mix of incurious, uncritical, and just plain lazy. Little things like their refusal to look up how to pronounce names correctly comes off as childish for two people approaching 40 and who, more importantly, making enough money off this podcast that Katie can afford two houses (her protests about how they're "shitty" to the contrary, the greater Seattle and Asheville areas are not cheap) and Jesse weeks-long European vacations. It's not cute or novel anymore.
I don’t think Katie was lazy in this episode and I appreciate that she put in a lot of work. I think her fatal error was being so concerned about her bias and confirming her priors that she overcorrected and accepted too many claims from the bully side uncritically.
Agree 100% in this case, but I thought Katie's repeated assertions that she worked really hard on *this* one kinda suggests that there might be some phoning it in at other times. I have left some episodes recently thinking, "is that it?"
Well, I think it was the time-sensitive component (because it's a hot news story) that was leaving her a little frazzled. Her previous investigative work, like the Unitarian Church blowup and the UofR sexual misonduct story were well out of the news by the time she looked into them, so it was more of a "cook it until it is done" situation and she didn't have to chase up phone calls and emails so frantically. I do think she did a lot of work here, but the main problem is that her conclusions all hang on one breeder of dubious reputation 1) actually trying to do what he claimed and 2) accomplishing what he claimed he was trying to do. I think that should have been regarded with extreme skepticism in the absence of any corroberating evidence, and I don't think it was.
By contrast, the episode that I thought Jesse got wildly wrong (CitiBike Karen) was because he failed to look into deeply enough to understand even the initial situation, much less the nonsense that followed.
Those two examples are what come to mind when I think of what this podcast does best.
Different strokes.
If any of the dog breeder organizations told me the sky was blue I’d open a window and check the sky. These are the people who let people breed dogs who need to sit on ice after mild exercise.
"Go to a dog show. And see that they are not the monsters you read about them in the press."
That this argument made it into the episode infuriated me. Nobody says, that they are 24/7 rage machines - but that they have maintained certain traits that can cause them to suddenly attack in certain circumstances paired with a bite strength and behavior that further aggravates any attack.
And it’s dumb. The dogs that make it to shows are the best behaved. It’s almost like judging disciplinary policy in schools based on the behavior of students in the top private schools. Self-selected groups are not representative of the population.
You realize that the show dogs have the same genetics . If the show dogs are so well behaved it must be the handlers or bad samples of the breed that has nothing to do with the breed standard . Also by your logic you should ban the show dog bully but let the near feral border collie or whatever that might actually bite somebody be legally kept ?
Because I said a thing about self-selected groups being used as representative I am in favor of feral collies in dog shows? Do I have that right?
What if the Bully XL breeders came out in force with their dogs to prove they are safe and non-aggressive?
Oh--wait. The Bully XL enthusiasts are banning bully XLs from their own marches:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/xl-american-bully-protest-london-b2417473.html
I can’t stop laughing, my sides! Of course they can’t bring their dogs, if they brought their dogs and something happened that would be the end of any support for their cause.
OMG.
There are other reasons to ban dogs from an event . Like the venue doesn’t want them. Also dogs shit and piss. Imagine having to clean up after hundreds of them
The kinds of people who own these dogs in the UK correlate very strongly with people who do not clean up after their dogs.
I would not trust the words of rogue breeders like Wilson further than I can throw their pure muscle, jaws of iron, inbred-and-therefore-psychologically-messed-up-and-likely-in-chronic-pain dogs. It's a huuuuuge moneymaking market, and it's all about, gosh, the concept of "bully," would you believe? The bottom line is, even beyond this clear market for violent dogs, we are breeding ALL dogs into pain, illness, inability to breathe, skulls too small for their heads, etc. Bulldogs cannot even give natural birth anymore. We are Frankensteins making monsters out of the species who have most been our loving companions. Humans suck.
Google "toad" dogs and other underground movements making monsters out of innocent creatures, bred for fighting. Look for this stuff on Instagram. It's real. It's sick. I can't imagine how this whole disgusting underground breeding system was missed in the reporting. I don't understand the focus on one specific breed. This is a much bigger story that any animal lover should be concerned about.
So glad to read your comments. This episode totally missed the much bigger story. The world of dog breeding is hugely problematic and often unethical. When breeders go rogue, things get worse, not better. I feel sorry for the humans who get attacked AND the dogs who often lead miserable lives because of terrible breeding practices. Lockdown in the UK caused a massive surge in people wanting dogs. Puppies of all sorts of breeds went for big bucks. Where I live, there are far too many dogs full stop. The parks are busy, there are a lot more dog on dog attacks than there used to be. I have no idea how we are going to get out of this mess.
I'm pitbull ambivalent. I guess you could say I don't have a dog in this fight
Boooo!
But you have a small child
I'm really playing for pun likes. Honestly? I keep my kid (who loves the idea of puppies) away from all dogs until the owner says it's safe to pet
Good call. I once took my toddler to someone's house for a baby-music class, and somebody released their (previously unknown to me) viciously anti-child Chihuahua at the end. Obviously, I knew he couldn't kill my kid, but when you're sitting on the floor with a small child, you have to take potential bites to the face seriously. Plus, the angry Chihuahua really did not help my kid's nascent fear of dogs, which was a setback for our dog-loving family.
You are right. The worst dog bite I've seen was from a small dog. It cut across the vermillion border (of the upper lip and the face) and I sent to plastics for repair.
It was a good pun.
I saw a YouTube video, something like, "plastic surgeon answers questions from Twitter." The plastic surgeon said his best advice to people is, "keep your kids faces away from dogs you don't know." A week later, my neighbor's daughter was bitten in the face by a strangers dog. No permanent damage, but ended up in the hospital. It definitely changed how I let my toddlers interact with dogs.
That was a terrible joke. More seriously, I also don't want to align with either the pro- or anti-pitbull crowd as described in this episode even though I have a dog that at least looks like an American Pitbull Terrier.
🥳
Judging dog owners by the breeds they own is entirely appropriate.
You barely mentioned the problem of bully culture. An obnoxious man does all sorts of things to project danger and intimidation. He takes the mufflers off his vehicles and says "fuck you" to thousands of people every time he drives across town. He gets scary tattoos on his face. He glares at people who say, "Hello."
And he walks an apparently vicious dog with the intention of creating terror.
The UK has every right to ban Pit Bulls and Bullies for exactly this reason.
The line that these things are "bred to be gentle" is the rationalization of a cretin.
What could go wrong with this logic?
On my lunchtime walk the other week, I tried to go into a Co-Op in Islington, but couldn't because this sort of berk was threatening a woman inside with a "little dick dog" like this, keeping it just at the end of its chain while everyone inside flinched away from it.
The man kep shouting "bring your boyfriend here so I can punch someone!". What a gent.
Just wipe these dogs out, because wiping out these people is apparently problematic. I have a three year-old, and I'm scared to walk around parts of my (very affluent!) neighbourhood because of this sort of thing.
Seems as though you're stereotyping people and dogs?
My neighbor is very mild-mannered and has a pit bull trained as a therapy dog that is brought to hospitals in the DMV.
A pit bull therapy dog is a wonderful idea until it suddenly isn't.
I live in the UK and it's a very accurate depiction of the actual evidence
You're half right. There's another type of pit owner. Single women with clavicle tattoos who are either dental hygienists or RNs.
I miss professional expectations for appearance.
You're right. The other half are generally people who adopt rescue dogs, or do rescue themselves. Those are also people who are pro-pit-bull, not because they support any kind of breeding, but because they love their dogs. Nobody I know with pit bulls wants to see them bred. I think they're mainly afraid of blanket laws that might euthanize any pit bulls for being alive if they're confiscated from breeders or whatnot.
Good for them.
As a woman walking at night in DC I feel safe because of my German Shepherd; sure they feel the same.
LOL
The reputation of pit bulls as dangerous is part of their appeal for some people.
Just like some voters admire our former president *because* he insults people--it’s a power move that appeals to some people.
So it’s obvious why pit bulls became such a polarizing breed.
The dangerous reputation is certainly why some people have pit bulls. Others have them because pit bulls are often very loving toward people. I have a dog that at least looks like an American Pit Bull Terrier. I didn't choose him, but I chose to keep him after he showed up in my brother's yard. He gets along with my other dog, but I generally can't trust him around other animals. OTOH, he loves every person he meets effusively and has never shown aggression toward a human. My biggest fear is that he would get into a fight with another person's dog, which is the only scenario in which I can imagine him hurting a human.
"What's a Cujo?"
"A bad dog from a movie."
Read a book, kids.
The Cujo question made me feel old. Doesn't everyone know Cujo?
Even Stephen King claims he forgot he wrote it.
I was also struck by Jesse's seeming ignorance. But then Google tells me that the movie came out in 1983 and Jesse is only about 40. So I'll give him a pass.
I’m 27 and I know Cujo just as a cultural reference, even though I’ve never read or seen it. I detected more than a hint of feigned ignorance in Jesse’s tone.
Neither the book nor the movie are what you'd call good. No need to perpetuate that sort of cultural schlock.
"I was also struck by Jesse's seeming ignorance."
Honestly could describe my reaction to any episode these days. He's done some good work, but the more I hear of him and learn about him, the more he seems like a manchild.
`he seems like a manchild'
How so? Examples?
Not knowing how basically anything in the world works, for one?
If you could please be more specific?
I know about it from Friends!
The true literary reference would be Cerberus
Jesse wouldn't know who he was either, and Katie would mispronounce it.
Sure, but read a better book.
Stephen King is one of those rare authors whose books are worse than the movie based on them.
Stephen King Cujo is actually a really good book. The first few Stephen Kings were kind of amazing. I guess that after that he just wrote too much. Cujo is atypical for him, nothing supernatural about it, just bad luck, a chain of events and being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
The movie was less good, they also changed the ending, Understandably, there is no way the movie could have being made with the original ending.
Anyway Cujo was a bad dog not because of his breed, but because he had rabies.
I need to agree with Katie 100 times over on one thing, and that’s the smugness people have about adopting/“rescuing” their dogs. It’s insufferable. It makes me want to tell people who ask where I got mine that I stole them.
Yes! For all that people love to trot out that incredibly stupid “racist” argument, the vast majority of pits I’ve encountered are the project of middle-class white ladies who get them so that everyone knows that they got a rescue dog and aren’t they a good person because they got a rescue dog?
And it’s buying dogs anyway! It’s not like they let you have the dog for free!
It's the difference between buying secondhand and buying new though. One isn't supporting breeding more dogs when there's already an overpopulation (in the us, not speaking to other countries). Whether or not that's something a person cares about or wants to consider when getting a dog is a personal decision and will vary, but just like thrifting is going to be cheaper, the fee you pay a shelter is going to be much cheaper than what a breeder costs
There isn’t an overpopulation of the dogs people want that make excellent family pets.
There was in the 90s but the shelters are full of pitbulls with a smattering of high-energy working breeds (which also aren’t suitable for most people, but aren’t as big of a menace and have a use). Look at Petfinder and compare the dogs available to the dogs you see walking around your neighborhood--its not the same distribution of breeds at all. Also, go to petfinder and filter for dog and child friendly dogs. It’s... enlightening
Chihuahuas are a special case: they are overpopulated in certain parts of the country but not others, so you see them in rescues a lot but depending on where you live there is a good chance they were brought in from Texas. IME there are always a few chihuahuas in the general area (Not always in my city) but they are either imports or owner death cases and they get adopted fast so it is a different chihuahua next week. I am fine with that; my girl has that backstory xe. And she was MUCH cheaper than my parents doodle.
People who live in regions of the country who have solved their overpopulation problem of normal, safe dogs should feel free to go to an ethical breeder.
There aren't golden retrievers or pure labs in shelters, that's definitely true. Huskies and german shepherds, as you say, aren't appropriate for everyone (not that that stops people from getting them and then dropping them off at a shelter). It is dependent on where you live and whether you're willing to be patient. I think the biggest problem is people feel entitled to the exact dog they want, as a puppy, when they want it, and if they're willing to pay 1000s of dollars for it, that's their choice. A lot of non-pit mixes get funneled to breed-specific rescues, which tend to have stricter adoption requirements (which is frustrating, but again, people want to be treated like a customer, not an adopter). This makes more space at gov funded shelters for pits/pit mixes. Small breed dogs of various mixes, especially chihuahua, mini poodle, Pomeranian, yorkie and shih tzu, as well as more medium size beagles and hounds are always available as adults, especially in rural areas. I really think it's less that only pit bulls are available than that people want a puppy, and/or they want the breed of dog they grew up with. I'm not against buying from a breeder. I'm against buying from puppy mills and buying dogs like pugs or french bulldogs that we've bred to have so many issues it's just cruel. I just think it's often possible to find a great dog from a shelter/rescue too.
I think we agree more than we disagree. I also oppose puppy mills and the breeding of dogs that can’t breathe. In my experience of small cities in rural areas is that small dogs are not super common in rescues but working dog breeds are.
I rescued because I did NOT want a puppy :) and I was cheap. I did want a dog when I wanted a dog, though. I was the same with cats.
But unlike cats, most dogs come from human-influenced breeding and so the better we can do the breeding and initial puppy placement the less rescues will be necessary and the shorter the dogs stay.
Whatever you think of the doodle people, doodles are not overflowing in shelters.
When I was a child, my parents got an adult golden mix from a shelter. She was an amazing dog. When they went looking for a retirement dog, mom said it was all pits and chis and she wanted neither. So they got a doodle.
I have an Airedale. There were no Airedales on Petfinder so he came from a breeder. If I’d wanted a Doberman, I could’ve gotten a whole pack of them from a local shelter...
Oh, for the days of Frasier and Wishbone when the shelters were overrun with JRTs. Granted, they’re not the best choice for families with small children, but at least they’re smaller than most toddlers.
Exactly, it’s such a racket. I wish Katie had investigated that.
She talks about it a little in one of her Moose Nuggets posts. I'd love a fully researched BARPod episode on how shelters source and market their animals.
It's a total scam. I wrote about it a bit in a magazine piece and got some pissy emails.
Great article. https://aeon.co/essays/dogs-are-symbolic-containers-of-human-hopes-desires-and-vices
You make the point which I kept hoping to hear in the pod, which is that idea of breeds and pedigrees, is relatively recent. Dates from the 19th century, like the concept of racial purity. And this article also mentions that the idea of breeding out behavioral traits in a few generations is not possible. https://www.npr.org/2022/04/28/1095390872/dog-breeds-behavior-study
I’d like to read it!
I understand objecting to smugness about "rescuing", but what's wrong with that also involving buying the dogs? Re-homing dogs for free doesn't seem possible.
Isn't it more about the circumstances the dog is being taken out of, like being on the streets?
One of my dogs was lost by his former owner, and was loose on the streets long enough to become skinny. The county animal services who caught him rescued him - they saved him from starving or other equally terrible fates. He was already rescued by the time I swiped my credit card (required! no free dogs! which I am ok with). I took him home because we wanted a dog, not because we are heroically sacrificing anything to help him.
Saying I rescued the dog is a) factually untrue and b) county animal services erasure.
Right, I understand. It sounds like you're mainly opposed to a kind of smug use of the term "rescue" in that scenario, a hangup which I get but don't share. I would rather say both you and the county shelter had important roles in giving the dog a life off the streets, and of course you have no obligation to feel any ethical warm fuzzies for that if it was more of a transactional thing to you (no judgement!).
The way we judge it seems very dependent on whether the local shelters/rescues where one lives are overrun and will have to turn away or euthanize dogs for each dog they're keeping, or whether they can offer at least some meager shelter (usually a concrete pen) permanently. Where I live, near a big city where shelters and rescues are overflowing, each individual dog is like a drop of water in a leaky overflowing bucket. Dogs are turned away, sheltered dogs may be euthanized quickly, and adoption standards may sadly get lower as the organizations face pressure to place dogs in homes. In that situation if someone gives the dog a permanent home (assuming they are qualified as owners, all else being equal), it seems clear they're helping the dog whether or not anyone wants to call it "rescuing."
Also, I take it for a given we all agree that unethical breeding needs to be reduced and I personally think spay and neuter needs to become more the norm to help reduce the regional dog overpopulation issues upstream of shelters.
I think you’re right about local circumstances affecting your view - like Katie I live in the dog-mad PNW and I’ve had genuine “Good for you!”s on walks. No stranger gives me asspats for any other reason. Just this one.
You wouldn’t believe the prices they are charging for 7 year old chihuahuas now.
It's a golden retriever mix 💅
People truly need to recognize that responsible breeding practices reduce the need for shelters in the first place. When Best Friends keeps sloganeering "Save Them All!" I want to punch someone in the face.
I don't agree with the concept of a no-kill shelter — I think shelters should selectively euthanize dogs that are aggressive. Also, WAY too many shelter dogs have emotional baggage that not every person can handle, and they are better off getting a puppy from a reputable breeder.
The shelter and rescue group I got my dogs from, they’re mostly dog-loving people- haters. So of course they don’t believe in killing dogs - every dog can be placed with a loving family and turn into a perfect pet, which you and I would agree is not always possible. I wish these groups were run by pragmatic people, but I guess they wouldn’t be so successful at placing dogs if they were.
I’m glad for the secondhand dog shelters, though, because I never wanted a puppy, and I think a mutt is just fine. If you want a two year old dog who has been well-treated and has no medical or behavioral issues, well, it’s kind of like getting a new liver. First, there aren’t so many livers out there, but there are a lot of people who want one. Second, you’re happy about the liver you got, but you got it because something went wrong with the first owner. It’s a bit of an odd feeling.
I agree. I think the hardest, most important thing about rescue work is accepting you CAN'T save them all. Education and low/no cost spays and neuters are much more important long-term than placing dogs. Private rescues can be no-kill because they're not open intake, which I think is fine. The issue is when there's the sort of unrealistic idealists running them who think every dog can be saved
Also in my experience rescue dogs are often needing rescuing because they are unmanageable monsters.
I work with rescue dogs and that's just blatantly false. It might be true in like 1% of cases. Most rescue dogs just don't have another place to go. Poorly behaved dogs that don't have a place to go are usually put down, so the vast majority of the ones "worth" rescuing are very good natured just maybe a bit unstructured and under socialized
You've got to be joking. Shelter environments can have very negative impacts on dogs' behavior, as dogs generally need a lot of structure and attention, but that's not why they ended up there. Rescue dogs mostly need rescuing because people didn't get their dogs fixed or they were taken from neglect, hoarding/cruelty or backyard breeder/puppy mill cases, or their owners passed away or went into assisted living or government housing where they weren't allowed to bring their pets or lost their homes. A lot of dogs get dumped at shelters because they're old or have chronic health issues and the owners can't afford the vet bills but don't want to put the dog down. Absolutely there have been instances of organizations hiding a dog's bite history and adopting out dogs who should not be considered adoptable, but at a regular county kill shelter an unmanageable dog isn't making it to the adoption floor.
Some of the other rescue orgs have different standards though. But I agree the public shelter is going to be mostly dogs that were abandoned, found running free, surrendered, etc. There is obviously an adverse selection problem where the most friendly and young/attractive dogs are going to go first and so the ones who are there a while aren’t going to be the easiest.
Someone once jumped all over me when I incorrectly said my family had "bought" my childhood dog. (We'd gotten her from a shelter, not that it matters, and we'd paid the shelter a fee. I used the wrong verb because I'm middle-aged and we didn't "adopt" or "rescue" dogs in my benighted childhood.)
Anyway, yes, the idea that you're virtuous for "rescuing" the cheapest mutt available to you is ridiculous. Just take your floppy-eared slobber monster home and enjoy your time with it like the rest of us do.
Unless you personally pulled the dog from a burning building or out of the path of a runaway train you didn't rescue anything. You're a consumer.
Most municipal shelters are kill shelters. They kill the dogs that don't get adopted within a certain amount of time. People who adopt from a city-run or county-run shelter are absolutely saving the dog from possible death, and certainly rescuing them from a bad situation.
Is that really true? It’s not true where I live, so I googled and found NYT reporting from 2019 that shelter euthanasia has seriously decreased over the years. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/03/upshot/why-euthanasia-rates-at-animal-shelters-have-plummeted.html
It would be great to have good data on this, but it can be hard for shelters to admit they euthanize, even if it’s never for space and always for issues that make adoption difficult or impossible (serious illness, high aggression).
This news story also includes this paragraph: ““Rescuing an animal has become a badge of honor,” said Matt Bershadker, the president and chief executive of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. “People proudly go to dog parks and walk around their neighborhoods talking about the animal that they rescued from a shelter.” “ they do! lololololololol
Yes, it's true. Euthanasia has decreased, but they euthanize regularly. If you don't believe me, that's fine, and maybe I'm only speaking for the extremely large metropolitan and suburban areas in my state. But I've been doing cat rescue for twenty years and I assure you that euthanasia of perfectly adoptable animals takes place ALL THE TIME here and in cities and counties around the country. The euthanasia of aggressive and therefore unadoptable animals also takes places, and I am not talking about that.
Cats are I believe euthanized at a much higher rate than dogs, but it's always dogs in the "save me now" campaign.
It just caught my eye as it doesn’t square with my knowledge of my area, but if you’d included in your post your experience I wouldn’t have questioned it at all. My neighborhood is not the world etc.
The fundamental unevenness of it is that you see adoptable animals being euthanized, whereas my local humane society has a sixty-five pound pit bull with a bite history up for adoption. Trade?
Well they do burn the carcass after the dog is euthanized for being at the shelter too long, so technically...
(I worked at a shelter in the midwest in the 90s; maybe no kill shelters are the norm now?).
Sadly they're not.
mY rEsCuE rEsCuEd Me
I’ve been dealing with guilt since we bought our recent pup (Goldendoodle, aka the Goldendude). But if I think about that while rescue dog thing the way I do about performative land acknowledgments, I can let it go.
I hate the term "rescue dog." It should mean a dog that rescues. I've owned two dogs that showed up in yards and one that I got from a county shelter. I don't use the word "rescue." I don't think there's anything inherently immoral about breeding dogs or buying one from a breeder. I don't care strongly about breed and prefer to give a home to dogs that would otherwise be stray or put down.
Katie spends a long time trying to specify what a Bully XL is, but in doing so misses the point that the Bully is to all intents and purposes an American Pit Bull. There have been so few generations it isnt meaningfully different.
In Britain, Pit Bulls are already banned and I dont think she appreciated that ppl say they have Bully XLs, staffy crosses etc. when the dog is clearly a pitbull. (Tbf sometimes they themselves dont know either.) The ban will close this loophole. I live near the welsh boy that was killed and remember deep diving into this and remember all the facebook chat about what exact breed the killer dog was.
Ultimately, all these deaths are from pitbull-type dogs and so there needs to be a ban that is broad enough to cover this. Its imperfect but dog breeds arent black and white categories either.
Right. The whole point is that the dogs that are responsible for all the recent attacks must be classed as Bullies, because if they were just classed as plain old pitbulls they wouldn't be allowed in the UK anyway. So banning the Bully is more about closing a loophole than anything else. And it's a loophole that badly needs closing.
Okay, this subject annoys me to no end. We have to acknowledge that it's part owner and part the breed.
There's a reason you never hear about vicious pug attacks. Their original purpose was to be a companionship for Chinese nobility. Unfortunately, pit bulls (and most bully breeds) were bred originally for bloodsport and protection. Breeders and shelters do the breed a service by trying to breed that out and selectively euthanizing aggressive dogs.
Also, people need to be more well-educated when they get a certain breed. It's very possible to get a pit bull and never have an incident with it, but you have to be the kind of owner that is willing to acknowledge its instincts and mitigate it. They have intense personalities and really need to be worked. Pit bulls are all muscle and have a hairline trigger of a personality. They are not the dog for everyone.
I have a corgi, and virtually every corgi owner will tell you that they are barky, bossy, and they nip. They are almost ALWAYS protective over their food. There are just certain situations I cannot put my dog in and most corgi owners will tell you the same thing about their dogs.
I just want people to stop treating it like a black and white issue! 😭
*steps off soap box*
Actually I've known some really obnoxious violent pugs. The thing is, with their ridiculous flat face, they can't bite worth a damn. One of them realy came at me, bit my hand and I was like "really? Is that it?" Also, they are usually unable to run so most people can outrun them. They are cute, but these two were horrible little shits.
If this gets out you’ll have pug owners giving you shit on Twitter. I wonder if they’re worse than TRAs... 😂
Honestly, I think some of these anti pit bull people are giving them a run for their money in terms of theatrics. 🙄
Little Dog Syndrome™️, man.
👏👏👏
Dog breeds ARE NOT animal species. They are human creations. For any human creation, a safety standard of "it's probably fine" is not good enough to justify a potential dangerous animal roaming the streets.
Also: We are talking about phasing out a dog breed - not culling every last pitbull in the country. Considering the littany of health issues of this breed, it's also for the best for the dogs.
A town in Massachusetts tried the “ final solution “ for pit bulls . Katie talked about that in episode.
"He looks like he's been lifting weights and avoiding seed oils" 😂😂😂😂😂
I liked that line, too.
The only time I was ever attacked by a dog (very glad the dog didn't go for my then 4-year-old son) was by a Pitbull. Got me on the left knee and took me right down. I had an umbrella and beat it until it let go. The dog's owner came outside and asked, "He didn't get you, did he?" I said, "He did indeed. Do you see the blood coming out of my fucking knee!" The owner replied, "Gosh, he's never done that." They moved out two weeks later.
They NEVER apologize.
No apology. They just moved away.
That’s a win, at least.
He knew his dog was a menace, otherwise that wouldn’t be the first question he asked when seeing a man outside with his dog.
I've only been attacked once. It was a chihuahua. All those stereotypes about angry little dogs were true in this case. It bit my face, I picked it up and moved it. It broke skin but didn't draw blood and I was up to date on my jabs so just cleaned the wound and went about my day.
I find the "little dogs are more aggressive" argument so dumb. In my experience it's true, but who cares? I could kill those fuckers with one stamp of my modest sized lady feet.
How do you know it was a pitbull and not one of the 20 or so other breeds that look like a pit bull kinda
When the couple moved into the other side of the duplex, they told us their dog was a Pitbull, but that he was well behaved - a family dog! Also, if it looked like a Pitbull, quacked like a Pitbull, and bit like a Pitbull, I'll conclude it was a Pitbull.
So it might be or might not be. Did they have papers on it ?
According to not only the podcast but also a book on the subject mentioned in the pod a LOT of people think they own PBs but dna testing shows them to be other breeds , something like 1/5 of dogs thought to be PBs without papers are not PBs .
The fact that it takes a DNA test to tell , should be evidence alone that breed ban laws are dumb
Just ban any dog which looks and acts like it could be a fucking pitbull, rather that endlessly walrusing about arbitrary distinctions between the races.