Hi Katie, in case you're reading I just wanted to say that the American Bully XL episode was one of my faves in recent memory! Unlike most listeners apparently, I didn't come in with a strong opinion on the matter and thought it was really thoroughly reported and quite fascinating to explore the different characters and sides of the issue.
I didn't come away thinking "American bullies are gentle as lambs and great family dogs that have been unfairly besmirched". Instead it was more like 1) breed bans are often ineffective and hard to implement, especially for pit mixes given their prevalence in the dog population; 2) there are cultural associations that may exacerbate pitt hate in a way that does not impact breeds like German shepherds; 3) some activist organizations are well-intentioned but spread dubious statistics that are credulously reported by media, leading to aforementioned ineffective bans.
I thought it was a nuanced, well-considered investigation. Sorry you're getting so much hate.
It was mind-boggling to me that so many people on here who were commenting with outrage sounded like they latched on to some minor inaccuracies in the story and completely missed the bigger picture/actual point of the episode. I saw some nuanced discussion more on here though, unlike Reddit and TwitterX, at least.
Tbh, some of the ‘inaccuracies’ were so minor as to be little more than nitpicking that don’t really alter the substance of the piece at all.
I missed the original discussion (thankfully) but it strikes me as a lot of people with a very fixed views outraged that someone could say ‘actually it’s probably a lot more complicated than it may first seem’.
To me it rather seemed Katie is the one to miss the bigger picture here precisely because she focused on relatively minor issues, and many people pointed that out.
The bigger picture is that if these dogs are not distinguishable from other pitbulls and there's zero evidence they are actually more docile, they should fall under the existing ban. In that view, all the nuance and nitty gritty is unnecessary.
"The bigger picture is that if these dogs are not distinguishable from other pitbulls and there's zero evidence they are actually more docile, they should fall under the existing ban. In that view, all the nuance and nitty gritty is unnecessary."
The nuance might inform how we should feel about the existing ban in the first place though.
I wrote this elsewhere but in the UK, “pit bull type” dogs are banned and not just American pitbull terriers — they must meet physical standards that were outlined by the American Dog Breeders Association. American Bully XLs had to be added onto the list later…so they probably did not fit the definition of “pit bull type” as stated by the government in the first place. There likely aren't a lot of "real" ABXLs (ones who originated from the breeders in the US who developed the "breed") in the UK anyway since they are ridiculously expensive. Maybe some of them have ABXL in their breeding but who knows without DNA testing.
But whatever, the actual big picture issue that maybe should have seen more focus on is that BSLs are not an effective way to curb violent dog attacks. Describing this ridiculous drama with ABXLs made for an interesting episode, but I wish there had been more attention paid to that. Nevertheless I still thought it was a decent episode since it got me to do a bit more research about this whole thing.
I imagine Katie would have got even more shit from the anti Pit Bull crowd had she focused more on BSLs ineffectiveness.
From my time in the UK, I know that the media have for a long time focused on the dangers of specific breeds. It’s not that the public aren’t aware that issues with owners or other non breed specific factors aren’t causative to dog attacks, but it’s very easy for the UKs tabloid culture to whip up breed specific hysteria that quickly becomes disconnected to the factual situation. The issues with ABXLs comes at the end of long and ingrained tabloid trope about ‘killer breeds’.
Given the complexity of the issues trying to cover both the effectiveness AND the identification critiques of BSLs in any depth would have required and enormous amount of work and it sounds like Katie but in a lot of time and effort just on this specific aspect.
Like Katie I’m agnostic on BSLs per se, but imagine if they are warranted in some cases they need to narrower and more clearly defined than currently.
Easier to deal with than penalising bad owners harder. I hadn’t even considered leash laws. I’d be MASSIVELY in favour of that- had an escalating conflict with a neighbour over his loose dog chasing our cats ON OUR PROPERTY that ended with him in prison- would have been nice if he had just had the dog taken after the first complaint.
Agreed! So we’ll said. I love dogs but don’t know this world at all. It’s wild that when you provide nuance to statements and try to come away with a reasonable stance people still filter it through their preconceived beliefs.
This was due to confusion of the Molossus hound (and mixes) with the pit bull. There are some similarities in appearance but while the Molossus were dogs of war, Roman pit bulls were nanny dogs (and sometimes wet nurses when wolves were unavailable).
The Roman empire meme was the least surprising thing to both me and my girlfriend. She and I were both like well duh, at least in my case. Good to know other guys have their priorities in order as well.
Today's Mastino Napoletano is a direct descendant of the Mollossian dogs. They are docile, my Italian father-in-law had several and we had one - Mischa. Their jaws are so powerful that a bite can cause severe damage, but they are not aggressive dogs by nature. Unfortunately, almost any dog can be trained to be aggressive by owners who are interested in a guard dog. I do believe people who buy certain breeds should have to have background checks - like gun owners - and take dog training classes.
Katie is an incredibly thorough reporter. That she felt a second episode was necessary just shows you how committed she is to making sure the audience has all the information. Crazy to me to that anyone here would think she's biased or not giving the full story in any way. If you've listened to any of her other episodes you'd know exactly how much work and worry she puts into getting the story right.
She didn’t affirm his specific position though, and believed counterarguments which if true WOULD undermine his position; therefore she was credulous.
I personally do not like pit bulls. I have friends who work in paediatrics and their stories have more than convinced me that we are better off without them and I’ll be happy with the ban when it comes in. But I don’t think Katie did a terrible job and she did make me think about it- though I haven’t changed my mind lol
Seriously what the fuck is wrong with people. Tbh I’m sure she watched some while researching the story anyway- how could you not, they’re in most of the articles. But still I don’t know what pushes people to immediately go so far into extreme behaviour after the first disagreement with someone. All Hamas, no Gaza.
Very commendable that she sat down with Lawrence and Sam, too. I think the issues stemmed from her over-correcting for her bias against pitbulls, not from a general bias towards dogs.
This is an incredibly frustrating episode to listen to. I didn't comment on the first one because mistakes happen and no one is perfect, but when you re-cover it and still make the same mistake it's incredibly annoying, frustrating, and, as a listener, disheartening. I'm not threatening to quit listening or unsubscribing, but I certainly would be thinking about it if this was a subject that was regularly covered.
The mistake here is there is no such thing as an "American Bully XL", and to say it's exists and is bred to be something is still an aspirational statement. To develop a breed of dog, or of anything, you have to actually get the different sources to breed (and many different versions of them), raise the offspring, sterilize the ones with characteristics/behaviors you don't want, have the remaining ones breed with other sources with the characteristics/behaviors you want to reinforce, then rinse and repeat for a few generations. Then when you do all that you then have to raise a couple more generations to prove what you've got is a stable mix with the characteristics you want that don't have hidden genetic defects or other problem areas.
That takes decades at a minimum. And that's before you even release the "breed" out in the world. The American Bully XL is, quite literally, just a random shot in the dark by a fanatic who has more dreams than sense. And I don't say that in a derogatory sense, I mean that in order to think you can create a dog breed by just doing a generation or two of mixing with a pair of breeds and hope it works is literally the textbook definition of feels over reals.
The fact that someone as educated and smart as Katie decided to run this story without considering that is what's disheartening here. In this episode she even brings up the reason they discuss the issue using the trans issue as an analogy, when one of the things they've covered on trans issues is the fact that there is no good data on certain aspects because it literally takes time for people on newer treatments to progress and get data on them. If she wanted to cover this story from a similar angle to their trans coverage, that's the angle they should have gone with. Crazy breeder does a hack job on creating a new dog type and the idiots who defend the new breed based on a hail mary pass and a prayer.
Edit:
I realized the last sentence there is a bit passive aggressive. Another way to say this in a more polite way is that there has, objectively, not been enough time to determine if the intent of the breeder has played out in the breed. And the breed itself wasn't given enough time and simply raw numbers to build itself as a proven breed before being sold to the public. The result is even if the "American Bully XL" does exist in some form as intended by the breeder, a ton of other breeders, whom aren't necessarily "bad breeders", have replicated the breed themselves in the same manner and passed them out to the public. If you insist on considering American Bully XL a breed, you don't actually have just an American Bully XL, you have the American Bully XL-Dave version, American Bully XL-Trisha version, American Bully XL-Lebron version. And then you get American Bully XL-Dave & Trish Version. And so on and so forth.
Part of her argument is that there is no such thing as an American Bully XL - for the reasons you mentioned - and that's why it's questionable to ban a breed that doesn't exist in any meaningful, easily categorised way. It's hard to identify a Bully XL, which muddies the water around the statistics because people report dogs as being Bully XLs when they probably aren't. I don't see how you are saying anything Katie didn't already address in the pod.
Pitbulls in Britain are already banned. The Bully XL is a "new" category that allows people to circumvent the law. The argument is that they aren't meaningfully different than existing pitbulls
But it "circumvents the ban" by not having pit bull characteristics, which means your argument against them can't just recurse to "they're effectively pit bulls." The characteristics are different, so you have to generate evidence that those characteristics themselves pose a danger to the public and that evidence hasn't been provided.
But they're going around killing people. They are directly implicated in the rise and deaths by dogs in Britain. Then the argument is that you can't "prove" that they are American Bully XLs because nobody can tell them apart from regular pitbulls, and we're back where we're started.
Well, they're not. They're "implicated" but only as a function of the fact that when there's a media-driven hysteria around certain dog breeds, people who aren't good at readily-identifying dog breeds by sight who get attacked by dogs falsely identify the dog as whatever's been in the news. "Oh, the media says pit bulls attack people. I was attacked; must be a pitbull."
There's no actual good evidence linking any dog breed to any dog attack because the dog breed is rarely identified when a dog attacks a person. The dog itself is rarely identified, so you can't just go to the dog and see what breed it is.
If there’s no such thing as an American Bully, there are a few implications that don’t line up with how Katie talked about the story:
(1) If there’s no such thing as an American Bully, all so-called American Bullies should be treated the same as all other pit bulls from a legal perspective. Since pit bulls are currently banned in the UK but “American Bullies” aren’t, the UK needs to either also ban “American Bullies” or unban pit bulls (I personally don’t know what I think about which it should be, FWIW). Katie seemed to be treating the status quo, in which pit bulls are banned but “American Bullies” aren’t, as reasonable.
(2) If “American Bullies” are just pit bulls, then it’s not really that important whether the dog involved in a particular attack is an “American Bully” or a pit bull—much as it wouldn’t matter if a particular dog was a yellow lab or a black lab. Katie discussed the story as though a lot hinges on whether a particular dog was correctly identified as an “American Bully” or whether it was just a pit bull.
(3) If there’s no such thing as an “American Bully,” the activists you should be most suspicious of are the ones who say there is one, it’s something different from a pit bull, and it should be treated differently by the law—not the ones who say the law should treat so-called “American Bullies” the same as pit bulls.
1) If there's so obviously no such thing as American Bullies, why is the UK government & media putting so much effort into talking about them as a specific breed rather than treating them like pit bulls? If American Bullies aren't a breed, then the status quo is reasonable. The government is the one saying they are a breed, and that legally means the breed must exist, which gives legitimacy to people who argue to Bullies are different and more docile.
2) Again, it matters because that's what the government & media are saying is important, and they're giving out a lot of biased statistics based on potentially incorrect information. If someone identifies ANY dog attack as ANY incorrect breed, that can have bad consequences for the public image of that breed, which leads more people to hate a breed when more robust, unbiased data isn't there to support that hate.
3) The government and media seem pretty certain that there's a difference between pit bulls and American Bullies. Maybe we should question that narrative?
I started writing a long response, but I don't want to get into a protracted back and forth. I just want to focus on one key point of disagreement:
You say, "If American Bullies aren't a breed, then the status quo is reasonable."
No, this is patently not true. If American Bullies aren't a distinct breed, then they are just pit bulls. The status quo in the UK is: Pit bull banned, American Bully legal. It is blatantly unreasonable to say "X is banned, but X is legal if you call it Y." Either ban all the X's, including the ones called Y's, or legalize all the X's.
In the UK, “pit bull type” dogs are banned — they must meet physical standards that were outlined by the American Dog Breeders Association. American Bully XLs probably did not fit into the standards, and thus were added onto the list…so they probably did not fit the definition of “pit bull type” as stated by the government in the first place.
There’s also the fact that it seems like it’s questionable that people can even tell what XLs even look like, given how they’re not really a real breed with clear traits that breed true. To me it seems like a waste of time and resources when they should probably just …ban dangerous dogs and take away any dog that is considered a danger.
That question is the point of the podcast, though. If you want an answer to it you're looking in the wrong place, and saying Katie failed in her task by not giving an answer is an unfair expectation. All Katie is doing is laying down the different opinions with emphasis on the ones she sees as not being given enough attention in the mainstream media and explaining why it's a more complicated issue than the incredibly biased activists would have you believe.
Please give me a time code where Katie even suggests either there is "no such thing as an American Bully XL" or that the breed "doesn't exist in any meaningful way". Furthermore I'd also appreciate a time code where Katie indicates there is any evidence to support the statement by the breeder.
I have a lot of interest in the Tamaskan, another breed in development. The goal was to create a "wolf look-alike" dog with no actual wolf ancestry. Predictably, even some of the founding breeders engaged in unscrupulous and unethical breeding practices to produce dogs with the desired look. Wolves were bred in and pedigrees doctored. Dogs with significant health and behavioral issues were bred because they had certain aesthetic traits that bred true. Like bullies, these dogs were selling for $3,000+ easy and that created an incentive to move fast and produce a lot of litters with whatever breeding stock was available.
Recognizing that flooding the dog market with a bunch of recklessly-bred wolfdogs (that were supposedly not even wolfdogs) would trash the reputation of the breed they were trying to develop, the leading breed club decided to implement very strict breeding requirements:
ALL breeding Tamaskans must have a genetic profile submitted that can be used to prove parentage of their puppies. ALL must have genetic health testing. ALL must have hip, elbow and eye testing performed by a vet. Paperwork must be submitted for these tests. Breeders must also submit paperwork for serious health conditions that arise in their dogs' progeny and file a report when a puppy dies during or shortly after birth. ALL breeding pairs must fall below a very low (10%) coefficient of inbreeding, which is a statistical method for guaranteeing genetic diversity. Breeding bitches may have no more than 4 litters in a lifetime. Wolf content must fall below 30% and must be confirmed by DNA testing.
If these requirements are not met, a Tamaskan's puppies will not be registered by the breed club.
These are the kinds of standards you need to have if you want to experiment with creating a new breed responsibly.
Contrast with the American Bully Kennel Club, which requires no health testing and no health reporting, permits unlimited inbreeding, permits any amount of pitbull ancestry, and only requires sires to be genetically profiled after 3 litters.
Domestic dogs speciated >10,000 years ago, possibly even closer to 100,000 years ago. They share most of their DNA with wolves (as we do with chimps and bonobos) but their genetic profiles are distinct.
I had a similar feeling as you, even though I know nothing about dogs: Katie is not addressing the issue that her abilities as a journalist are very much in question after these episodes. She's relying on the angry internet mob trope and then going into victimhood--we do not care if you lose sleep, Katie, stop relying on parasociality and start being a better reporter.
"we do not care if you lose sleep, Katie, stop relying on parasociality and start being a better reporter."
Why do you even listen to this podcast if you're going to act exactly like the sort of pretentious, self-righteous online asshole that this show justly criticizes and mocks?
...have you looked at the reddit or the slatestarcodex thing many barpod listeners like? This community is full of pretentious self-righteous online assholes. In fact that's how I'd describe Katie in this ep, too.
Really, you’d describe someone who was clearly deeply committed to getting a story right she spent a huge amount of time addressing critics in good faith, as a ‘pretentious self righteous online arsehole’?
That you seem to think being deeply unpleasant isok is one thing, but that you’ve convinced yourself you’re so right on the issue it justifies being deeply unpleasant quite another...
If you’re going to start throwing around accusations of journalistic malpractice at least have SOME awareness of your own biases and prejudices. Admitting you ‘know nothing about dogs’ would have you hoped caused you to be less certain about your position.
idk what you're talking about because I have no position on the pitbull issue; perhaps you've misunderstood or are confusing me with someone else.
On Katie's shitty journalism? As an ex-journalist who worked in the field for over a decade and now owns a media company, yeah that's something I am qualified to have a position on.
I was referring to your position on Katie’s coverage and your description of her ‘shitty journalism’ is at best an opinion I’m guess you’re entitled to.
As others have noticed you’re just coming across as throughly unpleasant and have no idea why you’ve subscribed if you really do truly believe Katie to be so unprofessional.
Your qualifications for passing judgement on her journalism are of course something we have no way to verify.
I’m going to mute you now, as a mixture of someone who thinks being so unpleasant online is justified because of their own ‘rightness’ combined with a ridiculously self righteous tone is something I can live without.
I think there’s little chance of me missing anything worthwhile.
Sorry, I'm really struggling to find the disagreement between what you're saying and what Katie reported, both in the original episode and the followup. I feel like we listened to two entirely separate podcasts.
I got too bored to read it all the way though. People get passionate about things, and then they get obsessed with minutia. And when someone doesn't know every single detail that they do, it's time to burn the oilfields and salt the earth.
It doesn’t matter if there isn’t an actual breed called a Bully XL or whatever, because an entire country is considering it a “breed” for the sake of banning dogs that vaguely look like them. They apparently didn’t do the required research on the matter and are basing the ban on social media hype and the misinformed public freaking out about muscular dogs that have a blocky head.
“Crazy breeder does a hack job on creating a new dog type and the idiots who defend the new breed based on a hail mary pass and a prayer”
Except she spoke to others with knowledge in the area who wouldn’t accept the ‘crazy breeder’ description and who based on their background can’t simply be dismissed as ‘idiots’.
It seems ironic that Katie seems far more aware of her biases than many of those criticising her.
Everyone she spoke too referenced that the breeder said they bred the dog to be less aggressive to people. More sources repeating the claims of a single source does not equal "spoke to others with knowledge". If she legitimately found some other evidence, I did not hear it and would be perfectly happy to eat my words and be proven wrong if you'd give me a time code to that. And if a breeder can't provide any proof of their claims, then they are a crazy breeder and not a respectable one.
The fact that they referenced the Breeders claim doesn’t mean they simply relied on it, or didn’t have reason to agree with it based on any evidence they reviewed or on their own expertise.
That you’ve concluded that they simply credulously parroted the Breeders claim & then Katie did the same is simply your conclusion.
That Katie was satisfied she was speaking to trust worthy independent sources that gave credence to Breeders claim seems far more credible than the assumptions you’ve draw which seem simply constructed to confirm the view your originally started with.
Yes, it's common for people to accept a claim after evaluating the data and coming to their own conclusion, but when they do that they reference the data. Where is that reference?
And if Katie wanted us, the listeners, to come to a different conclusion than I did maybe she should provide some basis for any other conclusion. I wouldn't expect her to do that deep a dive on this but maybe interviewing someone who has more to say on the subject than their personal experience and the claim of the breeder. Again, if she did that then I didn't hear it and all you have to do is provide me the point in time when she's done that.
So, having spoken to others with expertise in the field who you’ve no reasonable grounds to question their independence you’re dismissing their view point and are assuming it must simply be credulously accepted the breeders word because Katie’s piece provided details of their view but didn’t go into the basis of how they formed it.
So, rather than assume that level of detail wasn’t included for reasons of space & time you’ve jumped to a prejudicial conclusion that their view can just be dismissed in favour of of one that supports your conclusions.
This really is a waste of time. I came to this with literally no strong views either way, but it’s been pretty obvious a lot of others have completely fixed views & there’s literally nothing Katie could have said or done they’d be happy to accept.
Despite all your pontificating you've still yet to provide a single point I could go back and listen to during the episode where Katie "provided details of their view". Just saying it's been bred that way is not "details". I would happily accept that.
If everything is as you say this should be super easy and simple, yet you nor anyone else has done it yet.
The only weird thing here is in a podcast that prides itself on properly referencing data and calling out mistakes by people who aren't properly assessing the evidence based reality of the discussion topics you are defending the lack of any of that in these two episodes and instead making excuses for them not following through with their usual rigor. Maybe you should do some introspection about whether I've truly been prejudicial or if you're refusing to see the problem out of some unhealthy parasocial connection with the hosts.
Don’t worry Katie, as a subscriber who truly does not care about this issue whatsoever, I’m not offended.
I didn’t even listen to the original episode but couldn’t resist listening to this one because I 100% knew the drama explosion around this topic would be fascinating.
I haven't listened yet but I hope she doesn't pull the "I'm sorry you were offended shtick" instead of acknowledging the fact that we weren't offended at her bias and shoddy reasoning (and Jesse's lack of challenging her), we were disappointed.
Mistaking people vocally pointing out pretty staggering credulousness on Katie's part and persistent use of the "no true Scotsman" fallacy isn't being "offended"
I think the whole approach to this issue is wrongheaded, but I was never going to unsub or harass Katie or send anyone videos of people getting mauled, gold star for me!
Anyway, it would have been a very interesting groundbreaking piece of work had there been evidence that pitbulls and related breeds were being scapegoated for attacks by rottweilers or something. "A lot of dogs that basically look like pitbulls are attacking people, but are they the specific crossbreeds people think they are? Conclusion: we aren't sure," is just not getting me wherever I'm supposed to go. And stories about pregnant dogs getting dumped to whelp in the woods only lends credence to the idea that allowing loopholes to the pit ban put pit crosses in the wrong hands.
The issue, fundamentally, is that not knowing something isn't a justification to jump to whatever conclusion you prefer. If you don't know the breed of the dog, you can neither say "this was a pit bull, tally up another pit attack" like BullyWatch does, neither can you say "this isn't a pit bull, it's actually a rottweiler." Because you don't know.
The vast, vast majority of human dog attacks are by unidentified dogs. But there aren't that many dog attacks on humans to begin with. The data literally does not statistically support any course of action at all - the only reasonable position is to "have no dog in the fight", if you will.
Dogs that look like pit bulls and related breeds commit a drastically disproportionate number of attacks. Thus, dogs that look like pit bulls are banned. It's not a particularly sophisticated hammer for the problem, but that doesn't make it a bad one.
I don't think it would be a bad idea at all to do DNA testing on dangerous dogs euthanized by the state, but as the state is already reasonably convinced in its conclusions it has no reason to pay for that. Perhaps Bully Watch will work out a way to get that funded/done. I very much doubt that pit advocacy groups would want to fund that.
But they don't, is the thing. They don't commit a drastically disproportionate number of attacks - there are so few dog attacks that almost no number of attacks, by however you group the dogs, is disproportionate. Hardly any dogs attack people, so whenever a dog does, that dog's breed is now responsible for a "disproportionate number of attacks."
The one piece that I really felt NEEDED to be addressed is that the UKC apparently allows registered American Pit Bull Terriers to be "transferred" to the American Bully breed. Once the paperwork is processed, a purebred pitbull is magically transformed into an American Bully, and its puppies will be registerable as American Bullies.
As far as I can tell, this is a perfect smoking gun for those arguing that this breed was created primarily to circumvent breed bans, including allowing people to import and breed purebred pitbulls that have not been modified in any way.
Jesse's commitment to having windows work perfectly may be demonstrative of conscious or unconscious support for white supremacy culture and its foundational tenets.
Katie’s approach to the pitbull problem feels like willful blindness. The idea that “being docile” is a trait that you could select for w/ breeding with a few generations is so unscientific. This is Lysenkoism with a new name
I guess it depends on what you mean by a few generations, but in experiments a third of silver foxes were judged to be domesticated after 20 generations of selection for tameness, while nearly all of them were assessed to be domesticated after 30 generations. It wouldn't surprise me that it would take even fewer generations to bring an already domesticated, if aggressive, animal like the Pitbull and decrease its aggression to normal levels for a dog.
Foxes are wild and breeding them strictly for tameness is relatively simple. Fighting dogs were bred for docility to humans and aggressiveness towards other dogs. That's highly specialized and complex. Picking the calmest foxes is one thing. To 'unbreed' a pit's aggression means reversing one trait while still maintaining the others.
And that's in a breed that's genetically bottlenecked, not a wild population.
Unless I'm missing something, there are a lot of "aggressive" dogs that have an instinct to chase and kill prey - is there any actual proof that pit bulls are more aggressive to humans, or is this vibes?
I'm leaning towards vibes, despite all of the self-proclaimed dog breeding experts around here.
I don't know about humans, but if I had a small dog I would be very, very concerned if a former racing dog, e.g., a greyhound, were off leash as the instinct to chase and catch is still there.
Bulldogs are descended from mastiffs, bred for bull baiting. That was banned around the start of the 19th century. So people started crossing bulldogs with terriers explicitly for dog fighting. That's a lot of aggressive genetics to draw from.
I mean, that's also more than a century where dogfighting has been illegal in the Western world (from cursory googling it looks like things peaked and then cratered in the mid/late 19th century for dog fighting), during which time kennel clubs had no incentive to breed for aggression.
They're obviously bred to look mean, but I'm not sure if they're bred to be mean.
Dogfighting did not end when it was outlawed. Michael Vick was a high profile perpetrator, but his was hardly an isolated case. The ASPCA says they think tens of thousands of Americans participate in dogfighting (https://www.aspca.org/investigations-rescue/dogfighting/closer-look-dogfighting). You can also just search “dogfighting arrest” and see how many cases make the news every year.
The people who are doing this are predominantly using pit bulls and they are absolutely breeding them for aggression. Those pit bulls go somewhere, particularly when these guys get arrested. Most of the pit bulls people actually own probably aren’t from “kennel clubs.” They’re from hobbyist breeders (some portion of whom likely have connections to dogfighting), or animal shelters or rescues. Some portion of “rescue pit bulls,” and probably not as small a portion as we’d hope, are absolutely fighting dogs or recent descendants of fighting dogs.
The Belyayev domestication experiments? No, they were not faked. There is some controversy surrounding "Domestication Syndrome", the idea that domesticated animals necessarily develop certain physical characteristics such as neoteny or piebald coloring, which was claimed to have been observed following the domestication experiments. And there are some lingering questions surrounding the exact timelines, because the undomesticated foxes were bought from a fox farm and likely were selected for certain traits of their own. But no one that I'm aware of believes the experiments were faked. There are still silver foxes being bred from the original program that can be seen today
The Times did an article on the Domestication Syndrome controversy which can be found below,
Weren't the foxes incredibly docile to begin with? Thought I heard you do could elicit essentially the same behavior of the `domesticated' foxes from a wild Canadian cousin? Also looked the same.
They also bred extremely angry, opposite-of-domesticated foxes, so no. They were doing honest-to-goodness artificial selection.
How likely is it that a wild animal acts like a tame animal? I haven't seen your sources, but my prior on this is 0.5%. Maybe 1 in 100 is somewhat more tame, but that's the point of artificial selection.
But isn't that how you'd go about domesticating foxes? Take the ones that are easier to tame and breed them together? Traits that we want in domestic animals are often present in a wild population, they just aren't ubiquitous or consistent. I'll have to look more into this. I haven't heard about controversy in this experiment.
Even if it succeeded in breeding out human aggression, you can’t decouple that from dog aggression. A lot of attacks on people begin because pitbulls are trying to destroy someone’s dog. And while pitbull advocates have made it clear they don’t give a shit about dogs, only pitbulls, other people love their dogs too.
I confess total ignorance here, but I'm wondering if there's some confounding variable that could account for this - e.g., as sort of suggested in the episode, maybe the subculture around pit bulls selected for dog owners who are more likely to train their dogs poorly or maladaptively?
Based on my very limited experience as a dog owner, their behavior seems to be almost entirely dependent on how they are trained/treated by their owner, barring them being neglected/abused before being purchased or adopted.
I saw Katie's response to her detractors on Twitter, and I wasn't impressed. Is this episode her doubling down? If so, I don't know if I'll bother listening.
It's not just doubling down; it's the lowest form of response "I was bullied and threatened online and the counterarguments were stupid." She kind of admits she should've dug a bit deeper in parts but refuses to admit she's credulous and biased, in fact several times asserting she's neither while very clearly being both.
Idk I listen to this podcast for entertainment so it doesn't bother me, but if you take Katie seriously idk if you'll want to listen to this train wreck.
I’m saying this is not a real breed, despite their claim to have made them more docile within a few generations. It’s existed since the 1990s. They’re claiming to have gotten rid of a phenotype (extreme aggression) which has existed in the breed for over 100yrs within 10 years (highly unlikely)
Even the claim from the geneticist was ambiguous as to whether he could identify the breed with DNA. Note: Katie did not mention whether the geneticist could identity a mutt with a parent dog that was bully XL.
It's basic Mendelian genetics/inheritance---the same process dog breeders have been using for thousands of years. Lysenkoism doesn't enter into it, at all.
Feel free to disagree with Katie but let's not accuse her of being `unscientific' by attributing to her a view she does not hold.
Nope, this is not as simple as cross breeding pea plants. Behavior is controlled by thousands of genes, not 1-2. Claiming you’ve created a new breed after 1-2 generations with a different phenotype is pretty nuts, esp if that trait is something that has existed for much much longer.
I didn't say that it was simple or that it wouldn't take a long time, just that the same principles apply.
Breeding dogs is not Lysenkoism and making that comparison is not only inaccurate but, given the baggage that Lysenkoism carries, more than slightly over the top.
Nope. We are talking about behavior, a trait determined by thousands of different genes with different inheritance patterns so it is literally not “basic Mendelian genetics”.
The one last thing I’ve found frustrating is the docile breeding question. I’m perfectly willing to believe that Dave Wilson is trying to breed docile dogs, but I want to know whether he’s done so. That keeps getting lost under the question of whether he’s lying or not.
RE: "Death numbers," i.e. that number of deaths per year vs. population seems small: Obviously a business will recall a product that kills a few babies or toddlers, sometime when it's only one fatality, or just risk of fatality. We parse death risk in many different ways. Most people drive even though the risk of dying in a car accident is not minuscule, but extremely burdensome multi-million car recalls happen all the time, even when no one has died. (One is in the news now, a Hyundai car, no fatalities reported, just the risk of fire from brake fluid leaks, more than 3 million cars recalled.)
What's different about dogs (rather than manufactured products) is that beyond the fatalities, there is so much more out-of-control harm, in human injuries and animal maulings and killings. It's kind of like how we all are alarmed at how many detransitioners we see on social media platforms despite the purporting by TRAs that hardly anyone regrets transition. We can see that there is certainly an alarming number of people harmed, even if that number is relatively small compared to the population, or even compared to all medical transitions. Someone who agreed to have their penis and testes removed or their breasts removed, when they regret it, we know how that is a tragedy beyond what should be tolerated in society. Their life is truly turned upside down forever.
I can't imagine how anyone can not see, all around them, the anecdotal evidence of how common it is that people are terrorized or harmed, or pets mauled to death or gravely injured because of the exponentially growing number of these dogs in the U.S. You could see it in just the comments section on this Substack for that episode, and there is no reason this podcast audience would be very biased when it comes to that particular event (having a bad run-in with a pitbull or bully kind of dog). (And to say these may not be THAT kind of dog when we see shelters overrun with them...well...it's absurd.) And so I think many of us have a disconnect in our understanding of why this podcast would go out of its way to parse these incidents and have so much concern over the misidentification of a breed and how that affects laws that seem so obviously protective, especially to children.
And I totally identify with the feelings that Katie expressed as far as stress. I make gargantuan mistakes in judgments about career and work-related things that make me sick to my stomach and I lose sleep, or even just simply worrying about what people think of something I did. But this is a life and death issue, truly, and so I think it's worth speaking up about, with apologies for any anxiety caused.
I mean, she said she'd support a pit bull ban, so I just don't know what more people want. Is nuance only OK when it's a topic we're not passionate about?
Bring a dog with pointy ears to a dog park and a good number of owners will automatically leave or usher their dog away from the pointy-eared one. Airport security in the US is phasing out/minimizing GSD and like dogs from duty because people think they look scary, particularly because of their ears (even though they're some of the best dogs for the type of work)!
I try to keep that in mind when hearing about how dangerous pits are. I've been around pits and haven't seen it, including allowing them to grab and throw around my dog and him grabbing and throwing them around during play.
And on further thinking, I think Katie's principle that this is a "how the media's spread of misinformation influences laws" story is also what feels "off" about all of this. I am now agreeing with those who've posted and said that the bottom line is not whether to believe rogue trainer Wilson that these dogs were meant to be bred to be docile (and I still can't not roll my eyes at that...can we see those Bully XL ads again?) but whether they actually ended up BEING docile from his efforts. That's all that actually matters. Seems like a lot of evidence they did not turn out to be, and many of us would argue that it is scientifically impossible to have pulled that off anyway. And so, what are we really talking about here? A subset of misidentified dogs? Some activist groups not having solid numbers when we can all see before our eyes that this is at least SOMEWHAT of a very big problem that affects a huge swathe of people? Is that really a story? I don't understand the motivation here. And it's just so ultimately damaging to defend this rogue industry.
Agree 100. This was a bad case of not seeing the forest for the trees. Insane parsing of trivial claims about breeds while denying the very obvious fact that these dogs (whatever the breeders call them) are a problem.
ETA: This phenomenon of Demanding data so granular that it’s unobtainable while ignoring what’s right in front of your eyes is something I’m seeing more and more as of late.
It brings to mind the arguments about how many millimoles of testosterone in a male-to-female trans athlete are present after transition, ignoring the obvious and visible differences between one member of the team and all the rest.
And much of the current problem w/ science is that people throw theory and on-the-ground reality out the window and stare at (and massage) numbers until they see what it is they wanted to see. Both things are true.
Thus: "Puberty blockers are reversible" and "better a live son than a dead daughter" and other contrived bits of scientific fact that are being shown to be BS.
I'm not going to argue that the process isn't abused, because it is, but this isn't a reason to throw your hands up and say, `Well, I'll just believe what I see/experience,' because we know that approach is inherently biased.
Maybe? But often time common sense is wrong. The devices we're using to communicate with each other make use of physics that are mind bogglingly non-sensical.
Just don't agree that when there's a dispute about the data we should simply rely on `common sense'.
Hi Katie, in case you're reading I just wanted to say that the American Bully XL episode was one of my faves in recent memory! Unlike most listeners apparently, I didn't come in with a strong opinion on the matter and thought it was really thoroughly reported and quite fascinating to explore the different characters and sides of the issue.
I didn't come away thinking "American bullies are gentle as lambs and great family dogs that have been unfairly besmirched". Instead it was more like 1) breed bans are often ineffective and hard to implement, especially for pit mixes given their prevalence in the dog population; 2) there are cultural associations that may exacerbate pitt hate in a way that does not impact breeds like German shepherds; 3) some activist organizations are well-intentioned but spread dubious statistics that are credulously reported by media, leading to aforementioned ineffective bans.
I thought it was a nuanced, well-considered investigation. Sorry you're getting so much hate.
It was mind-boggling to me that so many people on here who were commenting with outrage sounded like they latched on to some minor inaccuracies in the story and completely missed the bigger picture/actual point of the episode. I saw some nuanced discussion more on here though, unlike Reddit and TwitterX, at least.
Tbh, some of the ‘inaccuracies’ were so minor as to be little more than nitpicking that don’t really alter the substance of the piece at all.
I missed the original discussion (thankfully) but it strikes me as a lot of people with a very fixed views outraged that someone could say ‘actually it’s probably a lot more complicated than it may first seem’.
To me it rather seemed Katie is the one to miss the bigger picture here precisely because she focused on relatively minor issues, and many people pointed that out.
The bigger picture is that if these dogs are not distinguishable from other pitbulls and there's zero evidence they are actually more docile, they should fall under the existing ban. In that view, all the nuance and nitty gritty is unnecessary.
"The bigger picture is that if these dogs are not distinguishable from other pitbulls and there's zero evidence they are actually more docile, they should fall under the existing ban. In that view, all the nuance and nitty gritty is unnecessary."
The nuance might inform how we should feel about the existing ban in the first place though.
I wrote this elsewhere but in the UK, “pit bull type” dogs are banned and not just American pitbull terriers — they must meet physical standards that were outlined by the American Dog Breeders Association. American Bully XLs had to be added onto the list later…so they probably did not fit the definition of “pit bull type” as stated by the government in the first place. There likely aren't a lot of "real" ABXLs (ones who originated from the breeders in the US who developed the "breed") in the UK anyway since they are ridiculously expensive. Maybe some of them have ABXL in their breeding but who knows without DNA testing.
But whatever, the actual big picture issue that maybe should have seen more focus on is that BSLs are not an effective way to curb violent dog attacks. Describing this ridiculous drama with ABXLs made for an interesting episode, but I wish there had been more attention paid to that. Nevertheless I still thought it was a decent episode since it got me to do a bit more research about this whole thing.
I imagine Katie would have got even more shit from the anti Pit Bull crowd had she focused more on BSLs ineffectiveness.
From my time in the UK, I know that the media have for a long time focused on the dangers of specific breeds. It’s not that the public aren’t aware that issues with owners or other non breed specific factors aren’t causative to dog attacks, but it’s very easy for the UKs tabloid culture to whip up breed specific hysteria that quickly becomes disconnected to the factual situation. The issues with ABXLs comes at the end of long and ingrained tabloid trope about ‘killer breeds’.
Given the complexity of the issues trying to cover both the effectiveness AND the identification critiques of BSLs in any depth would have required and enormous amount of work and it sounds like Katie but in a lot of time and effort just on this specific aspect.
Like Katie I’m agnostic on BSLs per se, but imagine if they are warranted in some cases they need to narrower and more clearly defined than currently.
Easier to deal with than penalising bad owners harder. I hadn’t even considered leash laws. I’d be MASSIVELY in favour of that- had an escalating conflict with a neighbour over his loose dog chasing our cats ON OUR PROPERTY that ended with him in prison- would have been nice if he had just had the dog taken after the first complaint.
Agreed! So we’ll said. I love dogs but don’t know this world at all. It’s wild that when you provide nuance to statements and try to come away with a reasonable stance people still filter it through their preconceived beliefs.
Totally agree. This piece was sooooo good. Really enjoyed both podcasts on this topic. Fascinating.
The fall of the Roman Empire was due to heated pitbull discourse
This was due to confusion of the Molossus hound (and mixes) with the pit bull. There are some similarities in appearance but while the Molossus were dogs of war, Roman pit bulls were nanny dogs (and sometimes wet nurses when wolves were unavailable).
Those Roman dog inspectors needed to get their shit together
that's why the empire fell!
Oh, thanks for making me think about the Roman Empire again, that’s 3 times today and it’s only 10am
The Roman empire meme was the least surprising thing to both me and my girlfriend. She and I were both like well duh, at least in my case. Good to know other guys have their priorities in order as well.
I think there should be a meta-meme about whether the meme makes sense to people.
Abetted no doubt by circumcision discourse
Today's Mastino Napoletano is a direct descendant of the Mollossian dogs. They are docile, my Italian father-in-law had several and we had one - Mischa. Their jaws are so powerful that a bite can cause severe damage, but they are not aggressive dogs by nature. Unfortunately, almost any dog can be trained to be aggressive by owners who are interested in a guard dog. I do believe people who buy certain breeds should have to have background checks - like gun owners - and take dog training classes.
Katie is an incredibly thorough reporter. That she felt a second episode was necessary just shows you how committed she is to making sure the audience has all the information. Crazy to me to that anyone here would think she's biased or not giving the full story in any way. If you've listened to any of her other episodes you'd know exactly how much work and worry she puts into getting the story right.
If you listened to the first episode you'd know that her credulous approach was well below the standards the pod usually sets.
I did listen to the first episode. Very well reported!
You’re of course entitled to view her as credulous but I think it’s a really unfair description of the first episode.
She didn’t affirm his specific position though, and believed counterarguments which if true WOULD undermine his position; therefore she was credulous.
I personally do not like pit bulls. I have friends who work in paediatrics and their stories have more than convinced me that we are better off without them and I’ll be happy with the ban when it comes in. But I don’t think Katie did a terrible job and she did make me think about it- though I haven’t changed my mind lol
I don't see the connection between putting a lot of work into something and the actual validity of the story. Tunnel vision does exist!
Listening to the list of calls she made for the episode was pretty eye opening. She’s very thorough!
It’s one thing to have a disagreement with someone, it’s another to directly send the unsolicited dog attack videos
The internet enables so much shitty behaviour.
Seriously what the fuck is wrong with people. Tbh I’m sure she watched some while researching the story anyway- how could you not, they’re in most of the articles. But still I don’t know what pushes people to immediately go so far into extreme behaviour after the first disagreement with someone. All Hamas, no Gaza.
them*
We love you Katie! Don’t feel stressed out by the response - your conclusions were wrong in the last ep but it’s ok, no one is perfect :)
Very commendable that she sat down with Lawrence and Sam, too. I think the issues stemmed from her over-correcting for her bias against pitbulls, not from a general bias towards dogs.
Agreed
Yes!
Thanks for writing exactly what I was thinking
This is an incredibly frustrating episode to listen to. I didn't comment on the first one because mistakes happen and no one is perfect, but when you re-cover it and still make the same mistake it's incredibly annoying, frustrating, and, as a listener, disheartening. I'm not threatening to quit listening or unsubscribing, but I certainly would be thinking about it if this was a subject that was regularly covered.
The mistake here is there is no such thing as an "American Bully XL", and to say it's exists and is bred to be something is still an aspirational statement. To develop a breed of dog, or of anything, you have to actually get the different sources to breed (and many different versions of them), raise the offspring, sterilize the ones with characteristics/behaviors you don't want, have the remaining ones breed with other sources with the characteristics/behaviors you want to reinforce, then rinse and repeat for a few generations. Then when you do all that you then have to raise a couple more generations to prove what you've got is a stable mix with the characteristics you want that don't have hidden genetic defects or other problem areas.
That takes decades at a minimum. And that's before you even release the "breed" out in the world. The American Bully XL is, quite literally, just a random shot in the dark by a fanatic who has more dreams than sense. And I don't say that in a derogatory sense, I mean that in order to think you can create a dog breed by just doing a generation or two of mixing with a pair of breeds and hope it works is literally the textbook definition of feels over reals.
The fact that someone as educated and smart as Katie decided to run this story without considering that is what's disheartening here. In this episode she even brings up the reason they discuss the issue using the trans issue as an analogy, when one of the things they've covered on trans issues is the fact that there is no good data on certain aspects because it literally takes time for people on newer treatments to progress and get data on them. If she wanted to cover this story from a similar angle to their trans coverage, that's the angle they should have gone with. Crazy breeder does a hack job on creating a new dog type and the idiots who defend the new breed based on a hail mary pass and a prayer.
Edit:
I realized the last sentence there is a bit passive aggressive. Another way to say this in a more polite way is that there has, objectively, not been enough time to determine if the intent of the breeder has played out in the breed. And the breed itself wasn't given enough time and simply raw numbers to build itself as a proven breed before being sold to the public. The result is even if the "American Bully XL" does exist in some form as intended by the breeder, a ton of other breeders, whom aren't necessarily "bad breeders", have replicated the breed themselves in the same manner and passed them out to the public. If you insist on considering American Bully XL a breed, you don't actually have just an American Bully XL, you have the American Bully XL-Dave version, American Bully XL-Trisha version, American Bully XL-Lebron version. And then you get American Bully XL-Dave & Trish Version. And so on and so forth.
Part of her argument is that there is no such thing as an American Bully XL - for the reasons you mentioned - and that's why it's questionable to ban a breed that doesn't exist in any meaningful, easily categorised way. It's hard to identify a Bully XL, which muddies the water around the statistics because people report dogs as being Bully XLs when they probably aren't. I don't see how you are saying anything Katie didn't already address in the pod.
Pitbulls in Britain are already banned. The Bully XL is a "new" category that allows people to circumvent the law. The argument is that they aren't meaningfully different than existing pitbulls
But it "circumvents the ban" by not having pit bull characteristics, which means your argument against them can't just recurse to "they're effectively pit bulls." The characteristics are different, so you have to generate evidence that those characteristics themselves pose a danger to the public and that evidence hasn't been provided.
But they're going around killing people. They are directly implicated in the rise and deaths by dogs in Britain. Then the argument is that you can't "prove" that they are American Bully XLs because nobody can tell them apart from regular pitbulls, and we're back where we're started.
Well, they're not. They're "implicated" but only as a function of the fact that when there's a media-driven hysteria around certain dog breeds, people who aren't good at readily-identifying dog breeds by sight who get attacked by dogs falsely identify the dog as whatever's been in the news. "Oh, the media says pit bulls attack people. I was attacked; must be a pitbull."
There's no actual good evidence linking any dog breed to any dog attack because the dog breed is rarely identified when a dog attacks a person. The dog itself is rarely identified, so you can't just go to the dog and see what breed it is.
They have identified them, because they are killing people https://twitter.com/s8mb/status/1706363365323313591?s=19
If there’s no such thing as an American Bully, there are a few implications that don’t line up with how Katie talked about the story:
(1) If there’s no such thing as an American Bully, all so-called American Bullies should be treated the same as all other pit bulls from a legal perspective. Since pit bulls are currently banned in the UK but “American Bullies” aren’t, the UK needs to either also ban “American Bullies” or unban pit bulls (I personally don’t know what I think about which it should be, FWIW). Katie seemed to be treating the status quo, in which pit bulls are banned but “American Bullies” aren’t, as reasonable.
(2) If “American Bullies” are just pit bulls, then it’s not really that important whether the dog involved in a particular attack is an “American Bully” or a pit bull—much as it wouldn’t matter if a particular dog was a yellow lab or a black lab. Katie discussed the story as though a lot hinges on whether a particular dog was correctly identified as an “American Bully” or whether it was just a pit bull.
(3) If there’s no such thing as an “American Bully,” the activists you should be most suspicious of are the ones who say there is one, it’s something different from a pit bull, and it should be treated differently by the law—not the ones who say the law should treat so-called “American Bullies” the same as pit bulls.
1) If there's so obviously no such thing as American Bullies, why is the UK government & media putting so much effort into talking about them as a specific breed rather than treating them like pit bulls? If American Bullies aren't a breed, then the status quo is reasonable. The government is the one saying they are a breed, and that legally means the breed must exist, which gives legitimacy to people who argue to Bullies are different and more docile.
2) Again, it matters because that's what the government & media are saying is important, and they're giving out a lot of biased statistics based on potentially incorrect information. If someone identifies ANY dog attack as ANY incorrect breed, that can have bad consequences for the public image of that breed, which leads more people to hate a breed when more robust, unbiased data isn't there to support that hate.
3) The government and media seem pretty certain that there's a difference between pit bulls and American Bullies. Maybe we should question that narrative?
I started writing a long response, but I don't want to get into a protracted back and forth. I just want to focus on one key point of disagreement:
You say, "If American Bullies aren't a breed, then the status quo is reasonable."
No, this is patently not true. If American Bullies aren't a distinct breed, then they are just pit bulls. The status quo in the UK is: Pit bull banned, American Bully legal. It is blatantly unreasonable to say "X is banned, but X is legal if you call it Y." Either ban all the X's, including the ones called Y's, or legalize all the X's.
In the UK, “pit bull type” dogs are banned — they must meet physical standards that were outlined by the American Dog Breeders Association. American Bully XLs probably did not fit into the standards, and thus were added onto the list…so they probably did not fit the definition of “pit bull type” as stated by the government in the first place.
There’s also the fact that it seems like it’s questionable that people can even tell what XLs even look like, given how they’re not really a real breed with clear traits that breed true. To me it seems like a waste of time and resources when they should probably just …ban dangerous dogs and take away any dog that is considered a danger.
"Part of her argument is that there is no such thing as an American Bully XL -"
.... yet she also argues that American Bully XL are bred to be docile.
Either the breed exists or it doesn't. Which one is it??
That question is the point of the podcast, though. If you want an answer to it you're looking in the wrong place, and saying Katie failed in her task by not giving an answer is an unfair expectation. All Katie is doing is laying down the different opinions with emphasis on the ones she sees as not being given enough attention in the mainstream media and explaining why it's a more complicated issue than the incredibly biased activists would have you believe.
Please give me a time code where Katie even suggests either there is "no such thing as an American Bully XL" or that the breed "doesn't exist in any meaningful way". Furthermore I'd also appreciate a time code where Katie indicates there is any evidence to support the statement by the breeder.
I have a lot of interest in the Tamaskan, another breed in development. The goal was to create a "wolf look-alike" dog with no actual wolf ancestry. Predictably, even some of the founding breeders engaged in unscrupulous and unethical breeding practices to produce dogs with the desired look. Wolves were bred in and pedigrees doctored. Dogs with significant health and behavioral issues were bred because they had certain aesthetic traits that bred true. Like bullies, these dogs were selling for $3,000+ easy and that created an incentive to move fast and produce a lot of litters with whatever breeding stock was available.
Recognizing that flooding the dog market with a bunch of recklessly-bred wolfdogs (that were supposedly not even wolfdogs) would trash the reputation of the breed they were trying to develop, the leading breed club decided to implement very strict breeding requirements:
ALL breeding Tamaskans must have a genetic profile submitted that can be used to prove parentage of their puppies. ALL must have genetic health testing. ALL must have hip, elbow and eye testing performed by a vet. Paperwork must be submitted for these tests. Breeders must also submit paperwork for serious health conditions that arise in their dogs' progeny and file a report when a puppy dies during or shortly after birth. ALL breeding pairs must fall below a very low (10%) coefficient of inbreeding, which is a statistical method for guaranteeing genetic diversity. Breeding bitches may have no more than 4 litters in a lifetime. Wolf content must fall below 30% and must be confirmed by DNA testing.
If these requirements are not met, a Tamaskan's puppies will not be registered by the breed club.
These are the kinds of standards you need to have if you want to experiment with creating a new breed responsibly.
Contrast with the American Bully Kennel Club, which requires no health testing and no health reporting, permits unlimited inbreeding, permits any amount of pitbull ancestry, and only requires sires to be genetically profiled after 3 litters.
How can a dog have no wolf ancestry?
Domestic dogs speciated >10,000 years ago, possibly even closer to 100,000 years ago. They share most of their DNA with wolves (as we do with chimps and bonobos) but their genetic profiles are distinct.
Ahhh gotcha - no recent wolf ancestors
First, thank you for your well informed response.
I had a similar feeling as you, even though I know nothing about dogs: Katie is not addressing the issue that her abilities as a journalist are very much in question after these episodes. She's relying on the angry internet mob trope and then going into victimhood--we do not care if you lose sleep, Katie, stop relying on parasociality and start being a better reporter.
"we do not care if you lose sleep, Katie, stop relying on parasociality and start being a better reporter."
Why do you even listen to this podcast if you're going to act exactly like the sort of pretentious, self-righteous online asshole that this show justly criticizes and mocks?
...have you looked at the reddit or the slatestarcodex thing many barpod listeners like? This community is full of pretentious self-righteous online assholes. In fact that's how I'd describe Katie in this ep, too.
Really, you’d describe someone who was clearly deeply committed to getting a story right she spent a huge amount of time addressing critics in good faith, as a ‘pretentious self righteous online arsehole’?
That you seem to think being deeply unpleasant isok is one thing, but that you’ve convinced yourself you’re so right on the issue it justifies being deeply unpleasant quite another...
Katie is not pretentious, you on the other hand.....
(I do care if she loses sleep. Same as anyone who isn’t a monster.)
You don't. There is no way you can care about the sleep health of 8 billion human beings, the brain doesn't work like that.
If you’re going to start throwing around accusations of journalistic malpractice at least have SOME awareness of your own biases and prejudices. Admitting you ‘know nothing about dogs’ would have you hoped caused you to be less certain about your position.
idk what you're talking about because I have no position on the pitbull issue; perhaps you've misunderstood or are confusing me with someone else.
On Katie's shitty journalism? As an ex-journalist who worked in the field for over a decade and now owns a media company, yeah that's something I am qualified to have a position on.
I was referring to your position on Katie’s coverage and your description of her ‘shitty journalism’ is at best an opinion I’m guess you’re entitled to.
As others have noticed you’re just coming across as throughly unpleasant and have no idea why you’ve subscribed if you really do truly believe Katie to be so unprofessional.
Your qualifications for passing judgement on her journalism are of course something we have no way to verify.
Thank you for sharing your viewpoint with me, I find it incredibly valuable and am grateful you've taken the time out to engage with me.
I’m going to mute you now, as a mixture of someone who thinks being so unpleasant online is justified because of their own ‘rightness’ combined with a ridiculously self righteous tone is something I can live without.
I think there’s little chance of me missing anything worthwhile.
Sorry, I'm really struggling to find the disagreement between what you're saying and what Katie reported, both in the original episode and the followup. I feel like we listened to two entirely separate podcasts.
I got too bored to read it all the way though. People get passionate about things, and then they get obsessed with minutia. And when someone doesn't know every single detail that they do, it's time to burn the oilfields and salt the earth.
It doesn’t matter if there isn’t an actual breed called a Bully XL or whatever, because an entire country is considering it a “breed” for the sake of banning dogs that vaguely look like them. They apparently didn’t do the required research on the matter and are basing the ban on social media hype and the misinformed public freaking out about muscular dogs that have a blocky head.
This is gibberish. Go touch grass. You’re as nuts about these dogs as online weirdos are about gender.
And you’ve clearly picked up talking points from comment sections that you’re regurgitating here- it’s incoherent in a very telltale way.
“Crazy breeder does a hack job on creating a new dog type and the idiots who defend the new breed based on a hail mary pass and a prayer”
Except she spoke to others with knowledge in the area who wouldn’t accept the ‘crazy breeder’ description and who based on their background can’t simply be dismissed as ‘idiots’.
It seems ironic that Katie seems far more aware of her biases than many of those criticising her.
Everyone she spoke too referenced that the breeder said they bred the dog to be less aggressive to people. More sources repeating the claims of a single source does not equal "spoke to others with knowledge". If she legitimately found some other evidence, I did not hear it and would be perfectly happy to eat my words and be proven wrong if you'd give me a time code to that. And if a breeder can't provide any proof of their claims, then they are a crazy breeder and not a respectable one.
The fact that they referenced the Breeders claim doesn’t mean they simply relied on it, or didn’t have reason to agree with it based on any evidence they reviewed or on their own expertise.
That you’ve concluded that they simply credulously parroted the Breeders claim & then Katie did the same is simply your conclusion.
That Katie was satisfied she was speaking to trust worthy independent sources that gave credence to Breeders claim seems far more credible than the assumptions you’ve draw which seem simply constructed to confirm the view your originally started with.
Yes, it's common for people to accept a claim after evaluating the data and coming to their own conclusion, but when they do that they reference the data. Where is that reference?
And if Katie wanted us, the listeners, to come to a different conclusion than I did maybe she should provide some basis for any other conclusion. I wouldn't expect her to do that deep a dive on this but maybe interviewing someone who has more to say on the subject than their personal experience and the claim of the breeder. Again, if she did that then I didn't hear it and all you have to do is provide me the point in time when she's done that.
So, having spoken to others with expertise in the field who you’ve no reasonable grounds to question their independence you’re dismissing their view point and are assuming it must simply be credulously accepted the breeders word because Katie’s piece provided details of their view but didn’t go into the basis of how they formed it.
So, rather than assume that level of detail wasn’t included for reasons of space & time you’ve jumped to a prejudicial conclusion that their view can just be dismissed in favour of of one that supports your conclusions.
This really is a waste of time. I came to this with literally no strong views either way, but it’s been pretty obvious a lot of others have completely fixed views & there’s literally nothing Katie could have said or done they’d be happy to accept.
Done!
Despite all your pontificating you've still yet to provide a single point I could go back and listen to during the episode where Katie "provided details of their view". Just saying it's been bred that way is not "details". I would happily accept that.
If everything is as you say this should be super easy and simple, yet you nor anyone else has done it yet.
The only weird thing here is in a podcast that prides itself on properly referencing data and calling out mistakes by people who aren't properly assessing the evidence based reality of the discussion topics you are defending the lack of any of that in these two episodes and instead making excuses for them not following through with their usual rigor. Maybe you should do some introspection about whether I've truly been prejudicial or if you're refusing to see the problem out of some unhealthy parasocial connection with the hosts.
Don’t worry Katie, as a subscriber who truly does not care about this issue whatsoever, I’m not offended.
I didn’t even listen to the original episode but couldn’t resist listening to this one because I 100% knew the drama explosion around this topic would be fascinating.
I haven't listened yet but I hope she doesn't pull the "I'm sorry you were offended shtick" instead of acknowledging the fact that we weren't offended at her bias and shoddy reasoning (and Jesse's lack of challenging her), we were disappointed.
Who’s the ‘we’, I couldn’t disagree more about your description of the first episode.
Mistaking people vocally pointing out pretty staggering credulousness on Katie's part and persistent use of the "no true Scotsman" fallacy isn't being "offended"
You know how idealogues try to hind behind "my enemies are offended" when faced with good criticism? Thank God Katie would never do that.
Ha, same!
I think the whole approach to this issue is wrongheaded, but I was never going to unsub or harass Katie or send anyone videos of people getting mauled, gold star for me!
Anyway, it would have been a very interesting groundbreaking piece of work had there been evidence that pitbulls and related breeds were being scapegoated for attacks by rottweilers or something. "A lot of dogs that basically look like pitbulls are attacking people, but are they the specific crossbreeds people think they are? Conclusion: we aren't sure," is just not getting me wherever I'm supposed to go. And stories about pregnant dogs getting dumped to whelp in the woods only lends credence to the idea that allowing loopholes to the pit ban put pit crosses in the wrong hands.
The issue, fundamentally, is that not knowing something isn't a justification to jump to whatever conclusion you prefer. If you don't know the breed of the dog, you can neither say "this was a pit bull, tally up another pit attack" like BullyWatch does, neither can you say "this isn't a pit bull, it's actually a rottweiler." Because you don't know.
The vast, vast majority of human dog attacks are by unidentified dogs. But there aren't that many dog attacks on humans to begin with. The data literally does not statistically support any course of action at all - the only reasonable position is to "have no dog in the fight", if you will.
Dogs that look like pit bulls and related breeds commit a drastically disproportionate number of attacks. Thus, dogs that look like pit bulls are banned. It's not a particularly sophisticated hammer for the problem, but that doesn't make it a bad one.
I don't think it would be a bad idea at all to do DNA testing on dangerous dogs euthanized by the state, but as the state is already reasonably convinced in its conclusions it has no reason to pay for that. Perhaps Bully Watch will work out a way to get that funded/done. I very much doubt that pit advocacy groups would want to fund that.
But they don't, is the thing. They don't commit a drastically disproportionate number of attacks - there are so few dog attacks that almost no number of attacks, by however you group the dogs, is disproportionate. Hardly any dogs attack people, so whenever a dog does, that dog's breed is now responsible for a "disproportionate number of attacks."
Poor Katie has been bullied on the internet, which is something Barpod always takes seriously.
If you think this stuff is contentious now, just wait until JK Rowling makes a few innocuous comments.
You could post this comment every episode!
The one piece that I really felt NEEDED to be addressed is that the UKC apparently allows registered American Pit Bull Terriers to be "transferred" to the American Bully breed. Once the paperwork is processed, a purebred pitbull is magically transformed into an American Bully, and its puppies will be registerable as American Bullies.
As far as I can tell, this is a perfect smoking gun for those arguing that this breed was created primarily to circumvent breed bans, including allowing people to import and breed purebred pitbulls that have not been modified in any way.
https://www.ukcdogs.com/docs/registration-forms/breed-transfer-american-bully.pdf
Jesse's commitment to having windows work perfectly may be demonstrative of conscious or unconscious support for white supremacy culture and its foundational tenets.
I bet he's stalking trans people with shitty pre-war windows on "X" as we speak.
Katie, just know some of us have so completely lost all sense of appropriate boundaries that we will love you no matter what.
Like an elderly racist neighbor or hard-to-come-by apolitical PNW hairdresser, I will always be here for Katie.
Katie’s approach to the pitbull problem feels like willful blindness. The idea that “being docile” is a trait that you could select for w/ breeding with a few generations is so unscientific. This is Lysenkoism with a new name
I guess it depends on what you mean by a few generations, but in experiments a third of silver foxes were judged to be domesticated after 20 generations of selection for tameness, while nearly all of them were assessed to be domesticated after 30 generations. It wouldn't surprise me that it would take even fewer generations to bring an already domesticated, if aggressive, animal like the Pitbull and decrease its aggression to normal levels for a dog.
I would disagree.
Foxes are wild and breeding them strictly for tameness is relatively simple. Fighting dogs were bred for docility to humans and aggressiveness towards other dogs. That's highly specialized and complex. Picking the calmest foxes is one thing. To 'unbreed' a pit's aggression means reversing one trait while still maintaining the others.
And that's in a breed that's genetically bottlenecked, not a wild population.
And unless I missed something, they didn’t even attempt to breed dog aggression out of them.
Unless I'm missing something, there are a lot of "aggressive" dogs that have an instinct to chase and kill prey - is there any actual proof that pit bulls are more aggressive to humans, or is this vibes?
I'm leaning towards vibes, despite all of the self-proclaimed dog breeding experts around here.
I don't know about humans, but if I had a small dog I would be very, very concerned if a former racing dog, e.g., a greyhound, were off leash as the instinct to chase and catch is still there.
Bulldogs are descended from mastiffs, bred for bull baiting. That was banned around the start of the 19th century. So people started crossing bulldogs with terriers explicitly for dog fighting. That's a lot of aggressive genetics to draw from.
I mean, that's also more than a century where dogfighting has been illegal in the Western world (from cursory googling it looks like things peaked and then cratered in the mid/late 19th century for dog fighting), during which time kennel clubs had no incentive to breed for aggression.
They're obviously bred to look mean, but I'm not sure if they're bred to be mean.
Dogfighting did not end when it was outlawed. Michael Vick was a high profile perpetrator, but his was hardly an isolated case. The ASPCA says they think tens of thousands of Americans participate in dogfighting (https://www.aspca.org/investigations-rescue/dogfighting/closer-look-dogfighting). You can also just search “dogfighting arrest” and see how many cases make the news every year.
The people who are doing this are predominantly using pit bulls and they are absolutely breeding them for aggression. Those pit bulls go somewhere, particularly when these guys get arrested. Most of the pit bulls people actually own probably aren’t from “kennel clubs.” They’re from hobbyist breeders (some portion of whom likely have connections to dogfighting), or animal shelters or rescues. Some portion of “rescue pit bulls,” and probably not as small a portion as we’d hope, are absolutely fighting dogs or recent descendants of fighting dogs.
If I'm not mistaken, you're referring to a famously faked study.
The Belyayev domestication experiments? No, they were not faked. There is some controversy surrounding "Domestication Syndrome", the idea that domesticated animals necessarily develop certain physical characteristics such as neoteny or piebald coloring, which was claimed to have been observed following the domestication experiments. And there are some lingering questions surrounding the exact timelines, because the undomesticated foxes were bought from a fox farm and likely were selected for certain traits of their own. But no one that I'm aware of believes the experiments were faked. There are still silver foxes being bred from the original program that can be seen today
The Times did an article on the Domestication Syndrome controversy which can be found below,
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/03/science/foxes-tame-belyaev.html
Looks like there was some disagreement about the implications, according to Wikipedia, but faked? How does one fake tame foxes? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox#:~:text=After%20over%2040%20generations%20of,but%20with%20much%20lower%20frequency%E2%80%A6.
Weren't the foxes incredibly docile to begin with? Thought I heard you do could elicit essentially the same behavior of the `domesticated' foxes from a wild Canadian cousin? Also looked the same.
They also bred extremely angry, opposite-of-domesticated foxes, so no. They were doing honest-to-goodness artificial selection.
How likely is it that a wild animal acts like a tame animal? I haven't seen your sources, but my prior on this is 0.5%. Maybe 1 in 100 is somewhat more tame, but that's the point of artificial selection.
Think I first heard about this on The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe? Here are a couple of sources:
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-friday-edition-1.5395387/century-old-photos-from-p-e-i-debunk-famous-study-on-how-foxes-were-tamed-says-scientist-1.5392806
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/03/science/foxes-tame-belyaev.html
I haven't looked into it too deeply, so in the best SGU practice I must admit that I'm possibly mis-remembering and/or mis-informed!
But isn't that how you'd go about domesticating foxes? Take the ones that are easier to tame and breed them together? Traits that we want in domestic animals are often present in a wild population, they just aren't ubiquitous or consistent. I'll have to look more into this. I haven't heard about controversy in this experiment.
Even if it succeeded in breeding out human aggression, you can’t decouple that from dog aggression. A lot of attacks on people begin because pitbulls are trying to destroy someone’s dog. And while pitbull advocates have made it clear they don’t give a shit about dogs, only pitbulls, other people love their dogs too.
`And while pitbull advocates have made it clear they don’t give a shit about dogs'
Seems a bit of a generalization. The pit owners in my life are all dog lovers and have had different breeds before and after pits.
I confess total ignorance here, but I'm wondering if there's some confounding variable that could account for this - e.g., as sort of suggested in the episode, maybe the subculture around pit bulls selected for dog owners who are more likely to train their dogs poorly or maladaptively?
Based on my very limited experience as a dog owner, their behavior seems to be almost entirely dependent on how they are trained/treated by their owner, barring them being neglected/abused before being purchased or adopted.
There's nothing in particular to account for - actually-identified pit bulls/bullies aren't implicated in a statistically-elevated number of attacks.
I saw Katie's response to her detractors on Twitter, and I wasn't impressed. Is this episode her doubling down? If so, I don't know if I'll bother listening.
It's not just doubling down; it's the lowest form of response "I was bullied and threatened online and the counterarguments were stupid." She kind of admits she should've dug a bit deeper in parts but refuses to admit she's credulous and biased, in fact several times asserting she's neither while very clearly being both.
Idk I listen to this podcast for entertainment so it doesn't bother me, but if you take Katie seriously idk if you'll want to listen to this train wreck.
Selective breeding is the opposite of Lysenkoism.
I’m saying this is not a real breed, despite their claim to have made them more docile within a few generations. It’s existed since the 1990s. They’re claiming to have gotten rid of a phenotype (extreme aggression) which has existed in the breed for over 100yrs within 10 years (highly unlikely)
Even the claim from the geneticist was ambiguous as to whether he could identify the breed with DNA. Note: Katie did not mention whether the geneticist could identity a mutt with a parent dog that was bully XL.
If it's not a breed, then there's nothing to ban. You're making two arguments here that contradict each other.
No, this is not Lysenkoism. This is at worst over-optimism about the pace of artificial selection.
It's basic Mendelian genetics/inheritance---the same process dog breeders have been using for thousands of years. Lysenkoism doesn't enter into it, at all.
Feel free to disagree with Katie but let's not accuse her of being `unscientific' by attributing to her a view she does not hold.
Nope, this is not as simple as cross breeding pea plants. Behavior is controlled by thousands of genes, not 1-2. Claiming you’ve created a new breed after 1-2 generations with a different phenotype is pretty nuts, esp if that trait is something that has existed for much much longer.
I didn't say that it was simple or that it wouldn't take a long time, just that the same principles apply.
Breeding dogs is not Lysenkoism and making that comparison is not only inaccurate but, given the baggage that Lysenkoism carries, more than slightly over the top.
“It's basic Mendelian genetics/inheritance-“
Nope. We are talking about behavior, a trait determined by thousands of different genes with different inheritance patterns so it is literally not “basic Mendelian genetics”.
As such, definitely not Lysenkoism, right?
Certain breeds come pre-selected for docility, so wouldn't breeding them be a potentially successful way to select for that trait?
My dog knowledge is very limited, but there does seem to be a real thing that some dog breeds are more chill/less reactive than others.
...but aggression can be?
Even if Katie was legally married to Moose in the state of Washington I still wouldn’t unsubscribe.
I would demand to be invited to the wedding.
Bro same. I'll come in my doggy leather suit.
They need to go this as part of a subscription drive stretch goal
Agreed.
I would respect that. But please no "kissing" photos. Super gross.
But I would expect kissing audio in the podcast for premium subscribers. Like slimy ASMR.
The one last thing I’ve found frustrating is the docile breeding question. I’m perfectly willing to believe that Dave Wilson is trying to breed docile dogs, but I want to know whether he’s done so. That keeps getting lost under the question of whether he’s lying or not.
RE: "Death numbers," i.e. that number of deaths per year vs. population seems small: Obviously a business will recall a product that kills a few babies or toddlers, sometime when it's only one fatality, or just risk of fatality. We parse death risk in many different ways. Most people drive even though the risk of dying in a car accident is not minuscule, but extremely burdensome multi-million car recalls happen all the time, even when no one has died. (One is in the news now, a Hyundai car, no fatalities reported, just the risk of fire from brake fluid leaks, more than 3 million cars recalled.)
What's different about dogs (rather than manufactured products) is that beyond the fatalities, there is so much more out-of-control harm, in human injuries and animal maulings and killings. It's kind of like how we all are alarmed at how many detransitioners we see on social media platforms despite the purporting by TRAs that hardly anyone regrets transition. We can see that there is certainly an alarming number of people harmed, even if that number is relatively small compared to the population, or even compared to all medical transitions. Someone who agreed to have their penis and testes removed or their breasts removed, when they regret it, we know how that is a tragedy beyond what should be tolerated in society. Their life is truly turned upside down forever.
I can't imagine how anyone can not see, all around them, the anecdotal evidence of how common it is that people are terrorized or harmed, or pets mauled to death or gravely injured because of the exponentially growing number of these dogs in the U.S. You could see it in just the comments section on this Substack for that episode, and there is no reason this podcast audience would be very biased when it comes to that particular event (having a bad run-in with a pitbull or bully kind of dog). (And to say these may not be THAT kind of dog when we see shelters overrun with them...well...it's absurd.) And so I think many of us have a disconnect in our understanding of why this podcast would go out of its way to parse these incidents and have so much concern over the misidentification of a breed and how that affects laws that seem so obviously protective, especially to children.
And I totally identify with the feelings that Katie expressed as far as stress. I make gargantuan mistakes in judgments about career and work-related things that make me sick to my stomach and I lose sleep, or even just simply worrying about what people think of something I did. But this is a life and death issue, truly, and so I think it's worth speaking up about, with apologies for any anxiety caused.
I mean, she said she'd support a pit bull ban, so I just don't know what more people want. Is nuance only OK when it's a topic we're not passionate about?
People are irrational about dogs.
Bring a dog with pointy ears to a dog park and a good number of owners will automatically leave or usher their dog away from the pointy-eared one. Airport security in the US is phasing out/minimizing GSD and like dogs from duty because people think they look scary, particularly because of their ears (even though they're some of the best dogs for the type of work)!
I try to keep that in mind when hearing about how dangerous pits are. I've been around pits and haven't seen it, including allowing them to grab and throw around my dog and him grabbing and throwing them around during play.
You’re unhinged about this and I doubt it relates to anything in your real life. Touch grass.
And on further thinking, I think Katie's principle that this is a "how the media's spread of misinformation influences laws" story is also what feels "off" about all of this. I am now agreeing with those who've posted and said that the bottom line is not whether to believe rogue trainer Wilson that these dogs were meant to be bred to be docile (and I still can't not roll my eyes at that...can we see those Bully XL ads again?) but whether they actually ended up BEING docile from his efforts. That's all that actually matters. Seems like a lot of evidence they did not turn out to be, and many of us would argue that it is scientifically impossible to have pulled that off anyway. And so, what are we really talking about here? A subset of misidentified dogs? Some activist groups not having solid numbers when we can all see before our eyes that this is at least SOMEWHAT of a very big problem that affects a huge swathe of people? Is that really a story? I don't understand the motivation here. And it's just so ultimately damaging to defend this rogue industry.
Agree 100. This was a bad case of not seeing the forest for the trees. Insane parsing of trivial claims about breeds while denying the very obvious fact that these dogs (whatever the breeders call them) are a problem.
ETA: This phenomenon of Demanding data so granular that it’s unobtainable while ignoring what’s right in front of your eyes is something I’m seeing more and more as of late.
It brings to mind the arguments about how many millimoles of testosterone in a male-to-female trans athlete are present after transition, ignoring the obvious and visible differences between one member of the team and all the rest.
Much of the scientific endeavor is concerned with eliminating biases, especially the common sense or `right in front of your eyes' variety.
And much of the current problem w/ science is that people throw theory and on-the-ground reality out the window and stare at (and massage) numbers until they see what it is they wanted to see. Both things are true.
Thus: "Puberty blockers are reversible" and "better a live son than a dead daughter" and other contrived bits of scientific fact that are being shown to be BS.
I'm not going to argue that the process isn't abused, because it is, but this isn't a reason to throw your hands up and say, `Well, I'll just believe what I see/experience,' because we know that approach is inherently biased.
Alas, much of the time these "scientific endeavours," as you call them, end up eliminating common sense.
See the Nate Silver Twitter kerfuffle going on today for more "isolated demands for rigour" nonsense.
This is data scientism.
Maybe? But often time common sense is wrong. The devices we're using to communicate with each other make use of physics that are mind bogglingly non-sensical.
Just don't agree that when there's a dispute about the data we should simply rely on `common sense'.