Wow this post got popular. I got called into work and didnt see the replies, sorry ladies and gentlemen! Trying to catch up tonight.
Wow this post got popular. I got called into work and didnt see the replies, sorry ladies and gentlemen! Trying to catch up tonight.
Wrong. You're misrepresenting the stats. You're leaving out the fact that in over half of all dog bites the breed is unknown.
Also, in studies where vet personnel are asked to visually identify the breed of dog, they are wrong two out of three times. So if vet personnel can't even do it, dog bite victims, police reports, and hospital reports, from where these statistics on dog bites are obtained, are definitely not getting right.
The truth is that we have absolutely zero legitimate idea what dogs are causing injuries. Even if the numbers on pitbulls were accurate, the breed is unreported in more than half of cases, which statistically speaking means there could be another breed of dog that you've never even heard of that's responsible for more than half of all bites.
The other issue for me is the inherent racism by those who advocate for these policies. In every conversation, it eventually devolves to the proponent of breed bans doing one of two things: admitting that they are targeting certain types of people, not breeds, and arguments that rely on false assertions of history, genetic and behavioral science, that are identical to those put forth by eugenicists. The easy example is the false assertions that pitbulls were "bred for fighting."
They were bred for hunting and loyalty to their families and children. The guy to originally bred them wrote several books which you can read on Google Books and discusses at length their loyalty to people and kids as a primary characteristics, moreso than any violence. It was their strength and determination that made them useful for hunting, not aggression.
They were used only for dog fighting decades after the big game hunting they were bred to do was banned, and even then, dogs that showed aggression to humans were banned from the "sport" if not outright euthanized.
The studies that you would cite to support your "you can't tell a breed by its look" also tend to show that people are quite accurate at identifying that one of the many breeds that are called pit bulls are present in a particular dog. in other words, they can't accurately say "this is a pure bred Staffordshire Terrier" but they can say, "this is a pit bull" and they're correct, unless you're playing stupid semantic games.
I don't see where the study says that.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109002331500310X
That study seems to state a conclusion precisely the opposite of what the experimental results were. Based on a small sample set, there’s a high degree of match, far more accurate than random chance, between the observations and the genetic findings.
So, at intake, 18 dogs were identified as pit bulls but only 2/3rds were at least 12% pit bull.
During the study, 56 dogs were identified as being pit bulls, but only about 1/3rd were in fact at least 12% pit bull.
This is the classic 'base rate fallacy'. The false positive rate isn't that high, and the false negative rate isn't that high either. But because the true positive rate is pretty low, the ratio of true positives to false positives is much worse than you'd intuitively think.
Tests for rare diseases and attempts to behaviorally profile terrorists at airports runs into the same problem. Sometimes, a 99.9% accurate test just moves you from searching for a needle on a farm to a needle in only a single haystack.
And yet still wrong two thirds of the time.