Three Simple Solutions To The Pit Bull Question
On ending our “pittie” scourge once and for all.
I hate pit bulls.
I hate their steel-trap, wide-set smile, their dead and glassy eyes, their predilection for snapping into a bloodthirsty fugue and flying, jaw unhinged, towards the nearest child in a hundred yard radius.
Lions and sharks and bears are dangerous, too, and don’t generally object to killing humans if the circumstances call for it. But middle-aged women don’t (generally) adopt lions and sharks and bears and parade them around city blocks, restrained from the public only by the woman’s slight grip on a fabric leash, if that. Also, sharks would die if you tried to walk them. But you get the point.
Pit bulls trace their lineage back to Britain, where some craft breeders crossed the Old English Bulldog (bred for bear and bull baiting) with terrier breeds (lighter and lively). Their offspring was the bull-and-terrier, the direct ancestor of modern pit bulls, possessing the ideal ferocity and agility for dog fighting and rat baiting.
Pit bull advocates sometimes claim that, though the dogs were selected for aggression against other animals, aggression against their human handlers was selected against. Consider the sort of people who breed dogs for underground bloodsports. Highly scrupulous? Averse to breeding the nastiest, meanest dogs and keeping them under lock and key until the moment of the fight? I doubt it.
An account on X that goes by Crémieux has been on something of a statistical war path against pit bulls since being “randomly attacked for the high crime of being in the pit bull’s vicinity,” in his words.
“This dog had been wandering around everyone all night and seemed friendly, until it decided to jump up and bite my face at the end of the night for no apparent reason.”
Many such cases.
Though Reddit saw fit to banish r/fatpeoplehate, the subreddit r/BanPitbulls is still live, with 130,000 members to date. Here, common genres of post include: News clippings of pit bulls killing/mauling people or other dogs (seemingly unprovoked), advice for users with loved ones who own aggressive pit bulls, and photos like this, which I warn you, are brutal.
But these, the “pittie” lover might object, are just anecdotes. You might be able to gin up equal vitriol towards any breed, with the right selection of stories. Just look at this bloodthirsty corgi.
In any case, if you remain unconvinced, have some data.
Nonprofit DogsBite.org, a “national dog bite victims’ group dedicated to reducing serious dog attacks,” reports that dogs killed 523 Americans between 2005 and 2019.
“Pit bulls contributed to 66% (346) of these deaths. Combined, pit bulls and rottweilers contributed to 76% of the total recorded deaths,” they claim.
If we accept these figures, we can say, without presuming anything as regards the nature/nurture argument, that pit bulls make up a large percentage of the most dangerous dogs in America.
“Pit bulls were 4.4 times higher in probability when biting to result in a complex wound compared to other top-biting breeds,” claim authors Kurram Khan and others in a 2020 study published in the Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery. A “complex wound” indicates greater severity than a simple wound.
“Of the top biting breeds, pit bulls, German shepherds, Rottweilers, bull dogs and huskies were not provoked to bite in most cases. Pit bulls led all breeds in non-provoked bite attacks (89.8% of bites were non-provoked),” say the authors.
“Pit bulls went off property in 18 bite events (36.7%) compared to 4 (8.8%) and 19 (21.6%) for top-biting breeds and all other breeds combined, respectively.”
DogsBite.org analyzed self-reported dog bite incidents collected by New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) between Jan. 1, 2015 and Dec. 31, 2023. There were 29,992 total incidents. Dog breed was recorded in 76% of these cases, though I have doubts about the public’s ability to recognize pit bull mixes (You can test your own skill with this game made by Crémieux).
“Pit bull bites surpassed the next top-biting breed, ‘mixed-breed’ (2,169), by over 3 times and the next top-biting distinct breed, shih tzu (1,077), by over 6 times,” says DogsBite.org.
“Bites inflicted by ‘unknown’ breed, a group larger than pit bulls, inflicted 7,132 bites,” they add, which by no means exculpates pitbulls. As mentioned, it’s sometimes tough to identify dog breeds, particularly when jarred by a violent attack.
Then comes a fascinating tidbit in the data which gets at the perverse psychology of the “pittie” lover.