Rip: Cum Rag the Smashed & Slammed dog. I'm positive you didn't die because of your shitty nog owner's breeding practices (10 breedings in 72 hours).
TEN BREEDINGS IN 72 HOURS
oh my god these dogs are born into sex slavery. RIP cumrag, you're in a better place now.
RE: pibble debate
After spending too much time reading up on pitbull bullshit I've come away exactly where I left off, which is squarely in the middle. The other morning I was walking my dog and we saw an intact 6 month old pit and they had a great romp and a play. Later that same day we passed another pitbull on the street and it gave us a nasty snarl. But then I'm reminded of the worst tempered dog we met on a walk, it was a golden retriever.
Three countries who implemented Breed Specific Legislation (BSL) found
no decrease in number of bites. One country that did see a decrease made BSL
in addition to responsible ownership campaigns. German shepherds bite around the same amount of people
(22.5% pitbulls vs 17.8% GSD) in fact I found several instances of cops having to
shoot their K-9s for
turning and
attacking handlers. Chow chows are VERY overrepresented in bite statistics for their relatively small population size.
What
is backed up by statistics is that when a bite does happen,
pitbull wounds can be worse. As for deaths, in the USA there were
31 dog fatalities in 2011 and 39 in 2017 from all breeds while having a pitbull population between 5-16 million (depending on whether you count pure APBTs or blanket term pitbull breeds and their crosses).
Cows kill around 22 annually, bees kill 51, and you're statistically most likely to meet your
death via deer than any other animal in the United States. But that does still mean there's thousands of serious bites annually.
Again the most dangerous part about pitbulls all comes back to what they were bred to do. I found a writeup by dog trainer with many years in the game, and he has a very informative explanation on pitbull history. Nobody really goes into detail of what dogfighting as a sport specifically entailed,
I highly suggest reading the full article.
Basically all dog drives are derived from the hunting sequence of a wolf, different breeds were selected to optimize different steps in the process while minimizing others. It goes something like this:
ORIENT → EYE →STALK→CHASE→GRAB BITE→SHAKE BITE/KILL BITE→DISSECT→EAT
The herding collies were selected for the first steps of the hunt: eyeing, stalking, and herding the prey (think of how wolves try to hunt a bison, separating weak animals from the herd). But you don't want your sheepdog killing the sheep, so the latter drives are selected against.
Sighthounds are optimized for the middle step: the chase.
And finally breeds like
pitbulls are selected for the final stages of the hunt: biting, shaking, killing, and dismemberment.
A good pit dog was selected for a quality called gameness. Gameness was not aggression, or simply the ability to win, it is the will to
keep going no matter what. They were also selected for higher pain tolerance, which is likely why you hear stories of multiple tasers being ineffective against a pitbull in kill-mode.
But what surprised me most is the fact that the olden pit men had absolutely zero tolerance for human aggression in the pit. Historic pitbull dogfighting would have several people in the pit with the dogs to break up a fight once a winner was called, any dog who attacked those men were culled. What you're left with is a dog wired to be very human-oriented and be very dog-aggressive. But also a dog that will keep going if a fight breaks out and will gleefully enjoy every second of it. The reason it looks like so many 'snap' one day is because they are indeed bred to go straight to the killing sequence of a hunt and not stop.
But I don't think that's necessarily a death sentence for the breed. As mentioned in the screenshot, breeds like bullterriers and bulldogs were used in bull baiting too but after a century of intensive pet breeding they aren't viscous. Problem is if you adopt a pitbull in United States, you have zero fucking idea how many generations ago these dogs were being used in fighting and bred for this gameness. Since dogfighting is illegal, pitbulls have lost their intended purpose and there's no set temperament being selected for anymore. There is a
genetic component in dog aggression, and there's likely pockets of nicer tempered pitbulls in the population along with lineages that are troublesome. So your safest bet is probably a "petbull" breeder where you can be guaranteed a long ancestry with zero fighting blood. No-kill shelters who refuse to euthanize problem dogs are definitely part of the problem, passing them between rescues like a hot potato and re-labelling them as lab mixes is negligent.
There's structured dog sports you can play with your pitbull to satisfy that gameness in a safe and productive way. It's why they're so good at weight pull and there's a dog sport discipline called
Gameness, Relationship, Control. But 9 out of 10 pibble owners won't bother putting that much time into their dogs. If you leave it to rot in your backyard letting it hurl dog profanities at anyone passing by (reinforcing the behavior each time he's allowed to do it), you'll get a reactive dog.
IMO, the two biggest problems are the meathead owners who buy pitbulls to look tough and "for protection" then stick it in a choke collar. Completely unaware that a "protection" dog that can't reliably be called off a target is just an untrained dog with a biting problem. And on the other side is the equally dangerous pibble apologist faction who say their dogs are physically incapable of hurting a fly. It's just fucking disingenuous and is asking for a bite to happen, it's insane.
I don't see this attitude with any other dangerous breed. I was looking at tibetan mastiff breeders recently, many of those people won't even sell you a dog if you haven't had previous dog experience and have a 6ft fence installed. They are up front about dedication this dog needs to be well adjusted, intense socialization before 3 months, and even then keep reasonable expectations of what their dogs will tolerate or what environment they will thrive in. Bringing home this dog then treating it like a labrador retriever is setting it up for failure at best and euthanasia at worst. And what happens when teams of unsecured tibetan mastiffs bought to "look tough" are allowed to roam like loose pibbles in the USA?
Severe maulings and savaged children.
I fucking hate the nanny dog trope. Imagine if a border terrier breeder said your hamster is actually totally safe to be left with a terrier, or a greyhound breeder saying they're actually fine offleash in an unfenced area, that it's just negative stereotypes that it would run away into the abyss after a rabbit. Not to get political spergy but in ways it sort of reminds me of the gun debate. Some people want them all taken away, others saying the problem is people don't treat firearms with the respect and safety they deserve. If you twirl around a gun with the safety off and shoot yourself or someone that's fucking on you, so why must the person who keeps theirs tightly locked away in a gun safe be punished for the idiot gun owner's stupidity? But if pitbulls were guns then yes, probably well over half are owned by people who twirl them around with the safety off.
So now we're stuck between tough guys buying pitbulls that may one day potentially attack somebody, or buying a deformed toad that is incapable of attacking but living in a perpetual state of agony. Nobody wins.
__________
Thanks
@contradiction of terns for the rescue milk! I'll start writing up an OP for a rescue thread. Pardon my stupidity, can I quote text from this thread in an OP of a new thread? Or would it work best to just have a list of links to the rescue exposes that have already been posted here?
What are these called? I'd love to do some digging.
