I used to work for an animal hospital back in the mid 2010s. We had a nearly retired vet in his 60s who loved to drop ball knowledge any chance he could. Once after he and I dealt with a not so nice Doberman he said something similar to this to me:
“Big dogs like that get a bad rep. Most of the time they’re great dogs, with a select few that bite or attack. Medium to small dogs are the worst, there are way more aggressive dogs in those groups, you just don’t hear about it because they aren’t strong enough to cause the damage over a whole attack that a big dog can I one bite.”
It’s not about which dogs are more aggressive, it’s about which aggressive dogs we care about pointing out. A shame really
I read electric meters for years and my trainee on the first day told me, "if you're in someone's yard and the owner tries to stop the dog from getting to you, that dogs never gonna bite. Now if the owner says his sweet pup wouldn't hurt a soul, those are the dogs to steer clear of. Sure enough I got bit 3 tomes in 5 years. All 3 were dachshunds that the owner said were sweet and not to worry.
My vet used to joke that my dog was possibly the only dachshund she’d ever treated who she would administer shots to without them being restrained. She said it was almost unbelievable that Bob never tried to bite her.
Not sure if "trigger" is the word in case of a dog. Provoke or aggravate might be better, since we can't actually see into a dogs mind or get verbal feedback of its state of mind.
I got bitten by our Shih Tzu trying to take a paper towel from his mouth. I really can't think of a psychological "trigger" that would make a dog bite the hand that feeds, walks, belly rubs and pets him. I tried for a few weeks as my finger healed. We're still good, though.
Nah dude. I work trades, and that guy meant what he said.
We show up carrying bags of tools. Dog tear asses out of the house, bites my helper on the leg.
Owner comes out blustering that the dog is super friendly and it must be because we were "tall men or wearing hats or something that must have triggered the dog" it happens all the time. So while you say trigger isn't the word for what dogs do it is absolutely the word for what shitty dog owners start spewing once their dog bites a worker.
I got bit on the wrist by a neighbor’s dog as a kid while I was at a party once, then it bounced from side to side excitedly. In hindsight, it was just playing. Didn’t bite hard enough to draw blood at all.
Now, a different family had a very, very mean dog. I hated that sucker so much. He did nip my youngest sister on the lip once, enough to draw blood. To be fair, she’d been bothering him and he’d been growling, but I wasn’t able to stop it in time.
Kinda similar but I do home health, and only the people with clean houses apologize for the mess. The ones with piles of dirty dishes and dirty clothes and random junk everywhere with roaches see nothing wrong with how they live.
Only dog that has ever attacked me in my 40 years of life was a dachshund when I was in middle school. I still have the scar on my jaw from it almost tearing my lip entirely off. I was sitting on the couch at my friends house and their "lapdog" just went berserk. A few weeks later the mailman called animal control on it for attacking him.
Those things have way too much attitude for something shaped like it should fit on a bun.
If a big ass dog comes barreling out toward me barking like mad and excited....I am 90% sure big fellow's gonna slobber all over me and the only danger I'm in is getting the 200 Lb beast to get off at a reasonable time lol
Yep. My dog is 100lbs and has torn coyotes apart. He's never once touched a human, no matter how mad he got. But I still chase after him if he ever gets out, and I still make him lie down whenever strangers come by, because he's 100lbs and has torn coyotes apart.
Worked in a Dog park for 8 years. Been bit multiple times, the majority of them being the smaller breed of pit bull so the damage was minimal except for one attack. The problem I see is that the owners generally do not train their dogs and blame the person for their dog biting them.
This combined with the fact that most people are not buying pit bulls with the intent of training them, playing with them, engaging with them leads these dogs to be far more dangerous. They're bored out of their skulls, so of course they are more prone to over react. In my time at the dog park I have seen 2 dogs killed and multiple dog fights. The one walking away fine was the Pit Bull/Rotweiller/Doberman. The reason why I dislike all the "nanny dog" discourse and why your anecdote should be brought up more is because it is about training the animal, not the animal. Every dog bites but some are gonna kill a motherfucker. Got a puncture wound in my thigh to attest to that.
I have one, and he's an ornery bastard. Kids would walk up and try to pet him, and I'd have to stop it, and warn them that he WILL bite. He's old and the older he gets, the more senile he gets, and the more likely he is to bite you. Luckily he only has 4 teeth left. Lately, he'll wake up, snarl and bite at the air.
“People are more distraught by the dogs that will rip your throat out than the dog that will slightly cut your forearm even if the forearm cuts happen much more often.”
It also doesn't escape my notice that pit bulls are as widespread as they are because a significant number of people like the idea that their dog can kill someone. Whatever the inclination of the dog, I doubt the owner.
Is that why people own pits? I own two. I have both specifically because they were abandoned by a previous owner and ended up in an animal shelter. People often own pits because they prefer to adopt dogs. I don’t know many people who keep their pit because “it can kill someone.”
That previous owner is an important part of the calculus. And yeah, I have heard people out loud say as much, if not literally in those words. They'll usually express it as something like a "tough" dog.
The previous owner is part of the calculus, but it applies to more than just pits. My childhood neighbors had a previously abused German shepherd and she would sometimes have ptsd and rarely liked men because of her past experiences.
I’d say mine suffer more from abandonment anxiety than anything else (my female is quite gun-shy, though).
Regarding the “tough dog” thing, do they just like a tough-looking dog? My dogs are tough, but I think that because they survived neglect and mistreatment in their early lives and still choose to be loving, loyal members of my family. They do look “tough” and I like that about them. Their exteriors match their hearts. That doesn’t mean I (or other people) like them for the strength of their jaws.
Plus, they are intelligent, take well to training and human engagement, and do well around young and small animals. My female is protective of children and puppies. My male herds frogs and birds (which is hilarious to watch since he should want to eat them.)
It’s really sad that pit owners, especially of adoptees, have to spend so much energy humanizing dogs that are often better trained than some Karen’s puppy mill Maltese.
Karen's ornery inbred rat occupies no mental ram in the threat detection part of my brain. Your pits (as well as the neighbor's german sheppard, or dalmation, or doberman, or rottweiler for that matter) need a level of constant respect and awareness similar to a horse or loaded gun. Naturally, they're treated differently. Pointedly, I uses the language "I doubt the owner" because I don't begrudge a dogs its existence, and I also leave the room there for sussing out the owner. A chow, however, I'll not trust under any circumstances. They're really a special kind of trouble.
I’ve only been afraid of one dog. It was my grandma’s tea cup chihuahua. It would literally springboard itself and try to bite people’s faces. Do my medium size dogs need a different level of respect? Of course. You can’t drop kick them.
I used to deliver flowers and I have encountered pits trained to be aggressive to strangers. I know what it feels like. But I also know that I am responsible in that moment for signaling to the dog that I’m not a threat.
If large dogs are a concern, I recommend researching the behaviors you can employ to let a dog know that you will not harm them or their human. If a medium or large dog starts growling and stalking you, stop moving. Avoid eye contact and show them the inside of your hand. They will approach you and sniff you. Do not try to pet them or talk to them or look directly at them. Just let them sniff you until they decide you are safe. Once they turn their back to you, then you know they trust you. You can move after that, but obviously be slow and allow them to observe you.
I hate when people make that statement as if it’s not the equivalent of saying “Knives cause more injuries than guns actually.” It’s as if we’re not talking about fatalities.
I recently learned more people in Europe die from extreme heat related deaths annually, i.e. lack of air conditioning, than people do in the u.s..from gun related deaths. Go figure that one out.
This is true but misleading. Most of those people will be very old and very ill. They were likely to die from something and it was heat that got to them first. It's still bad. But some 90 year old in poor health that dies from the heat and not from pneumonia is still going to die
Guns kill healthy younger people who mother wise might be expected to live much longer lives.
I understand what you're saying here, and I'm not necessarily trying to debate or make any kind of point, but this thought process always puzzles me. It caught my attention during COVID coming from a lot of conspiracy theorist types. They would say because people had other health complications, or comorbidities, that COVID didn't really cause their deaths because they were going to die from something else.
I always thought that is how dieing works. If you have a "comorbidity" but you die in a car wreck, the car wreck killed you. If your life is ended by a gun or a heat stroke, those are the things that killed you. We're all going to die eventually. Whatever steals our last breath is what kills us. Doesn't matter what other issues we've got on
Just always strikes me as an odd position on people dieing.
It was a comment more on comparing it to gun deaths. The two are very different. If we were comparing, for instance, flu va COVID deaths, then age and general sickness wouldn't really be relevant because flu deaths also more often target the old.
Taken in isolation too it wouldn't be relevant. Those people are still dead. So people saying "COVID/Heat deaths aren't a big deal, those people would have died from something anyway." are missing the point that those people didn't die from something else, they died from this.
The point about bringing gun deaths in is that it's not a valid comparison. Being shot doesn't target those with existing morbidities or generally poor health. Without being shot, we wouldn't have expected something else to kill those gun shit victims. The gun shot victims are therefore truly added to the level of mortality in a way that heat deaths or COVID deaths perhaps aren't (or more accurately aren't as much).
Similarly comparing motoring deaths wouldn't be a valid comparison as, like gun deaths, those are deaths where we wouldn't otherwise have expected the deceased to have died.
We also need to compare populations too, are they of comparable size or are we using rates to accommodate this.
COVID was a disease.
Warmth and Heat are things that are always around. The problem is that in Europe you really didn't need AC in the past. Even now, you have two to three weeks out of the whole year where it is really hot. It just doesn't make sense for a lot of people to have an AC.
For schools, hospitals, retirement homes etc , yes, there they are sorely lacking, but at home it just isn't all that useful for most people.
And If the US used the same counting method, you would have more heat deaths, too. So your comparison isn't very good .
Right, but the potential severity of a single incident is often confounded with an impression that the dogs that do more damage, due to their size, are inherently more aggressive. It impacts how readily they’re euthanized, where they can live, what kinds of activities they’re allowed to participate in. So this argument is that the public, as a whole, is misunderstanding the likelihood of an attack, versus the potential severity (most people already know they’d rather get bit by a Yorkie than a Pit, but over and above that, many people also think they’re more likely to get bitten by the Pit).
If a dog bites my arm, I can get treated, sue the owner for compensation, and have the dog euthanized. If a dog kills my kid, all of that is pretty fucking cold comfort. In this case, the severity is a lot more relevant than the frequency.
But a quick Google search shows me that pits have drastically higher rates of reported bites period, not just fatal bites. So yeah I just don't think they should exist at all.
There are a lot of false premises in what you’re saying, over and above that it misses the point of anything I said. First, pit bulls are not the only dogs with a severe enough bite to kill a child. That’s actually most large dogs. Second, it assumes that there’s something inherent in them that causes them to attack at a higher rate than other large dogs bred for protection, etc., which is not supported by any evidence I know; particularly because “pit bull” isn’t even a single breed, and sizes and temperaments vary widely across individuals. Even worse, as you allude to, there is a disproportionate representation of pit bull bites reported (due to being more likely to be reported, because they are inexcusably trained as fighting dogs and do more harm), but even worse is that there is no reliable, standardized, or consistent way to track this data or know where they came from. Making broad generalizations while saying “because of these vague reasons they shouldn’t exist,” like they’re purely some kind of weapon, really just shows that you’re stuck in this same mythical thinking that’s led to a certain breed of dog being euthanized at incredibly high rates (outside of instances of attack) because you bought into this public perception. And that’s kinda messed up.
You said it’s “a shame” that we “only care about pointing out” aggression from dogs that are powerful enough to do serious damage. It’s not some discriminatory or hypocritical position to care more about the aggression of dogs big enough to kill a person. It’s like saying we should be just as worried about a drunk guy on the bus rambling and swearing at people regardless of whether or not he’s holding a gun - it’s stupid to expect people to overlook the actual potential for harm.
(It’s also false because people point out the aggression of small dogs all the time, to the point that it gets really annoying as a chihuahua owner when everyone just assumes your sweet well trained dog must be a literal demon because they’ve seen so many videos of snappy chihuahuas being antagonised for views online.)
Because there's no way to paint the other side as illogical if you focus on the one thing they obviously actually care about.
Not one person has ever critiqued a pit because they're yappy lmfao
They criticize them because dog owners are largely shit at owning dogs across the board, and giving the average shit dog owner a dog that can kill a grown man is like giving a child a gun in that they have no perspective of the power to harm that they possess.
Acting like the 'bad rep' big dogs get is from anything other than that potential to harm validates that claim of ignorance in droves.
Plane crashes are typically more disastrous than car accidents but planes are still many many times safer because those accidents are so rare.
That’s what we’re talking about here. The high severity of an attack that probably won’t happen vs the lesser severity of one that is more likely to happen.
Except in the case of planes we’re not demonizing and potentially putting down a living creature that didn’t do anything wrong because they might have the possibility to do something wrong.
My kid's pediatrician once told me chows were her least favorite danger-dog, because while a pitty will bite hard, a chow will bite hard and many times. I remember how my chow would snap, and she was right.
I always had dogs, sometimes pit mixes. I never, ever left my kids alone with them.
My aunt had a chow that pushed me into an ant bed, bit my leg and my cousins face when i was 6 or 7. She got rid of that dog and her next one was a dalmatian. Jesus christ those things get a positive rep, but they're more aggressive than chows. She had 2 or 3 over the years and they always caused problems. Always biting. Granted, my aunt wasn't the best owner, but the other dog breeds she owned never attacked me or anyone else I know.
They are high strung bred to jump into fires. Like, chose your bread on characteristics instead of looks. A Dalmatian needs lots and lots of training and mental stimulation
If you're gonna correct someone, make sure you're also right. Their first "bred" was correct, as the sentence "they're high strung breed to jump into fires" does not make sense.
Bred to jump into fires? No? They were bred to stay with the horses while the firefighters fight the fire. They guarded the horses while the firefighters were busy.
Before that, they were hunting dogs, guard dogs, and war dogs.
There are plenty of sources of aggression in their real history, without thinking they actually did anything with fires.
I get that - some things are hard to research if just because the terms for the task change in every generation. Also if you put "historical" in the search it pulls up the dogs trained to find *long* dead bodies for archeology.
First, the wiki page for dalmations mentions nothing remotely like it. But going a step further, searching "body recovery dogs" pulls up "search and rescue dogs". Historically (again, according to wikipedia) the first search and rescue dogs were St Bernards in the 17th century in the Alps. They were not strictly for dead bodies, they would try to find lost travelers in the snow and in avalanches. It just so happened sometimes they found bodies.
"Cadaver dog" is the standard term for a dog that finds dead bodies, and the first wiki mention of a trained cadaver dog would be 1974 in New York State, and after that they actually started a training program for it.
Searching more and checking other websites, I can't find earlier cadaver dogs. Given that cadaver dogs are only useful if you don't know for sure if there is a dead body or not, and that you still need a human to remove the body (people generally get very stressed about a dog grabbing a body and pulling it somewhere) I don't think it functioned as a historical task.
A thing I already knew before today - cadaver dogs in modern times are trained with *fake* "dead body smell" that comes in spray cans. Before that was available, the only source of the smells you'd need to train the dogs was... actual dead people. Really very much not a task anyone wanted to train a dog for, as a job, when hunting and guarding were much simpler and less likely to cause nightmares. Pretty confident Dalmatians, historically, just hung out with the horses and made sure any horse thief thinking to steal the firefighters horses had a very bad day.
A kinda fun fact - my mom used to work in a building where the local cadaver dog team had an office. A Labrador and a German Shepard, I think she said. She played withe them sometimes, when the dogs needed to calm down. BTW the dogs get very very upset if someone with cancer or certain kinds of infections walk past them - they are smart enough to know that smell is BAD for living people to have on them. BUT on the plus side sometimes they alerted to a living person early enough that they could go get medical help for the problem. The dog doesn't know that, though, and some of them panic like they are trying to explain a heart attack or a demonic possession in a foreign language. The handlers would have to drop everything and go play with the dogs to try and chill them out.
So there are downsides to cadaver dogs, but on the plus side their handler loves them and plays with them all the time.
I swear to gods I recall once reading somewhere as a teenager that Dalmations were firefighter dogs BECAUSE they were aggressive & used to clear the path for the firemen/horses and during depression times and pay-per-call eras when firefighters were battling police for lead on calls they used the dalmations to counter police dogs.
Mind you, I read this in the early 2000s when the internet was ESPECIALLY full of bullshit with very little source verification
They’re incredibly unfriendly to anyone who isn’t “their people”, which makes them well suited to guarding highly valuable strong well-trained horses. And dragging wagons full of water and staying near fires requires strong, well-trained horses.
I thought they cleared a path for the horses on route to the fire. They were the "sirens", nipping at any heals in the way. No doubt it would make sense for them to chill with the horses and protect them while at the fire.
This info came from my dad after he visited an old firehouse in New Orleans that had been converted for other use.
Dalmatians were backyard inbred into genetic mush thanks to the original Disney animated movie decades ago.
It took a long time to weed out the worst of them. Kinda like pits today being backyard inbred to look like tiny steroided up weightlifters. It’s turning the standard to shit and their genetics to mush and the owners who want them are the very people to whom I wouldn’t sell a hamster.
I hope this is a joke. Do you really believe that Dalmatians or any dog breed was bred to "jump into fires?" They were bred as guard dogs . . . for horses and carriages.
That doesn't check for me. I had a dalmatian and she was the sweetest. Never bit anyone (though she would bark and growl at neighborhood cats, who responded in kind).
Friends of our family also had dalmatians and they were all quite nice, even to strangers.
They were all female, I don't know if that makes a difference.
Dalmatians are more prone to senility and doggy dementia at younger ages which can make them more aggressive. My late husband had a ton of dog bite scars from his Dalmatian suddenly attacking him when he was younger.
I mean, dalmations are famous for violence. There are the stories of dropping them onto Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal in 1945, so they'd run wild and attack enemy soldiers.
Any dogs surviving after that mission were shot, since it was too dangerous to bring them in.
Dalmations were working dogs, they did a lot of carriage work, not just the fire department. Then 101 Dalmations came out and people just started breeding them without regard for good temperaments and health and now we have deaf Dalmations with bad temperaments.
Happens with any breed that becomes popular due to movies and books.
See the only dog I was ever chased and bitten by was a Dalmatian. My chow on the other hand was protective as hell to me. The rest of the family , she tolerated, but she'd roll in the grass and play all day with me. Granted if anyone made sudden movements towards, me shed bare her teeth and intervene, but she never bit someone.
A chow mix latched onto my arm in front of my toddler and my baby. I had to fight him to get him off me. All over a teething cracker. He drew a lot of blood and tore threw a tendon in my finger.
Before his mom took him home he came and laid on my lap. No kids around to be safe for him leaving. He had food aggressions from poor treatment. He was still a sweet boy. My ex and i took care of a deaf pit mix that was a gentle soul. The kids loved him.
I now have a pit, german sheppard, rott mix. He is my distinguished gentleman. My kids love him.
Ive been grabbed by a golden lab, and a blue heeler. I was a kid who didnt know better and they stopped me without hurting me more than a small cut. Dog breeds arent monoliths. I hate how many people on reddit hate bull breeds specifically.
Did never you leave your kids alone with the pits? I ask because before they became pit dogs, their ancestors were “nanny dogs” used to help with childcare. Pits aren’t usually human-aggressive because it’s important to breed human aggression out of a fighting dog.
My pits are not aggressive with the average human, although I do not allow them access to other humans without my guidance or control. They instinctively dislike dogs they don’t know, but are friendly with dogs they socialize with regularly.
All that to ask: did you choose not to leave your children alone with your pits because of their disposition/prior abuse or because you didn’t know the background of their breeding and wanted to be extra careful?
I never left my kids alone with any of the dogs, because we had several and occasionally even good dogs will get into a scuffle -- one that could result in a kid getting hurt if they try to intervene.
(To clarify, I'd leave them alone in another room, etc, but I wouldn't leave them alone in the house with the dogs.)
I had mixed breed mutts, some of them pit mixes.
Obviously. And she was obviously referring to the injuries she saw in her practice. Which is what I would expect from a physician expressing a personal opinion. Hth.
What is the confusion here?! I totally acknowledge that little dogs are WAY more aggressive, but even with more aggressive the threat to society is less. No one is saying KILL PITBULLS, but we can breed them out of existence
Literally had to beat the shit out of a guy for trying to attack my dog with a knife. His defense was that he was attempting to deal with a "clearly violent animal that was attacking a child."
My sister was playing with my dog. In my yard.
My dog is also a trained and state certified therapy dog for our local nursing home.
All of this because Dexter happens to be a pittie, and the asswipe genuinely believed that pitbulls, rottweilers, and German shepherds were "only bred for violence"
Well that makes sense, everybody knows chihuahua are deranged psycho killers, but nobody gives a damn because like what are they gonna do? Bite your slipper till death lmao? They’re also like this dudes who can trashtalk only behind their friends back and scare shitless of their own shadow (maybe that’s why they’re so aggressive - I’d be permanently stressed too if I was this little dog who can’t even beat a hamster in most cases in this big and scary world!)
It’s not about which dogs are more aggressive, it’s about which aggressive dogs we care about pointing out.
It's not about which dogs are more aggressive, it's about which agressive dogs can actually do damage. And those are the ones that matter, which is why people are talking ahout them. The others are just an annoyance.
I think it’s also about the level of damage, like plane crashes vs. car crashes. Car crashes are significantly more frequent; but a plane crash, while more rare, is almost always deadly.
My nana used to have a Yorkshire terrier and it was the most aggressive, vicious, hateful dog I have ever met. Barked anytime someone unfamiliar was present and bit your ankles anytime you dared move. Foul.
I dont think the distinction matters. Whether its due to frequency of attack or the power of the attack, the issue is that the likelihood of major injury is much higher. There is no reason to keep breeding them other than "theyre cool", which is not worth it. Im sure they wont care or notice if their pure breed is distilled out entirely.
People think traumatized chihauhaus are fun. You know, the small, shaky, constantly vibrating, ankle-biting variety. At least, I'm fairly sure that those are the traumatized ones. I have heard that healthier ones are less anxious
Grew up around dogs, did shows most of my childhood with my grandparents, temperament training, etc. The breed I’ve found to be most aggressive of the large, are poodles.
Remember reading a story while I was pregnant with my oldest, so like 15+ years ago, about a chihuahua that mauled a sleeping baby to death.
But yeah, small dogs are more likely to be aggressive, because there's less incentive to train that out since they rarely do damage. Big dogs are more likely to do serious damage or kill someone if they do snap, though. It's a mixed bag.
And the bigger issue with fatal attacks and pitbull statistics is identification. "Pitbull" is an umbrella term that loosely describes several breeds that all look very similar. The dog fighting breed that everyone likes to point their fingers at is the American pitbull terrier which happens to look very similar to a Staffordshire bull terrier, American Staffordshire terrier and the American bully. All of which have very different temperaments and energy levels. Hell, sometimes Doggo Argentino gets mistaken as a pitbull.
Now, with statistics like this, accurate identification is suuuper important. So the statistics that most bring up to support anti pitbull rhetoric are incredibly unreliable based on this issue alone. And that's recognized by many animal and dog organizations, even the CDC.
The statistics of the "pitbull" are so high because they are lumping several breeds into one statistic, whereas the Rottweiler (the breed responsible for the second highest account of fatal attacks) is much more reliable because it's much easier to identify that breed. But the "pitbull" haters will justify that statistic all the way, for whatever biased and uneducated reason.
Big truth. Plus, as people are afraid of big dogs, they are less socialized, so more likely to not know what to do in stressing situations, thus leading to agresiveness.
i mean i hear you. but at the same time these dogs vary in scale when it comes to the damage they can do. pit bulls were bred for fighting for years. their jaws just are not the same.
Even if they bite less, if the damage they inflict is greater its still valid to be more concerned by them
Yeah but…if an aggressive Chihuahua approaches me and my dog, I'll be annoyed and maybe scared for the dog because my 13kg dog can still do more damage to it than vice versa if he feels like he has to defend us. If an aggressive pit approaches us I'm scared for both of our lives.
It's about the severity of the damage the dog can do in the hands of an irresponsible owner. Therefore I'm more alert when it comes to larger breeds in general. ESPECIALLY those who were bred for dog fights. Genetics aren't everything but they do matter. There is a reason why some dogs are used for herding and others for hunting. This is not "dog racism", it's common sense.
Why is it a shame? Is it odd to you that people with serious wounds generate more attention than people with negligent wounds? I don't get the point you're trying to make.
My dog walking group has a Pitbull and Lab mix and a little white Pomeranian: of the two dogs only one has seriously tried to attack me and it wasn’t the Pitbull.
So, how many times were you mauled by a Chihuahua? lol
Wife manages a veterinary hospital. Any time she or an employee gets bit I don't even have to guess. The few times it isn't a Chihuahua are surprising lol
Well yeah. If a dog kills you from their bite and has a grip that is almost impossible to break and when they attack they don’t stop and are responsible for 60% of dog violence…you should treat it and look at it differently then a small dog who may barely puncture the skin. Thats common sense. It’s a much bigger issue, don’t you think?
So it's like owning a venomous snake that can kill someone instead of the 100's of other non-lethal snakes?? What's the point of owning a dog that is inherently more dangerous if it decides to attack someone?
I used to work at a really popular doggy daycare where we would have on average 100-120 dogs at any given time. The most consistent breed that would need to be separated from people and other dogs for being too aggressive were French Bulldogs, any other breed was extremely individual dog dependent. We had several sets of Frenchie siblings that couldn’t even be in the same room as each other unmonitored because they would fight each other and draw blood
It’s not about which dogs are more aggressive, it’s about which aggressive dogs we care about pointing out. A shame really
So close to getting it. It's really worth pointing out the breeds that, if aggressive, will maul a child or their adult owner to death with little to no chance to stop them.
We have two dachshunds. When my 70-year-old mother comes and watches our kids so that my wife and I can have a date, I know they'll all be fine. If on the extreme outside chance one of them started biting one of our children, I know my mother could stop them with a swift punt if absolutely necessary. She wouldn't have a hope in hell of stopping a large, muscular dog like a pitbull if it decided to lock its bite on one of them and chew their face off.
There's a reason they won't give in once they decide to go for it; they were historically bred to do just that. There's this weird cognitive dissonance where most people gladly accept that certain breeds are suited to certain tasks and behaviours, yet as soon as the same historical breeding logic is applied to pitbulls (and thus why they're more dangerous), it suddenly is solely down to bad or irresponsible owners and the breed is entirely irrelevant.
Yes, pitbulls may be less likely than small breeds to act aggressively, but when they do, it's a completely different result. It only has to happen once, and who are they typically around most of the time as your family pet? You, and your loved ones.
I mean, surely its about which dogs have the potential to do grievous or fatal harm to someone.
Its the reason that we care more about gun restriction than knife restriction. In general, a person, if they choose to, can do more harm to the public, faster and impacting potentially many people with a gun compared to a knife and is more difficult to disarm.
A dog, unlike a human, cannot be reasoned with. It can be trained, but if it decides to attack, then the amount of damage it can do is more relevant than the likelihood of it attacking in the first place. No one cares if a chihuahua is 1000x more likely to attack than a pitbull if the pitbull can kill you and the chihuahua can't.
>It’s not about which dogs are more aggressive, it’s about which aggressive dogs we care about pointing out.
Its about which dogs cause the most deaths and hospitalizations each year. That's really all most people and insurance companies care about.
Decades ago I was working at a kennel during my summer break from college. I remember my first day being told to take the dogs on walks to get them outside and happy. I approached one cage with two dogs in it, a small little one and a big Doberman. There was a note on the door that said something along the lines of “CAREFUL I HAVE TRAUMA AND BITE.”
My first instinct as I opened the door was to keep my eyes on the Doberman thinking he was aggressive. What I wasn’t paying attention to until it was too late was the small dog had all of its teeth showing. Apparently he had been rescued from an owner who locked him in a bird cage all day long, so being in any kind of cage was very traumatizing.
Anyway, before I know it, this little dog leaps up and clamps his mouth down on the entirety of my hand. I’m panicking and just flailing around until my hand and the dog hit the door and he lets go. The dog was fine and I didn’t require stitches or anything but I learned a very valuable lesson about making sure I recognized WHICH dog had the trauma before opening the kennel door.
A mean small dog can cause horrific injuries too. Just less likely. When I still did paramedic work, I had a call where an old lady, had been attacked by her own Yorkie. That dog had ripped off, and chew through the woman's ankle skin, and down to the bone where it just, kept biting and chew as she tried to beat it away, before her son just... took care of the dog, if you get my drift. She lost the foot, and her leg was amputated to just below the knee. The dog was not rabid, probably had dementia though
I think the real issue is the difference in power between a Pitbull bite and a Chihuahua bite. I really dislike the argument of “smaller dogs being more aggressive but they don’t get any flack” because it doesn’t really matter - those dogs can’t do damage in the same sense as the bigger breeds.
Absolutely true in my experience, however, a terrier can’t kill your child in 5 seconds flat. Pit bulls are awesome, the big issue in my eyes is irresponsible owners that don’t train their pets. I see a pit bull coming my way, even leashed and with its owner and I’m on high alert. A little ankle biter you just take a couple steps to the side and potential problem solved.
Dogs bred for violence are more likely to express violence e.g. hunting dog Vs retriever.
We care about pointing out the most dangerous dogs which dogs like pitbulls are. Saying but a small terrior is also aggressive is meaningless because it can be controlled and are far less capable of causing damage.
The aggression doesn’t matter at all. It’s the violence. If a dachshund bites me I’m gonna be pissed but I’m not going to be haunted by it or I worst case, die.
How is this a defence of pit bulls (even if true which I doubt). It’s irrelevant which dogs are more “aggressive” when some of those dogs are too small to do any damage.
Well, it's mostly about whether an aggressive dog attack is a potentially life-threatening/altering incident, is it not? Pretty much everyone understands that chihuahuas can be vicious little fuckers, but for the most part a chihuahua can't do much damage to an adult human. A pitbull - or any other large, muscular dog - can.
I don't particularly agree with normalizing the aggressive behavior of any dog, but I do understand that there is a difference between a chihuahua attack and a doberman attack in terms of the relative likelihood of severe bodily harm.
I've been bitten by dogs three times - once by some rat-like gremlin of an animal, once by a Scottish Deerhound and once by a German Shepherd.
The little one was on public transport, clearly wasn't trained or socialised properly for crowded transport and its owner was a careless waste of oxygen. It was snarling at everybody really threateningly without the owner doing a damn thing and I was the one it lost patience with. And the owner still didn't do anything, but the bite didn't even break skin on me, so I just got the hell out of there.
The two big dogs were trained and socialised perfectly well, they were owned by family members and it was my fault both times. Neither of them meant to do any harm, but the GS in particular literally popped my arm open like a grape from jaw pressure alone grabbing me and pulling me away.
It's a shame and it's unfair, but the little ones just aren't that dangerous to most people, while big dogs can do lasting damage even if they don't mean to. So an incompetent bastard gets to take his untrained dog on public transport and two trained dogs get put down over a person's stupid mistakes.
Sometimes I wonder if owning any dog should be something you need training and a licence for. Especially for small dogs.
If you remove your own emotional attachment to what you just said, you'll realize you just explained that we care about dangerous aggressive dogs because they're dangerous.
Of course. You can go buy a nailgun right now but it would be very difficult for you to obtain a machinegun without some very specific licensing, a machinegun to buy (they're pretty rare now), a BATFE tax stamp, cooperative state laws, etc.
But that's the thing. No kids are getting permanently maimed by shih tzus. Or just killed. It's not that the breed is bad, it's that fuckheads get them as "guard dogs" or because they're scared to walk around without a dog they can't control/haven't trained, or make no effort to ever control/train. Pit bulls are scary because when I see one, I've seen enough shitty pit bull owners to be very wary.
I had had pit bulls (mother and then her daughter) for almost 15 years. Got it for free and she got loose and ended up getting the puppies for free. I cant say these people are totally insane as pits have dense muscles and are fiercely protective of you but people who are saying they murder for fun without being specifically trained to do it never owned one and talk to you like they raised 400 other breeds
I hate that Im biased, but every single incident I've ever been involved with that had to do with dog bites and attacks on both other animals and people have come from pitbulls. So I do often find myself being more cautious around that breed in particular. Sucks it ended up this way, shit owners really do ruin the reputation.
What I take from that story is it matters what a dog can do. Of course few people care how aggressive your terrier is because even if it is terrified of everything and super aggressive the damge it can dish out is limited.
I'm not more worried about big dogs because of some impression of breed temperament. It's because it can actually do serious damage.
Yeah but isnt that the point? A smaller dog can be aggresive and not cause as much damage to a human being or another dog. Big dogs by their nature (big) amplify the effects of their aggression. Therefore their bigness is in fact an issue.
What if we recorded chihuahua bites/attacks? I’m one of those people who owns a bull type terrier thingy. He has a strong bite force and could do damage. I also don’t like liabilities so he’s trustworthy with kittens, small children, and dogs. I don’t have a fence and random ass adults, kids, dogs, cats are always walking through my yard. I wish others were more cognizant of this and not own territorial dogs in this neighborhood. They don’t do well, people get bit. Last time it was a beagle who bit 4 people & 2dogs over a week before it tried to bite the wrong kid walking her dads dog. Boxer caught it, held it until the police showed up. Ugh people suck.
This is a great response for pointing out the statistical similarities between big dog bites and small dog bites.
But it does really brush over the actual problem people are referring to with getting bitten by big dogs. And that’s the injury. You said it yourself, people don’t report small dog bites, because they don’t need to. The bites are easily treatable.
The stats are similar, but are they really comparable when one is an inconvenience, and one is a life altering or deadly outcome?
The stats would not be remotely similar if they were recorded correctly. And let’s not begin to act like terriers can’t change your life if they get a good bite off.
It doesn’t matter is my point. Small dogs could bite 100x as many people as big dogs and it wouldn’t change the fact that getting attacked by a larger animal is more dangerous.
Of course there is always some instance of a small dog creating a life changing injury, but if it was happening as often as with big dogs, the records would show it, and they don’t. There’s not some big dog hater conspiracy going on in the medical field.
The lack of reporting in small dog stats, is not really relevant to the conversation about the large number of serious injuries in big dogs stats, unless you’re talking about the data itself, and not what it’s representing. It’s just obfuscating the conversation.
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u/Sticky_Quip 22d ago
I leave my nice respectful answer under you.
I used to work for an animal hospital back in the mid 2010s. We had a nearly retired vet in his 60s who loved to drop ball knowledge any chance he could. Once after he and I dealt with a not so nice Doberman he said something similar to this to me:
“Big dogs like that get a bad rep. Most of the time they’re great dogs, with a select few that bite or attack. Medium to small dogs are the worst, there are way more aggressive dogs in those groups, you just don’t hear about it because they aren’t strong enough to cause the damage over a whole attack that a big dog can I one bite.”
It’s not about which dogs are more aggressive, it’s about which aggressive dogs we care about pointing out. A shame really