Highlights: In a bizarre turn of events last month, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced that he would ban American XL bullies, a type of pit bull-shaped dog that had recently been implicated in a number of violent and sometimes deadly attacks.
XL bullies are perceived to be dangerous — but is that really rooted in reality?
For the data to be useful it needs to be normalized.
What’s the rate of bites per number of that breed in the country?
The problem is that breed ownership numbers are only drawn from voluntary club registrations, which isn’t particularly representative and going to be biased against low income owners and rescues.
Did pit bulls bite the most often because they are the most violent, or just because they are very common? Are there environmental factors, such as pit bulls being more commonly a rescue dog and rescue dogs being more likely to bite?
Are there breeds that are much more prone to biting that just aren’t as popular in ownership such that absolute numbers on bites doesn’t reveal them?
The article is 1,000% right that the existing numbers and studies suck and are next to worthless.
Edit: Apparently 84% of fatal bites are from dogs that aren’t spayed or neutered, and 76% are by dogs that aren’t kept as a family pet which are the types of environmental factors that might be quite a bit more relevant than breed, especially given that only 20% of dogs aren’t spayed or neutered and yet represent 84% of fatal bites. Also, glossed over in the link I was responding to is that 82% of the fatal bites are an “Unknown” breed, which is wildly higher than one might have expected.
Edit 2: Additional resources - apparently the data point from the commenter below is from a poor 2000 study that relied on tenuous breed identification and the research world has been trying to correct ever since, with the 2012 study cited above being by one of the same authors of the 2000 study and presenting a very different picture, and more recent research such as:
Pit bulls are estimated to only be about 6% of the dog popualtion, and account for 70% of fatal bites.
By your logic pitbulls would have to be 70% of owned dogs, and let me tell you walking around 7 in 10 dogs are not pitbulls.
First off, you’d need to also factor in the percentage of large dogs, as no matter how vicious a toy breed or even medium sized dog is, it isn’t going to have a high fatal bite count. So out of the 36% of dog households that have a large dog, pitt ownership might be more than 6% of the total.
Then again, we need to look at other factors as well.
Maybe 70% of rescue dogs are pitts and 100% of fatal bites were from rescues? (Or vice versa, that 100% of fatal bites were from rescues and 70% of the rescues that went on to bite were pitts, which is a more subtle but still very different picture of events which might reflect fairly narrow causal environmental factors like prior fight training.)
Without the additional layers of data, the best we can do is draw potentially misleading conclusions around causative factors when we barely have correlative ones.
And the ways in which this could be dangerous in terms of social policy is if actions are taken around the mythos of it being a breed specific trait, it not being that, and then unexpected outcomes occurring, such as a popularity shift towards an even more dangerous breed as pitt ownership declines or ignoring or even exacerbating underlying causal relationships to environmental factors.
We’ve seen how bad data science applied to human crime rates can lead to supremely (supremacist?) misleading claims around the contributing factors with an over representation of demographic data that’s simply correlative to underlying causative environmental factors.
So if we both know full well that saying “XYZ demographic is 2-3x more likely to commit violent crimes so we should get rid of XYZ demographic from the population” is an outrageously bad faith argument predicated on poor data analysis, I’m curious what you think is materially different about the data evaluation aspects that you support the analogous claim here?
Pitbulls were specifically bred as fighting dogs to fight and kill other dogs in pits.
Don’t apply human logic to dog breeding. Dogs are specifically bred by humans to have specific traits. Humans are not bred to have specific traits.
And at least one study I’ve read showed that bad ownership and rescue status only account for 20% of dog attacks, so most attacks are not a result of bad ownership.
The closest I could find to the study you mentioned was the following:
https://positively.com/articles/fatal-dog-bites-share-common-factors/
Where yes, it says that in 21% of cases the dog was subject to abuse and neglect (one out of five is a rather large number by the way).
That same study says that in 37.5% of cases the owner had previously ‘mismanaged’ the dog in the past.
And then you have numbers like in 76.2% of cases the dog was not kept as a family pet.
Or that in 84.4% of cases the dog was not spayed or neutered.
Including this gem:
So please, tell me more about how we shouldn’t be looking at environmental factors because dogs aren’t people and with dogs it’s all about breed and nothing else…
Edit: Ah, we also have this study’s results:
Yeah, the source for that webpage doesn’t exist, so not going to believe a word on it.
Oh, a traffic offense, oh goodness they must be horrible dog owners. Seriously, nearly everyone has a traffic offense, if that’s in the criteria, then no shit it’s at 100%.
You mean this?
Patronek, G. J., Sacks, J. J., Delise, K. M., Cleary, D. V., & Marder, A. R. (2013). Co-occurrence of potentially preventable factors in 256 dog bite-related fatalities in the United States (2000-2009). Journal Of The American Veterinary Medical Association, 243(12), 1726-1736. doi:10.2460/javma.243.12.1726
Direct link: https://nationalcanineresearchcouncil.com/research_library/summary-analysis-co-occurrence-of-potentially-preventable-factors-in-256-dog-bite-related-fatalities-in-the-united-states-2000-2009/
“The source that disagrees with me doesn’t exist after not even a single Google search, so I won’t believe a word of it!”
Not when the link to said source gives a 404 doesn’t exist page. Blame your source website.
And some of those factors just apply to pits because of their breed.
76% are not given lots of human contact, because pits are violent and aggressive, and need to be kept away from people.
77% compromised ability to interact with dogs; well pits are way too strong for the vast majority of people.
Unneutered dogs being more likely to attack. Just an argument to force neuter all pits.
As for breed identification. If it be big, terrier shaped, and boxy head, it’s pit enough.