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To: Revel

That chart is not fatal attacks per dog. It is total attacks (I assume fatal). There are an estimated 4 million pit bulls in the US. Per your chart, 0.0071% of pit bulls caused casualties in the US over whatever period of years (12?) that chart is for. Put another way, one in 14,084.5 pit bulls caused fatal injury to a human over those 12(?) years. (The number is likely a bit higher due to multi-dog attacks, but I disallow that for purpose of discussion here and in the next paragraph because the 2nd or 3rd dog(s) in either case is most likely a pit bull, but could be ANY breed.)

Now, I could not find the St. Bernard population in the US, but, they are fairly rare. Taking a wild guess, if there are 40,000 St. Bernards in the US, and over the same years they killed 5 people, that’s one in 8000 St. Bernards causing a fatality over the same period. So, per “dog per capita”, St. Bernards would indeed be more dangerous. But they would not show up on your chart.

This actually makes sense — I’ve had to deal with unruly-but-not-vicious pit bulls that got onto our property, and while pits ARE powerful and formidable, a dog like an unruly St. Bernard is almost exponentially harder to deal with, countering the fact that they are generally good matured. IF you get a bad dog that size, you have a real problem (short of shooting it with a large caliber firearm.)

BTW, it would be interesting to compare numbers: I suspect humans turn out to be a lot more dangerous “per capita” than pit bulls.

I also suspect many people own pit bulls for protection and deterrence against crime, and the odds of one’s pit bull succeeding in that are much higher than the odds of their dog attacking someone for no good reason.


80 posted on 08/11/2018 8:36:51 PM PDT by Paul R.
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To: Paul R.

Thanks for your post now it makes prefect sense that there are more Tigers being kept as pets that there are Tigers in the wild.


87 posted on 08/11/2018 10:03:44 PM PDT by Kartographer ("We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.")
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