If I have time, I’ll track down the article. I am not really invested in doing so because I know that the pro pit lobby denies evidence presented (like fatality stats - those are hard to make disappear so they simply deny them, problem solved) so actually presenting evidence to them is a waste of time. Oh I went on page after page with rabid pro pit people - they end up asserting that Llaso Apsos are a greater risk to people and NO I am not joking - they REALLY go there in defense of their breed!
If, in the meantime, you want to believe that pit bulls kill more people than any other dog breed in the US for no medical reason at all, that’s fine with me.
I already know all the “stats”.
Post your proof.
This comes from a sane, reputable site:
Most people skim it and look at the table and way ‘wow, Pits and Rotties’. But if you dig around you find that the authors used media reports to develop their database.
Quote:
Our search strategy involved scanning the text of newspapers and periodicals for certain words and word combinations likely to represent human DBRF followed by a review of articles containing those terms.
And look at what they say in the discussion:
Quote:
Considering only bites that resulted in fatalities, because they are more easily ascertained than nonfatal bites, the numerator of a dog breed-specific human DBRF rate requires a complete accounting of human DBRF as well as an accurate determination of the breeds involved. Numerator data may be biased for 4 reasons. First, the human DBRF reported here are likely underestimated; prior work suggests the approach we used identifies only 74% of actual cases.1,2 Second, to the extent that attacks by 1 breed are more newsworthy than those by other breeds, our methods may have resulted in differential ascertainment of fatalities by breed. Third, because identification of a dog’s breed may be subjective (even experts may disagree on the breed of a particular dog), DBRF may be differentially ascribed to breeds with a reputation for aggression. Fourth, it is not clear how to count attacks by crossbred dogs. Ignoring these data underestimates breed involvement (29% of attacking dogs were crossbred dogs), whereas including them permits a single dog to be counted more than once.
In other words, since bites by certain breeds are more likely to be reported, the data in the table are skewed towards those breeds. Also, they admit that people are lousy at correctly identifying breeds and say that the reputation alone may increase the reporting tendency. Since there is a tendency for the press to misreport dog bites as far as breed, the raw data are biased and frankly, without good data you can’t really develop any reliable conclusions. So IMO the whole thing has a basic flaw.
Continuing on, there was a more recent study done where vets actually saw dogs that had bitten children. The Title was “Behavioral assessment of child-directed canine aggression” published in Injury Prevention Unfortunately the full-text version is no longer available online, but there are excerpts.
http://www.livescience.com/animals/071002-dog-bite.html
http://www.huliq.com/36585/behaviora...ine-aggression
And this is what I had found in there about breeds:
Quote:
A total of 103 dogs had bitten a child under the age of 18 years. ...
Forty one breeds were represented. English Springer Spaniels and German Shepherd Dogs each comprised 9% of pure-bred dogs (7% of all dogs), followed by 5% each of Labrador Retrievers, Golden Retrievers, and American Cocker Spaniels (4% of all dogs)
But then you have this:
There is a Dog Statistics done on every dog each year that shows which breeds are more aggressive than others.
Atts - American Temperament Test Society
[Anything above 80% is good]
Dalmation 81.8%, Husky 86.6%, German Shepard/ cop dog 83.5%, Rotts
82.6%, Mastiff 83.9%, American Pit Bull Terrier 84.3%, American Staffordshire 83.4%, Staffordshire Bull Terrier 85.3%, and Boxer
84.3
Now the nice little dogs.
Collie 53.3%, Bichon Frise 79.3%, Corgi 75.4%, Chihuahua 70.3%,
Dachshund 70.2%, Setter 75%, Schnauzer 75.5%, Lhasa Apso 69.2%