[brytlea]

Unfortunately good dog bite stats with good breed id is really difficult to come by. I have tried thru the years to find info, and it's simply not there. The media likes a story, and they want to hear about pit bull attacks because people want to hear them. Some states keep pretty good stats (as far as they go--remember, many animal control officers cannot tell a pit bull from a boxer or lab) and others don't really keep any at all.

Here is the latest from the CDC:

The latest CDC "Dog Bite: Fact Sheet" includes a disclaimer regarding this study, saying that

"it does not identify specific breeds that are most likely to bite or kill, and thus is not appropriate for policy-making decisions related to the topic. Each year, 4.7 million Americans are bitten by dogs. These bites result in approximately 16 fatalities; about 0.0002 percent of the total number of people bitten. These relatively few fatalities offer the only available information about breeds involved in dog bites. There is currently no accurate way to identify the number of dogs of a particular breed, and consequently no measure to determine which breeds are more likely to bite or kill."[40]

So, shall we kill or otherwise get rid of all of one breed based on a media bias against them?

[wendy1946]

There are simply too many of the anecdotal stories and they are simply too gruesome.