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Tibetan Mastiff, the most genetically unusual dog breed
The Washington Post jumps on a new study of the genes and behaviors of thousands of dogs as opening another front in The War on Stereotypes:
Looking for a well-behaved dog? Breed may not tell you much.
Researchers found that breed alone explains very little about dog behavior and personality
By Katie Shepherd
Yesterday at 2:00 p.m. EDT
Americans have as many stereotypes about dogs as there are distinct breeds: Chihuahuas are nervous; border collies are hyperactive; golden retrievers are great with children; and, most infamous, some large breeds — like the American pit bull terrier and Rottweiler — are aggressive.
But a research paper published Thursday by scientists studying the link between genetics and dog behavior suggests that our preconceived notions may be wrong.
Breed means very little in predicting the behavior and personality of an individual dog, the researchers found. That appears to be especially true for traits that are most commonly associated with a dog’s personality, qualities such as cuddliness, friendliness toward strangers and aggression.
… The researchers examined data only on dogs that live primarily as companion animals and did not study how genes influence working dogs bred to perform specific tasks.
Breed accounted for only about 9 percent of behavioral variation in individual dogs and no trait was unique to a single breed of dog, the study found. The researchers speculate that much of the rest of the differences between dogs comes down to individual experiences, training and other environmental factors.
Although some traits appeared to coincide with existing beliefs about breeds, others contradicted deep-seated stereotypes. Labrador and golden retrievers, on average, scored high on “human sociability” — a measure of how receptive a dog is to unfamiliar people. That finding goes hand in hand with those breeds’ reputations as friendly dogs. But American pit bull terriers, a breed that has been outlawed in some cities and is often not allowed to live in apartment complexes because of the belief that it is aggressive and destructive, also scored high on human sociability, the study found.
“We knew what we were finding wasn’t lining up with people’s stereotypes and what they feel is their lived experience with dogs,” Karlsson said.
Actually, pit bulls are famously affectionate. The problem with pit bulls is they have been bred to have certain behaviors, such as when they bite to not let go, along with the muscularity to cause a lot of damage. The vast majority of pit bulls will never rip a child apart, but a large fraction of the most damaging attacks on people are carried out by pit bulls and their close cousin breeds.
Like breed, dog size had almost no effect on differences in behavior among individual dogs, the study found. “You will never have a Great Dane-sized Chihuahua, and you will never have a Chihuahua-sized Great Dane,” Karlsson added, “but you can definitely have a Chihuahua that acts like a Great Dane, and you can have a Great Dane with the same personality as a Chihuahua.”
Some traits were more likely to be associated with certain breeds — but those largely had to do with functional behaviors such as howling, pointing, retrieving, herding and playing with toys. On average, beagles and bloodhounds are more likely to howl. German shorthaired pointers are more likely to point. Herding breeds tended to be more biddable — or easily trained — and played with toys more than other breeds. And, predictably, breeds classified as retrievers had a greater propensity to retrieve than other types of dogs.
Still, many individual beagles rarely howl, and some golden retrievers refuse to fetch; a dog’s breed does not guarantee any specific behavior, the study found.
As Damon Runyon might say, the race is not always to the greyhound, nor the dogfight to the pit bull, but that’s the way to bet.
… The study’s authors said dispelling stereotypes about our dogs may help people make better-informed choices when picking pets and also may affect breed-specific laws and policies that prevent people from owning certain dogs.
“There are some breeds that are both fairly and unfairly judged,” Alonso said.
So, we must cancel bias against pit bulls!
Too bad about the people who will die from the War on Stereotypes. From Dogsbite.org:
I also read the original study in Science, “Ancestry-inclusive dog genomics challenges popular breed stereotypes.”
The most genetically unusual dog breed by far, according to the report, is the Tibetan Mastiff, which is quite a sight. Like human Tibetans, canine Tibetans are genetically adapted for the thin air of the high altitude.
Plus, they look unreal, like giant plush toys. I saw one over the weekend in Riverfront Park in Spokane, and it was attracting a crowd.
Other interesting facts from the study:
Pit Bulls (American Pit Bull Terrier) are now the leading breed in the U.S. genetically, with about 10% of genes in purebreds and mutts combined tracing back to pit bulls, with Labs next at 6%. The public consistently underestimates how prevalent pit bull genes are:
This prevalence of pit bull genes means that pit bulls accounting for almost two-thirds of fatal dog attacks on humans isn’t quite as awful as you’d think because pit bulls are so common these days. But still, 10%-does-66%?
More than 80% of the nearly 1 billion dogs on Earth are free-living, free-breeding, and not under human control (e.g., village dogs). Even in countries with large purebred populations, dogs with ancestry from more than one breed are common [~50% in the United States].
My new dog looks like a large village dog, or what I call a “default dog,” with usually a yellow-brown short coat. The pound named her Bambi because she looks like a muscular deer (but does not act much like one).
Mutts are rarely (17%) mixes of just two breeds. Most (66%) carry >5% ancestry from four or more breeds. We find that 1071 dogs (70%) are highly admixed, carrying under 45% ancestry from any one breed. The most common breed ancestry is American pit bull terrier (9.9%) followed by Labrador retriever (6.0%), Chihuahua (5.1%), beagle (4.1%), and German shepherd dog (4.0%), varying by geographic region. Purebred dogs had higher coefficients of inbreeding, as estimated from the proportion of the genome in runs of homozygosity.
The guy at the animal shelter came up with four possible contributor breeds for Bambi: Korean Jindo, German Shepherd (or as you are now supposed to call it: German Shepherd Dog to, evidently, distinguish it from the German Shepherd Human), Shar-pei (a few wrinkles on her forehead), and one other Asian breed I forgot (Akita?). Hopefully, she’s avoided most of the unfortunate genetic problems associated with those various breeds. She appears to be very healthy and is definitely vigorous.
The researchers got the DNA on over 2000 dogs, half mutts, and had their owners fill out a lengthy survey about their dogs.
One concern I’d have about survey responses about behavior is that, while no doubt many owners are experts on how their dogs compare to other dogs, other owners, such as me, would be pretty clueless about how she compares to other dogs. Bambi is my first dog in several decades, so I’m not a comparative dog expert. So far, to sum up her temperament and behavior as: “extremely dog-like.”
In the owner surveys, breed explains a larger fraction of the variance in behavior phenotypes (110 questions and eight factors) than size, sex, or age, but the effect is relatively small. In an analysis of variance (ANOVA) of confirmed purebred dogs representing 78 breeds, the breed effect, measured as generalized eta squared (ges), averages 0.089 … and is about fivefold higher for the physical traits characteristic of breeds than for behavioral traits. …
Pet dogs these days are primarily bred for looks rather than behavior. (The study excluded working dogs.) Often behavior rides along with looks (pleiotropy), but personality is not what wins the Westminster Kennel Club dog show.
Also, dogs that are bred for behavior are sometimes bred for a limited number of traits rather than a whole suite of behaviors encompassing the eight main behavioral factors the authors found. For instance, a Newfoundland is bred to rescue people from the water. That’s a pretty amazing trait. I presume that breeders of working Newfoundlands will tolerate a range of other behavioral traits as long as it really wants to dive in and save drowning people.
Age explains little of the variation [0.018 ± 0.035 (±SD)] overall, but for a subset of traits it exceeds 0.05, including two factors (arousal level and toy-directed motor patterns) and nine questions, which include five designed to assess aging-related traits.
Sex has little effect (0.009 ± 0.044), except for “lifts leg to urinate” (ges = 0.48).
We are constantly lectured about how gender differences in behavior are socially constructed due to the patriarchy’s need to impose the Gender Binary on everybody. But when it comes to dogs, American society is strikingly lacking in widespread stereotypes about sex differences. Dog experts often have theories about subtle sex differences (not all of them agreeing), but as a definite non-expert, I’ve barely ever of them.
Size has virtually no effect (6.6 × 10−4 ± 8.6 × 10−4; range 2.5 × 10−7 to 0.006).
Do dogs have much sense of their own size and looks? I got to thinking about that yesterday at the park when an off-leash pitbull went dashing 50 yards to bark at another pitbull. The two beasts pulled up about 3 feet apart and unleash furious barks and snarls.
Then two more excited dogs ran up and barked their heads off. One was a little lap dog and the other a very silly looking dog with a fluffy white coat. My impression was that they both should stay far away from angry 75 pound pit bulls. But do they know they look like pit bull appetizers?
Breed is not a reliable predictor of individual behavior
For several factors, score distributions for individual breeds differ from the distribution of all dogs, with at least a few breeds over- or underrepresented in the highest-scoring quartile. These distributions are based on owner survey data that may be influenced by breed stereotypes and other factors, and differences are not necessarily genetic in origin. For example, for human sociability (factor 1), an individual Labrador retriever (1.4-fold), golden retriever (1.6-fold), American pit bull terrier (1.4-fold), or Siberian husky (1.7-fold) was more likely to score in the highest quartile than a randomly selected dog, whereas a German shepherd dog (0.78-fold), Chihuahua (0.72-fold), or dachshund (0.56-fold) was less likely. Even so, in every breed represented by 25 or more dogs, the majority scored within one SD of the Darwin’s Ark cohort mean (67.2 ± 7.5% within one SD and 95.4 ± 3.0% within two SD for confirmed purebred dogs). Behavioral factors show high variability within breeds, suggesting that although breed may affect the likelihood of a particular behavior to occur, breed alone is not, contrary to popular belief, informative enough to predict an individual’s disposition.
So this is basically Lewontin’s Fallacy applied to dogs. From Wikipedia:
In the 1972 study The Apportionment of Human Diversity, Richard Lewontin performed a fixation index (FST) statistical analysis using 17 markers, including blood group proteins, from individuals across classically defined “races” (Caucasian, African, Mongoloid, South Asian Aborigines, Amerinds, Oceanians, and Australian Aborigines). He found that the majority of the total genetic variation between humans (i.e., of the 0.1% of DNA that varies between individuals), 85.4%, is found within populations, 8.3% of the variation is found between populations within a “race”, and only 6.3% was found to account for the racial classification.
Everybody was amazed by what a tiny percentage 14.6% was, but few stopped to compare that number to anything to get a perspective on it. In reality, 15% of diversity explained by racial ancestry is actually quite a lot. It’s comparable in scale to how much the diversity between uncle and nephew relative to the rest of their subrace is explained by their being related.
Second,
A. W. F. Edwards argued that while Lewontin’s statements on variability are correct when examining the frequency of different alleles (variants of a particular gene) at an individual locus (the location of a particular gene) between individuals, it is nonetheless possible to classify individuals into different racial groups with an accuracy that approaches 100 percent when one takes into account the frequency of the alleles at several loci at the same time. This happens because differences in the frequency of alleles at different loci are correlated across populations—the alleles that are more frequent in a population at two or more loci are correlated when we consider the two populations simultaneously. Or in other words, the frequency of the alleles tends to cluster differently for different populations.
Say you have two dog breeds. On each of the eight main behavioral factors found in this study, one breed averages half a standard deviation more than the average dog and one a half standard deviation less. While you will definitely have some overlap on any one factor — for example, African-Americans average a one standard deviation lower on IQ tests than white Americans, but that still means one-sixth of blacks have higher IQs than whites — across all eight factors, just about any dog from one breed will be quite different from a dog from the other breed.
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Stereotypes about dogs! Hehe, Katie, that is so unintentionally funny, sorry, I should take you seriously, cause you’re in the Washington Post, I know, but next pit bull you see on the street, go ahead and kiss and pet him like a nice yellow lab and let us know how that turns out.
(I’m sure the Washington Post has a killer health plan.)
Sounds a bit like Muslims.
Most existing dog breeds are actually quite young and will thus not tend to show as deep an ancestral distance from each other as humans. And it’s not that their integrity is contained by only breeding within a breed so strictly as selection for physical appearance or behavioural traits, so the bulk of SNPs between them won’t be as discriminate. Irish Wolfhounds, for example, were revived as a breed relatively recently with the few purebreds crossbred with things like Great Danes before being bred back to their ancestral appearance. Doing that won’t purge much of the Great Dane ancestry outside a few areas.
Exceptions tend to be the really ancient dog breeds in China that are very old and stable and tended to only be bred with themselves.
If anything it highlights how stable human populations have been over thousands of years as to how easy it is to trace a human’s ancestry over that of a dog’s that is much more a case of who their ancestors were 5 generations ago rather than 40 to 50 in the case of humans.
And, indeed, how much stable difference is achieved with only a few closely-linked traits.
Dogs aren’t a refutation of race, they’re a blindingly obvious example of it, that they are all so closely related in terms of time to last common ancestor despite having such stable physical appearances and other traits shouldn’t really embolden the ‘race is a social construct people’ but then, like everything causing cancer, everything in the entire universe, including race, is apparently proof that race doesn’t exist and also why race, just not he white race, is so important!
Ah yes, the old “shar pei” claim – we had a dog years ago that the pound also claimed had this breed in him due to some wrinkles as a puppy but the reality was that he was just some kind of hound mix and they have a bit looser skin around the face and neck. It did give him a really high degree of expressiveness though, which is obviously advantageous from an evolutionary standpoint and endeared him to us.
On the flipside, he was very protective of his home and extremely racist, which wasn’t a bad thing since we lived in the hood. I had more than one neighbor comment that everyone knew my dog and no one was going to mess with our house because of it, which turned out to be accurate for the years we lived there. Definitely a dog for that time and place in our lives, although when we later moved to a suburban neighborhood his outlook on home defense could be tiresome.
I pulled out my phone for its calculator and I see that that’s 32 Americans killed by dogs (bites, at least) per year. I was surprised to learn that this is 50% higher than the number of Americans killed by lightning.* For injuries, I could see the dog bites being a much higher factor greater.
.
* Just ’19 data. BTW, men are 5X more likely to be killed by lightning than women. That is sexist and egregious! Shouldn’t we be out there, maybe on the golf course, with big signs, no not metal, maybe plastic signs, to protest this injustice?
I’d believe a study where the investigators conducted controlled experiments. Or talked to veterinarians about how cooperative different breeds are on the examining table.
But here all the data comes from a survey of owners, which makes the whole thing nonsense. To any question about something like “friendliness” or “trainability”, the answer has to be relative to some fixed standard, which is exactly what a pet owner doesn’t have. He has his own dog, which he knows well and which behaves toward him in a way it behaves toward no one else, and he observes other people’s dogs haphazardly. A few people own multiple dogs and more people will have serially owned multiple dogs, but each one has been raised and kept under different circumstances (e.g. the dog you had when your kids lived with you vs the dog you keep in your old age).
Yeah sure. A Chihuahua and a Mastiff react the same way when someone rings the doorbell…shows what these guys know.
This was cute: “Sex has little effect (0.009 ± 0.044), except for “lifts leg to urinate” (ges = 0.48).”. Whatda’ gonna do? You could get all Swedish about it and make them pee like girls, but try it on a lab first.
Since I’m more of a cat guy, I gotta say that the cats put a lot more thought into the urination process. Usually it’s something like “hey, I haven’t peed on this corner of the house in, like, ages.” Our cat recently backed up to a bunch of celery in the garden and sprayed it down good. Gonna need a bigger bottle of Ranch Dressing…
Oh yeah. My dog is very much aware of his size. He can be a jerk around dogs ≤ his size, but he’s very respectful of bigger dogs.
#dogbreedsracist
I know a postman. He says he likes pitbulls, because most of them are so friendly!- No kiddin’ on his side. I also know a computer nerd (computer programmer or some such) who prefers to be for himself most of the time. And he has a pitbull, who drags him along on his skateboard. This pitbull likes to play with kids (with his muzzle on, though).
Re. pit bulls — when I bite, I too do not let go.
This is probably misleading for many reasons, and particularly if the claim is that genes in dogs aren’t or can’t be highly determinative of behavior. Working lines of breeds like German Shepherds are bred for temperament and ability to successfully complete tasks, whereas most “purebred” dogs now are just the product of someone slapping two dogs with “papers” together to sell puppies.
If dogs still served as beasts of burden (and tailored to a particular environment) for men rather than serving primarily as companions, their breed characteristics in terms of behavior would be readily discernible and pronounced.
A “canine lion”.
Katie should survey her, or is it zir, or whatever, Post colleagues to find out which breeds they own. Odds are that there aren’t many pit bulls in the mix.
A search on AKC breeds brings up an article from Steve’s local Los Angeles Times. They are marking their territory all over.
Are Jindos popular in LA? In Korea, outside of their namesake Jindo, they were very rare (Koreans apparently hadn’t read this study, so most were of the opinion that Jindos were difficult to train and not very personable). And the government was very protective of the breed – strict control over breeding, and difficult to take one out of the country.
that still means one-sixth of blacks have higher IQs than whites
I assume you mean the white average.
There’s a video at the Pet Collective of 6 dogs barking loudly through an iron gate at a German Shepherd, also barking, on the other side. Then the gate begins sliding to the side, and the dogs move with it but continue barking. When it’s all the way open, they all turn around and walk away quietly.
The Bezos Blog, which scrutinizes and doxxes humans who oppose their masters’ Marxism, is upset that people scrutinize and doxx dogs as if that tells you anything.
Oh yeah, Dieter, and I saw Steve’s point about them only after I’d written that 1st comment. OK, so it’s sometimes nurture as much as nature, but does that change the idea of stereotypes? Maybe it doesn’t that much, because you’d still better really watch it, if it’s not your own dog or you don’t know him. That would go along with her no big differences in innate personality theory, I suppose.
Then, as I’ve written before regarding the Welfare State and black dysfunction, sometimes nurture can create its own evolution, hence, nature. I don’t see how that would apply to dogs, though, but it’s something to think about …
Surprisingly, the study found that almost all breeds are cuter, friendlier, and exhibited more human-like characteristics than convetional wisdom (a.k.a. a loose survey of all people, including non-owners). Also asking that wretched hive of scum and villiany that is pit bull owners and expecting any kind of honest answer is pretty naive. Pit bull owners mostly seem to be either the ones who fight them, or the ones who enable the dog fight crowd because they need to virtue signal about some self-imposed persecution, but couldn’t get on the tranny train.
If ancestry doesn’t determine (dog) behavior, the obvious next candidate for determining dog behavior is the training (intentional or otherwise—canines make no distinction) of the owners. And for pit bulls, the owners are mostly black, particularly ghetto blacks.
Is it possible that cities and apartment complexes have found a way to exclude ghetto blacks without explicitly excluding ghetto blacks? Banning pit bulls is less obviously racial profiling than banning menthol cigarette smokers or purpa drank drinkers, especially so long as skinny white hipsters and gormless white women persist in their niche pit bull affection (two other not particularly desirable demographic segments).
Not just breeding. Physical world stuff matters too. If someone’s aggressive chihuahua nips your ankle with its tiny mandibles, so what? But if someone’s “affectionate” pit bull locks onto your calf with its enormous mandibles, you’re going to the hospital.
But to The Science™, the owners said the former was aggressive and latter was affectionate, so that’s how they are scored.
Katie Shepherd Human?
Well put.
Indeed.
Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali) was interviewed by Alex Haley and expressed his disdain for miscegenation. He use the example of two unlike breeds of dogs to explain his opposition.
I liked the little disclaimer: “…except for functionality traits.” LOL
Similar to the way that the “politics is downstream of culture” crowd ignore that sometimes politics can create its own culture.
OT
Marriage rates by college, lots of graphs and lists, as well as an attempt to create a model of college characteristics that predict the future marriage rate of graduate. The guy got ahold of the marriage and educational data from a decade of IRS returns that Chetty at Harvard apparently gives out to interested parties.
The Mr. & Mrs. Degree: Which Colleges Have the Highest Marriage Rates?
https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-mr-mrs-degree-which-colleges-have-the-highest-marriage-rates
Brigham Young seems like a good place to go if you want to get married. Harvard is middling.
And I came here hoping to hear the latest misadventures of the intrepid San Francisco mayor.
Sad.
BTW, I always get a laugh when my french friends ask what race my dog has.
Dog “food”? Your canine pal’s life can be extended by feeding him/her some kind of diet closer to what wolves ate in the wild. Feeding your dog burnt pellets from a bag or crap offal from a can invites tumors, ill health, joint problems, and early death. Plus the burnt pellets are expensive….$60 for a 22 lb bag plus sales tax i.e. $3/lb. Chicken thighs at Safeway are $1.79 lb but $5 for 6 to 7 lbs of $5 Fridays. No sales tax on human fare either. Get a freezer and load up on 25 packets at a time. Feed them raw or cooked. NEVER feed your dog cooked bones of any kind!! NEVER feed your pal drumsticks as they have a needle bone which can perforate throats and stomachs!! Likewise, this is also true for humans. If you eat store bought chemical crap in a can, box, bag, plastic container….you are poisoning yourself and inviting early health problems like cancer, bad joints, and heart disease.
You really nailed it with your assessment of the pit bulldog. I owned one (stray, I never would have sought out such a breed). She was the most affectionate, exuberant dog I’ve ever had. Luckily for us, we never had any issues with her.
One of the things that makes pit bulls so dangerous is the fact that they ARE so friendly. Guardian type breeds (think GSD or Dobermans) generally show their discomfort by barking or growling when they feel threatened; biting is actually a last resort for them. Pit bulls on the other hand are far more happy-go-lucky…. Until they’re suddenly not. They have been selectively bred for minimal threat displays as well as gameness which translates to attacking until the prey is dead. Even in the face of grave injury to itself. The attacking dog doesn’t even seem “angry.” It is pure (artificially) amplified prey drive.
Dog Knees. Please allow a second dog health comment. Dog knee problems are actually more common than hip problems. Ripped out ligaments ave very common and require TPLO surgery (bone replatforming) and a long 4 month rehab. The expense is horrendous…..$10k to $15k. Never allow your dog to run in thick sand or deep snow. Larger heavier dogs are more prone to all joint problems. Oh, and after TPLO surgery, the knees do not function like new and arthritis eventually sets in. Dogs are impulsive and live in the moment. It is up to you to make preserve you dog pal’s health and make sure your his / her life is more pleasant than your own.
It seems that different human faces are also correlated with personality.
This is true, but they are still far likelier to bite than breeds like golden retriever and labrador retriever.
I think that best explains the “dog breeds do not exist” style article theme. Thanks.
Worth noting that dog inter-breed Fst tends to be higher than between human races. See Table 2 of this paper for a comparison of Bernese mountain dogs, Flat-coated retrievers, Golden retrievers, and Rottweilers with pairwise Fst ranging from 0.237 to 0.398.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5757025_Canine_Population_Structure_Assessment_and_Impact_of_Intra-Breed_Stratification_on_SNP-Based_Association_Studies
This paper looks at the Fst distributions of SNPs in human populations, but seems to shy away from giving simple numbers for pairwise continental race Fst (comparable to dog table).
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0049837
Human Fst matrices seem to be getting harder and harder to find. Here is an excerpt of an old comment of mine which references one and gives some numbers, but the link is broken (funny how that keeps happening). Also references the last link with title.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/18-years-of-trying/#comment-2365735
Supplementary Figure 6 is currently available in the Supplementary Materials for https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5019950/
See NIHMS788970-supplement-3.doc
You might want to download it if you are interested in this sort of thing.
The full matrix helps drive home how far apart the sub-Saharan African populations (YRI and LWK) are from the other populations relative to other pairwise differences.
Doesn’t that include almost all breeds? Of the 14 shown in the chart, all but a couple would qualify. Our beagle detonates when she sees a local leporine leap by. She’s stocky and dark, obviously not a show dog. Given the “deplorable” brand name she came with, her old owner almost certainly hunted.
Their market demand for soft, cuddly pits would lead to dimorphism in the breed. Few of the ones in the study would have come from Demetrius’s chain-link enclosure. (I.e., front yard.) This can’t be a representative sample.
This is ironic. Our English generic term dog originally meant a mastiff, as it still does in other languages, e.g., dogue de Bordeaux, the French mastiff. In sister Germanic tongues, the generic is cognate to our now-more-restricted hound.
Or English sheepdog. Shepherd and sheepdog have quite different canine connotations for what is essentially the same term. Why don’t we just adopt the Imperial term Alsatian?
Dog experts often have theories about subtle sex differences (not all of them agreeing)
A K9 officer told me they prefer males because bitches get too attached to a single handler, making it more difficult to move shifts around. Human shifts, that is. Wouldn’t canine shifts need to be kept regular?
You must realize after reading the article that your opinion has become full of bias due to your media intake and preconceptions.
The research is spelled out above.
Your notion that pit bulls are more aggressive has been refuted but you insist it is the science that must be mistaken because you have already formed an opinion.
Pitts pass temperament tests at a higher rate than golden retrievers. They are more prone to animal aggression or reactivity…not for people though
What do you think of this?
From Pitbull.org
It all goes back to history. The breed was developed in Germany from 1899 onwards using a particularly fine specimen of the German farm dog as a starter, and then breeding in other good local working dogs.
The founder of the breed was a chap named Captain Max Emil Friedrich von Stephanitz, a German cavalry officer and dog breeder who is credited with having developed the German Shepherd Dog breed as it is currently known, set guidelines for the breed standard, and was the first president of the Verein für Deutsche Schäferhunde (Union for German Shepherd Dogs.)
Of course there are lots of problems in translating to English, even from a closely related language like German.
German English
Schaf Sheep
Schafe (Sheep, plural)
Schäfer(in) Shepherd(ess)
Hund dog, hound
Schäferhund Shepherd dog
Schäferhund Sheepdog
So Schäferhund could be translated to English as Shepherd Dog, or as sheepdog, but I guess that Stephanitz wanted to go with Shepherd Dog. It is not really clear to me if the dog is honored with the title of shepherd, or a merely a shepherd’s dog.
However, nothing in life is simple, after after World War I Germany and everything German had a pretty bad rap, so the name of the breed was changed (at least in English) to Alsatian Wolfhound due to its lupine appearance, but then dog fans didn’t like the name Wolf (even though all dogs belong to the species Lupus Canis Familiaris), so the wolfy bit was dropped and they were just called Alsatians.
When I was young in England, I had never heard the words German Shepherd, we called them Alsatians. My mother had one, but it had a short life as it suffered from hip dysplasia, which is common in the breed, and can be exacerbated by constantly jumping in and out of cars.
The Second World War came along and one Adolph Hitler had a beloved Alsatian (or was it a German Shepherd?) called Blondi. Blondi died from cyanide poisoning in Hitler’s bunker in the last hours of the Reich, and it is said that Hitler’s staff grieved more over Blondi than Eva Von Braun who met a similar fate.
Part of the reason that Hitler had a dog was common to many politicians, that they like to have an animal for public appearances that makes them look more human. However, such animals often pick up on cues from their owners and start biting people.
President Roosevelt also had an Alsatian called Major who was known for biting people including the British Prime Minister Ramsay Macdonald at the White House and was thereafter rusticated to upstate New York. Similarly, decades earlier, President Theodore Roosevelt had exiled his bull terrier Pete from the White House after he bit numerous people, even tearing the pants off of ambassador of France to the United States.
The current occupant of the White House has also had a German Shepherd called Major who has followed in the toothprints of his illustrious predecessors in having a bite worse than his bark.
Anyway, after World War II, the Germans were gradually rehabilitated into decent society and the breed reverted to being called the German Shepherd Dog as the founder of the breed had intended.
Perhaps because of the association between fascism and German Shepherds, Russian President Vlad Putin had for his most famous dog the black Labrador Retriever Konni, a breed better known for its pacifist credentials, though she was still able to scare the pants off Mrs. Merkel without even showing her canine teeth.
Here is our Ms. Shepherd.
National reporter focusing on health and science
Ok, so a science background?
Education: University of California at Los Angeles, BA in English; Columbia University, MS in journalism
Woops, nope!
She looks as pompous as you’d expect for a know-nothing writing for a massively influential newspaper.
Anyway, this is yet another one of those “we’re going to tell you something completely contrary to your lived experience in order to humiliate you into submission” articles. Of course it’s total nonsense, but that’s what they do. The thing is, gals like Ms. Shepherd are so marinated in this kind of thing, and such true believers, that they don’t even realize they are pure propaganda tools.
In the early twentieth century there was a global moral panic about German Shepherd dogs equal to the current fear of pitbulls, particularly since they were associated with bootleggers and other lowlifes.
Subtext for this article.
“We at the Washington Compost, want to paper over genetic and behavioral differences in dog breeds, because that comports with our project of papering over genetic and behavioral differences in human racial groups!
We so smart!!!
See, we just left off a verb!! We like all those other humans, brothers and sisters, doncha know! ”
No, only humans ate from the apple in the Garden of Eden.
The Family Dog Project in Budapest is the world’s largest dog-research organization dedicated to dog behavior in the world. Founded in 1994, it has published over 100 peer-reviewed studies in major technical publications. They also publish reports of studies in forms comprehensible to non-experts and dog lovers. I trust their studies and articles and seminars more than the above behavioral assessments of owners. The reliance upon dog-owner impressions reminds me of how Google elevates a few individual “audience reviews” of movies above reviews by Roger Ebert and similar prominent professionals.
https://familydogproject.elte.hu/
Basically, the article says “except for the ways they were bred to be different, dog breeds are pretty typically doggy.” But you don’t need a PhD to notice that Great Danes, Chihuahuas, and Wiener Dogs are pretty consistent examples of their phenotypical stereotypes — which are actually the traits being selected for in their AKC “environments.”
Dog breeds are thus perfect examples of different selective pressures making for different traits.
For example, retrievers gonna retrieve. https://youtube.com/shorts/tOa0elw-ZqI?feature=share
Hmmm… Hungary…
https://1movieshd.com/movie/free-white-god-hd-7353
This prevalence of pit bull genes means that pit bulls accounting for almost two-thirds of fatal dog attacks on humans isn’t quite as awful as you’d think because pit bulls are so common these days. But still, 10%-does-66%?
Let me definitively answer the nature vs. nurture debate re: pitbulls: it’s nature. You can obviously raise a pitbull to be exceptionally vicious, but much of bad pitbull behavior is genetic. Your pitbull might be sweet and loving to you, but I regard them all as potential murderers. They are the sharks of dogs.
I was going to point out that Katie Shepherd will fetch whatever current narrative is thrown her way. Might be an inbred trait. Who know?
Well, I’ve never had a female dog hump my leg. Does that count as a sex difference?
Crain’s Chicago Business
Whole Foods closing Englewood location
When the store opened in 2016, it was hailed as a catalyst for more development in a neighborhood that had suffered from decades of disinvestment and population loss.
Whole Foods Market is closing its grocery store in the Englewood, part of a prominent shopping center development that served as the centerpiece of the city’s plan to reinvigorate the South Side neighborhood several years ago.
When the store opened in 2016, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration hailed it as a catalyst for more development in Englewood, a neighborhood that had suffered from decades of disinvestment and population loss. Anchoring a project subsidized by the city, the store opening lifted hopes that more investment would follow and attracted national news coverage.
Nearly six years later, Whole Foods today confirmed that it plans to close the store at 832 W. 63rd Street along with five other locations, including a store in Lincoln Park.
“As we continue to position Whole Foods Market for long-term success, we regularly evaluate the performance and growth potential of each of our stores, and we have made the difficult decision to close six stores. We are supporting impacted team members through this transition and expect that all interested, eligible Team Members will find positions at our other locations,” Whole Foods said in the statement.
The loss of Whole Foods is a major blow to the 50,000-square-foot shopping center, called Englewood Square, and the neighborhood, which had been lacking healthy grocery options before the store opened. It’s also hard to ignore the symbolic significance now, after many big corporations pledged commitments to Black and Latino neighborhoods in response to the protests over George Floyd’s death in 2020.
But the Englewood Square’s developer, Leon Walker, is confident he’ll be able to find a new grocery store to take over the Whole Foods space.
“We’ll find an operator that will pick up the baton and keep this thing moving,” said Walker, managing partner of Chicago-based DL3 Realty. “The underlying business case is still solid.”
Englewood Square is currently 100% occupied to tenants including Chipotle, Starbucks, PNC Bank and AT&T, he said.
“This is a speed bump,” Walker said. “There is too much investment and so much momentum.”
How early? The breed standard wasn’t even conceived until 1899.
If you’re talking about in the UK, I think the moral panic would have ensured during the World Wars when the breed was renamed the “Alsatian,” yes?
One must understand that the breeds aren’t static – when a breed becomes popular it tends to incentivize people to engage in irresponsible and poorly considered breeding because there is a demand for the puppies. This is especially the case with breeds which become the “tough dog” that people will use as status enhancers, guard dogs, etc. People who don’t understand dog behavior and genetics can mistake fear biting from so-called “civil aggression” which is to say that they will breed a dog that they think is tough but bites because it has bad temperament and is easily scared. Such a dog is biting in order to flee at the first available opportunity.
To breed a dog which will actually have the temperament to actively fight an adult man requires an in-depth knowledge of dog genetics, and an exclusive and standardized breeding program with temperament testing. In other words, there are reasons that police K9 Units and the Military employ only working lines German Shepherds and Belgian Malinois for guarding/fighting applications and not Pittbulls or other “mean” dog breeds.
Off topic:
Anyone have a good article or blog post or the like on the modern tendency of the US military to look like Soviet generals with the ribbons (eight racks or more!? )
I find it bizarre. Are things so much more dangerous now? Or is this just grade inflation? And why aren’t they embarrassed with the amount of that crap?
Tried Googling, but didn’t find a good article.
so many pit-bull owners – “I never saw him do that before.”
Loved my pit/good training but on rare occasions he snapped into primordial bezerker mode – usually raccons but once had to pry him off another dog (leashed). Despite his many wonderful qualities – I will not shelter another pit breed for fear of potential harm.
I remember I once looked up fatal dog attacks by Labrador Retrievers — and there’re a lot of Labrador Retrievers.
As I recall, there had been one.
Ohhhh,
so statistics aren’t reliable, eh?
For sex differences, did they take into account that a good chunk of dogs in the US are spayed or neutered and thus the hormonal inputs behind sex differences in behavior might not be as present in the US population?
It is banned because of a fact, not a belief. This is how the shitlibs work.
“The study” found two things, one of them is a fact, so the other one must be too. No mention, of if the study polled the dead about pitbulls sociability.
“Researchers found that breed alone explains very little about dog behavior and personality…”
The problem here is that dog behavior and personality — even within a breed — can be drastically altered.
The Basset Hound was once a true hunting dog. It would flop around and snooze when the hunt was over, but once a rabbit scent crossed his dewlap, he was fired up and ready to go.
But that was before the show-dog breeders got to work. They were only interested in sad-eyed useless puddles of fur and skin featured in “Hush Puppy” shoe ads. The English bulldog — like all other bulldogs — was similarly a creature of frenetic physicality. Once upon a time, he could even breathe without difficulty. I kid you not. Again, according to the breeders, that needed to drastically change. And now, he’s a much sweeter and friendlier animal, but physically, he’s a monstrosity.
Belyaev’s domestication experiments with silver foxes were able to produce both sweet and vicious subpopulations within 40 generations.
Pitbulls (and cane corsos, and dogos, etc.) are still being bred to fight in certain places — and they tend to the kind of dog that thugs like to have around — so the aggressive genes are still being selected for. On the other hand, the city dog pounds will gas any outwardly vicious dog before even allowing a shelter to take it in, and they disproportionately gas pitbulls and related breeds. Depending on the specific dynamics, I suspect either of those forces can predominate (or else produce the weird semi-stationary flux we see today in the US).
OT:
Now that many people think Covid is in rear view mirror, I noticed something interesting: Hawaii just crossed 1,000 Covid deaths per million (lowest death rate). At the other end is Mississippi at 4,181 deaths per million. Somehow, I have not seen a rigorous analysis of this 400% difference. Unlike international statistics, one can’t easily blame this on vastly different measurement criteria.
Best States:
Hawaii 1,002
Vermont 1,021
Utah 1,481
Alaska 1,666
Washington 1,666
Worst States
Mississippi 4,181
Arizona 4,115
Alabama 3,989
Tennessee 3,830
West Virginia 3,826
To the extent that differences between dog breeds do appear, can be attribute them to their ancestors previous condition of servitude, or to housing policy, or to the lack of suitable Hollywood role models?
It does remind one of the statistics on terrorism. In our current world terrorist attacks are mostly carried out by Muslims.
But you don’t inherit Islam in the traditional sense. Mohammed fixed it fairly well by provisions against leaving Islam.
Yep. And thanks for the picture. It’s funny how this story becomes more interesting by adding more details. Steve wrote wednesday a bit counterintuitively that experiencing things you expected is part of what makes travelling fun. So: Yes: It is fun to see how parts fall in place. It’s like watching an explosive drawing of an engine becoming – whole. But still: It is a surprise to see how she looks. – Not bad. Not too charming. Bossy.
It might be relevant to know that those with STEM PhDs who take this study as “refuting the correlation of behavior and personality by breed”, something that concerns biology (more specifically genetics, behavioral genetics), are the same ones pushing the covid vaccines, or even sometimes working directly on them. They not rarely also think there are no meaningful biological differences between the human sexes, and that race is not correlated with intelligence or behavior, if it even exists.
some large breeds — like the American pit bull terrier and Rottweiler — are aggressive.
Saying this is like saying “some races — like blacks and Hispanics — are crime-prone.”
Yes, Hispanics are considerably more crime-prone than whites or Asians. But the crime rate of blacks, whether compared to Hispanics or any other non-black race, is simply off the charts.
Pit bulls were bred to do nothing except kill anything in front of them. They kill far and away more people than even Rottweilers, the next runners up. If Rottweilers are the spics of the dog world, then pit bulls are it’s niggers.
I absolutely despise pit bulls and the retards who own them. Any intelligent and decent person does. Ban the breed.
After WWI when the GSD’s became popular they were referred to as Alsatian shepherds in the UK. They liked the dog but did not like the fact it was German so they let themselves believe that WWI liberated Alsatian dogs from German captivity. Something along the line of the liberty cabbage syndrome.
It looks like high-income states have done better than low-income states.
That photo makes her look like one of the Shining twins.
Pit bulls who are aggressive were bred to be that way – by thousands in the hood; go watch the Mercy’s Kennel documentary. Newfoundlands were bred to save drowning victims. The current genetic batch of pit bulls were bred for the opposite of altruistic purposes. Discount thousands of years of animal husbandry just to say genetics don’t determine behavior or traits to prove that race is a social construct. I’d rather see behavior surveys/genetic comparison of pit bulls born before crack (pre-1980) vs. now.
I agree that “owner surveys” are pretty subjective. Like most surveys these days which are publicized, and biased because of the leading questions or lack of knowledge about things by respondents.
A better source of data would be veterinarians and vet techs who are around many kinds of dogs for a living. Also dog trainers and breeders.
I have only owned one breed of dog so my experience is highly limited. But just ask me a question…
Well, never walk your dog without bringing along a crow bar. You never know when you might need to pry a pit bulls’s jaws off one of your dog’s hind legs.
Yes, I would look at the divorce rates among those who did marry also.
I would speculate that crazy and neurotic would be associated with female Harvard grads along with the usual dysfunctionality and (now) Woke religion that would make a sane and happy life improbable if not impossible. Do you really want to live with Elizabeth “Big Chief” Warren?
Ivy league and hyphenated last names are also tells. Avoid those ye young man, life can be worth living…
It seems telling that due to the very dark dress and her unsmiling portrait, she is both overweight and insecure.
She wants to present as “normal” not fat, which embarrasses her. No Jolly Jane is she.
And the grim facial presentation reeks of a pretense of toughness that actual self confident and tough minded women don’t usually have in portraits.
So she’s found a job as a WaPo fake science reporter for oligarch Bezos. An unhappy hatchet woman who takes out her personal frustrations and hostility on pre selected targets.
Of course this is all my pure speculation. But unsmiling women who choose to look that way in such a public choice have something very dark going on.
In the Spring Steve used to write about golf, now it’s dogs. Steve is newby dog guy, and that’s ok with me. All boys or dogs start out about the same, it’s how they are raised, or neglected that molds their personality. Father Flannagan used to say…”There’s no such thing as a bad boy.” He should have added, but there are bad parents. (or dog owners.)
Democrats are not only nuts but clearly haven’t been around Black people.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/eye-on-the-prize-biden-bans-menthol-cigarettes
Polls show that Blacks are mentally stressed from COVID and Biden is actually going to ban menthols.
Good luck urban area Whites. Gonna be a long hot summer once this passes.
Should we take bets on which city will burn?
I think you are right.
Hawaii $57,015 (Per Capita income)
Vermont 55,293
Utah 48,939
Alaska 62,806
Washington 64,758
Mississippi 38,914
Arizona 46,058
Alabama 44,145
Tennessee 48,684
West Virginia 42,315
Except, for Utah, which has done well despite being lower income State, While Tennessee has done worse in spite of being somewhat better off.
They were bred for blood sport. The prey drive plus very strong bite strength is a dangerous combination.
They get the prey drive from their terrier admixture. Farmers use terriers to take care of rats. It’s remarkable to watch them in action.
The nice thing about pit bulls is that you know when you start seeing a lot of them it’s time to move. I couldn’t live with myself if I had a pit bull that escaped and killed/maimed somebody’s kid or even their dog. So I’ll never get one. They’re penis dogs that only high hormone/low intelligence people want.
There is actually a group of researchers at the London School of Economics who are doing research on dog IQ. They suggest that Border Collies have the highest IQ in their peer-reviewed paper, “A General Intelligence Factor in Dogs”.
https://www.lse.ac.uk/cpnss/research/rosalind-arden/canine-intelligence
The Department Of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board has verified the premise of this article.
Dog owners and other scurrilous types disputing this are hereby anathemized, condemned and inaddition will have 20 points deducted from their credit scores.
“Actually, pit bulls are famously affectionate.”
Generally speaking, the breed’s name conveys considerable information about the breed itself. For example, those dogs with the word “bull” in the breed name, means that their ancestors were bred to fight (literally) in the ring with a bull or other larger sized animals. Betting on dogs fighting bulls goes back to the Romans, and was revived in Renaissance England. James I of England was a heavy wager on dogs fighting bulls, and although protests coming from the Puritans that such behavior was inhumane, the only concession he made was to forbid the matches on Sundays.
Historically, pit bulls are part of the guard dog breeds. They are basically assassins, natural bred killers. While centuries of interbreeding and other things have somewhat lessened some of the more natural aspects of the breed, the fact remains that pit bulls and bull like dogs are the leaders among natural killer dogs. They are basically assassins, originally bred to guard and protect their owners.
Former NFL Q Michael Vick’s dogs that were impounded were nearly all pit bull or bull like dogs bred and used for fighting vs other dogs on the street.
Westminster winners primarily go to the well bred, the best looking, and…the best trained. Obviously a dog that wee wees on the green carpet during their big moment isn’t going to win the Best in Show.
Thanks.
I wrote up the same Raj Chetty database of income and marriage by college in 2017:
https://www.takimag.com/article/alma_mater_blotter_steve_sailer/
• Red Rum! @ Achmed E. Newman
I get the impression that from many years of reading his articles that Steve Sailor loves numbers, statistics, graphs and endless complexity. The end of the article explaining about Bitcoin and all that jazz makes me want to tear my hair out. I see endless talk about Bitcoin and I don’t understand it, don’t want to understand it and want to leave it out of my life. I’m glad to see he leaves an actual mailing address for those of us who are sick to the teeth of endlessly increasing technical complexity that doesn’t improve our lives and just causes stress.
Wow. A cogent, well written, and nearly logical response from THE Tiny Duck, with only two typos! I’m somebody now!
(Hey, none of the rest you have ever had the honor, so pipe down.)
Thanks.
A parrot named Alex once asked someone what color he (Alex) was. It took some doing, but he finally accepted the fact that he was gray.
Yeah…They gave me BS participation ribbons for being able to tie my shoes.. And I had to wear those ribbons to be promoted. FTSh*t. I wore just my jump wings and aviator wings. None of theses careerists has the sense to realize they look like a parody. Sad.
Uh… Steve? You forgot to mention, left alone with the aftermath, they do, in fact, let go, and then they eat you. Some pit bulls consider you to be prey. They “lock on” because they’re trying to kill you, so they can eat you without a lot of screaming and writhing while enjoying their dinner:
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/police-found-pit-bulls-eating-11719337
https://www.newser.com/story/177552/pit-bull-tears-off-owners-hands-likely-eats-them.html
https://naijagists.com/pitbull-dogs-kill-eat-owner-alive-south-carolina/
They’re cute when they’re little:
https://www.inquisitr.com/701175/pit-bull-puppy-eats-sleeping-owners-toes/
Most often somebody will see the attack, and interfere, so the victim gets to live, albeit without an arm or two, like this lucky pitbull aficionado:
https://nypost.com/2022/04/29/deputy-recounts-vicious-south-carolina-pit-bull-attack/
I’ll save the reader from the stories of pit bulls decapitating their owners.
The breed should be outlawed.
It saddens me that you neglected to mention how many POC own pitbulls. Do better, pequeño pato.
With one glaring proviso: breeds do not exist to dogs. As with human breeds, they are a result of human decisions. Thus breeds exist to humans. Why would dogs care? It’s more important for them to tell a hare from a fox.
Recently a commenter related how his own dog feared Dobermans specifically. Dogs can detect, via scent and other senses, aggression and other important qualities. Dobies, pits, and Rottweilers would exude more of the signal pheromones or whatever. That’s not the same as recognizing breed.
Breeds no doubt smell different, and dogs could be trained to recognize various races of their species, just as they can pick out grapes or ganja in your bag at the airport. But that follows human interests, not canine.
I decided to send my dog’s DNA in for analysis. I started with Embark, then tried Wisdom Panel and finally Darwin’s Ark. My dog might well be one of the “participants” in this study, and for what it’s worth she exhibits both the conformation and the personality that one would expect, based on her breed – whatever that is, considering that the three DNA tests gave breed results that agreed only on her primary ancestry.
That being said, I encourage Steve to just pony up the money and submit his dog’s DNA. I found the Wisdom Panel breed results to be the most believable, and both Wisdom Panel and Embark detected that my dog carries one copy of a faulty gene. Those companies use proprietary algorithms, while Darwin’s Ark uses Admixture. The Darwin’s Ark analysis covers more genetic markers, but their breed database is smaller.
However, it is known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects, and other reproductive harm.
And it hasn’t been registered with the Penna. Dept. of Agr.
I suspect that those results may be driven by differences in the age-distributions of the populations and also their obesity rates.
“Grade inflation” indeed. The further from combat you are the more medals you get, apparently. Google “fruit salad” and see what turns up.
https://images.app.goo.gl/98DcZyPbPq7Y7WEp8
So a study about breed behavior excluded breeds bred for behavior?
When america’s military leaders transition all those colorful medals will look fetching with a dress and pumps.
My dog can distinguish pork from all other meats by the smelle He’s obsessed.
Nature or nurture when it comes to dog aggression, particularly the pit bill?
According to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals….
“While a dog’s genetics may predispose it to behave in certain ways, genetics do not exist in a vacuum. Rather, behavior develops through a complex interaction between environment and genetics. This is an especially important consideration when we look at an individual dog versus a breed. Many diverse and sometimes subtle factors influence the development of behavior, including, but not limited to, early nutrition, stress levels experienced by the mother during pregnancy, and even temperature in the womb. And when it comes to influencing the behavior of an individual dog, factors such as housing conditions and the history of social interactions play pivotal roles in behavioral development. The factors that feed into the expression of behavior are so inextricably intertwined that it’s usually impossible to point to any one specific influence that accounts for a dog becoming aggressive. This is why there is such variation in behavior between individual dogs, even when they are of the same breed and bred for the same purpose. Because of the impact of experience, the pit bull specifically bred for generations to be aggressive may not fight with dogs and the Labrador retriever bred to be a service dog may be aggressive toward people.”
According to this study, “Information on breed-specific aggressiveness derived from such sources may be misleading due to biases attributable to a disproportionate risk of injury associated with larger and/or more physically powerful breeds and the existence of breed stereotypes.
Source –> https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168159108001147
According to this study, there are preventable factors in dog bites, by which breed of dog is not relevant. “The study found that the major factors in the fatalities studied include: the absence of an able-bodied person to intervene (87.1%), incidental or no familiar relationship of victims with dogs (85.2%), owner failure to neuter dogs (84.4%), compromised ability of victims to interact appropriately with dogs (77.4%), dogs kept isolated from regular positive human interactions versus family dogs (76.2%), owners’ prior mismanagement of dogs (37.5%), and owners’ history of abuse or neglect of dogs (21.1%). Four or more of these factors were present in over 80% of the dog bite related deaths. Considering that over 75% of dog bite related deaths were caused by resident dogs (a dog not kept as a family pet, but isolated from positive human interactions and usually kept for protection and/or chained outside), reducing this practice is a huge factor in preventing dog bites, as is neutering male dogs.”
Source –> http://stubbydog.org/2013/12/new-study-confirms-preventable-factors-in-dog-bites-breed-not-relevant
Hat tip. Jack D…
The most recent study of the epidemiology of fatal dog bites in the United States was published in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association in 2013. While earlier studies were based on television and newspaper reports, this was the first study to be based on law-enforcement reports, animal control reports, and investigator statements. It identified preventable factors in the fatal incidents. They found that the most common contributing factors were: absence of an able-bodied person to intervene, no familiar relationship of victims with dogs, owner failure to neuter dogs, compromised ability of victims to interact appropriately with dogs (e.g. mental disabilities), dogs kept isolated from regular positive human interactions versus family dogs (e.g. dogs kept chained in backyards), owners’ prior mismanagement of dogs, and owners’ history of abuse or neglect of dogs.
Furthermore, they found that in 80% of the incidents, 4 or more of the above factors co-occurred. The authors found that in a significant number of DBRFs there was either a conflict between different media sources reporting breed and/or a conflict between media and animal control reports relative to the reporting of breed. For 401 dogs described in various media accounts of DBRFs, media sources reported conflicting breed attributions for 124 of the dogs (30.9%); and where there were media reports and an animal control report (346 dogs), there were conflicting breed attributions for 139 dogs (40.2%).
Seems plausible, but not wholly satisfactory. Hawaii and Vermont are gray while Utah and Alaska are youthful. Arizona and West Virginia are not more obese than, Louisiana or South Carolina. Some public policy issues seem to have mattered. Even income differences cannot explain the extraordinary difference in death rate (25% richer leads to 400% better outcome?)
I bet $48,939 goes a lot further in Salt Lake City than those higher figures do in Juneau or Honolulu.
In other breed does not exist news, four men of indeterminate breed (and perhaps indeterminate gender) have all been charged with drugging and sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl (also of indeterminate breed and gender). The names, however, all sound suspiciously vibrant:
Per capita income is not the same as average salary. Larger family size means lower per capita income even when salaries are the same (or even larger).
Utah has one of the lowest COVID death rates but also one of the highest COVID case rates. That is probably due to more young people getting it (it’s harder to prevent the spread in homes with 5-6 people) but not dying due to their better health, some just incidental (younger ages) and some due to better health habits (lower rates of obesity, smoking, diabetes, etc.)
For information about pit bulls go to DogsBite.org
My Springers run 20 miles a day in snow along side me on my sled six months a year they get Putin a pro plan which is what all reputable sporting dog breeders feed best you can buy. Last month it jumped $10 a bag to $52 for 50# bag. He also gets a lot of my food a lot I’m spoiling this one. You need to shop elsewhere. I agree dogs need good food and are wolves but if you’ve raised dogs in the country you’ll notice they’re not pure carnivores they eat all sorts of shit literally moose shit pig shit horse shit but aLso grass pine cones and of course if they come on a wolf kill they’ll steal some carion usually bones
Am I missing something or is this statement tautological for a gaussian distribution? 68% within 1 SD and 95% within 2SD is…normal.
Source of info?
I grew up in the UK and I have only ever knew the dogs as Alsatians, never as Alsatian shepherds.
These people collect a lot of pit bull statistics.
https://www.animals24-7.org/2017/08/08/pit-stop-archive/
https://www.animals24-7.org/2015/12/23/pit-bull-statistics/
They reckon that the situation is markedly worse than Steve’s 10%-does-66%, but part of that is because they use a figure lower than 10% for the US’s pit bull portion. Is the genetic sample in the WaPo‘s research paper representative? I dunno. And in any case, the bites attributed to pits aren’t by DNA sample, but by appearance, which means a lower number of attributions.
The animals24-7.org people reckon that America’s pit bull obsession really only took off, ironically, after Michael Vick’s arrest 15 years ago. If I understand their argument, the publicity to dispose of Vick & co’s many pit bulls led to an outpouring of public sympathy for the poor beasts, which hasn’t really abated. The result has been a canine foreshadowing of the Racial Reckoning: more pit bulls where they shouldn’t be, more deaths, more disfigurements (human and animal). Thousands more.
https://www.animals24-7.org/2022/01/09/will-there-be-a-tomb-of-the-unknown-pit-bull-victim-body-count-2021/
Weird how pit bulls so disproportionately attack in “the absence of an able-bodied person to intervene” or “no familiar relationship of victims with dogs”, etc.
I suppose one could try to keep all those amorphous statistics in mind as one goes about daily life (“Wait, no able-bodied intervenors around? 87.1% deadly! Dogs I don’t know? 85.2% deadly!”), or one could just discriminate against the dog breed, and its owners, that keep on turning up in fatal encounters: better results, and actually practicable.
I agree. The example I use is the Reverend Russell, Jack to his friends, Who purchased what was to become the Ur Terrier of his breed in 1818(?). thirty odd years later the nasty pain the ass, yappy, sturdy, never say die Fox digger was a separate recognized stable true to type breed. If you can do that in 30 years what can be done in 40,000? (And that’s assuming a late Out of Africa)
The initial terrier, a bitch of course, was named Trump.
The reporting around the facts is is stupid, misleading spin. Kind of like the “nothing to see here” in “naked gun”.
9% is a big deal in social science, implying a correlation of .30. Its hard to find between group effects that strong in psychology much less social science. Its not all that different from the men women group differences on the big 5.
In my experience, moving from surveys to objective data often turns weak correlations into strong correlations. That human filter introduces a LOT of noise.
Its not that surveys are worthless, but take with some salt.
Besides genes, certain types of dogs generally have different types of owners. Most golden retrievers are owned by law abiding, loving white owners. Goldens are not at all popular among ghetto trash, but I wouldn’t trust a golden that had been raised by a Michael Vickesque person.
(The study excluded working dogs.)
So they excluded the dogs most likely to falsify their hypothesis. Ah, modern science.
Is that postman’s route in a high income or low income area? Urban or rural? Black or White population?
Make a note: Don’t date Wendy.
Here is a veterinarian’s opinion on pit bulls and breeds in general.
https://charles-danten.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-killer-dog-problem-how-globalists.html
Closing remarks:
Breeds do behave according to their genes, but if you mix them up in a dog park for example, they don’t mingle according to their breed because unlike humans they were not artificially selected to recognize their breed as one of their own. Pit bulls in a dog park, for example, will not mingle with pit bulls more than they will mingle with any other breed. In other words, they do not have a special attraction for dogs of their own breed. Dogs are breed-blind. Liberals like pro-pit-bull-advocate, Anne-Marie Goldwater, therefore wrongly assume that if dogs are breed-blind, humans are also race-blind. They forget that humans were naturally selected to recognize those of their breed or race. So if you mix a bunch of people from different races, in a jail or in a high school for instance, they will eventually mingle with those that are genetically similar to them (theory of genetic similarity by Philippe Ruston: people are naturally attracted by people who have similar genes). This is not at all the case for dogs or any other domestic animal of the same species. But wild animals will mingle according to their breed. There are hundred of breeds of ducks, they are all ducks first and foremost but they divide naturally into their respective breeds because of natural selection. The same for humans, unless they are forced to do otherwise by totalitarian types of ideologues like Trudeau and friends.
A firefighter from a certain southeastern Michigan community claimed to have a “arson dog”–one that could detect accellerants. This “firefighter” and his dog were instrumental in ruining many innocent peoples’ lives on his testimony alone.
Insurance companies LOVED this guy as he was able to get them out of paying (valid) claims. Innocent people were denied valid insurance claims and prosecuted for arson on the testimony of this “arson dog’s” handler.
Those who were “ruined” by this supposed arson dog’s “handler” had no recourse, because of “qualified immunity”. The firefighter (and fire department) could not be sued.
Finally one citizen who had been accused of arson fought back by suing to prove the “arson dog’s” ability. The dog was found to have NO special ability. The “arson dog” and his human master’s career was finally over. How many innocent people were wrongly convicted of arson and lost everything they owned??
The same applies to “drug dogs” that are merely reacting on “cues” from their human “handlers”, nothing more. More often than not, the dog is used to justify a patently illegal “search”, nothing more.
@stevesailer
That is the crux of the real and present danger of pitbulls: the threat display has been bred out of them (because it is suboptimal in dogfighting).
This is precisely why you hear so many true stories along the lines of:
“Muffy was the sweetest pittie and snuzzled us all the time, until she ripped our 5 year old to pieces. Out of the blue.”
Chows (also a dogfighting breed) are similar fwiw — a dog trainer I knew said he too had been bitten by a chow because like pits — they don’t overtly and clearly signal their irritation or fear with growling or barking that is easily understood — when chows and pits are irritated/scared/threatened, they take violent action.
His words were: unlike golden retrievers or vizslas or labs or most other breeds, chows and pits are very hard to “read”, even by skilled dog trainers bc their threat display is so subtle. It may be just a flutter of an eyelid that signifies that the pit is actually terrified.
Moreover, pits also attract the absolute worst and irresponsible owners. People who want pits are attracted to the visceral danger and to the effect of walking a pit down the street — where most people are instinctually uncomfortable facing a large, strong, incredibly athletic animal that poses a serious risk to life and limb.
At the same time, pit owners are walking, talking pitbull cliche propaganda machines.
“They’re nanny dogs.”
“It’s the owner, not the dog”
In reality, a pit is a grenade that may or may not go off unexpectedly at any time — and if a human is in the blast radius, woe unto them.
Lastly, being the owner of a “misunderstood” animal gets you brownie virtue signaling points — which is why hipster girls love them as do suburban lefty Beto moms of trans kids.
I knew a lefty lady who was half-terrified of her own pits. She would only walk them with her boyfriend and when they wrestled aggressively with one another, she would hide in her bedroom but she couldn’t bear to give up her fur babies and ceaseless selfies on Facebook. When she broke up with her boyfriend, she made him take the dogs as long as she was allowed to visit them.
Last thing, the trans kid + adopted pit is an unbeatable package for signaling your progressive bonafides on social media these days.
Pork tastes and smells like human flesh. Seriously.
I like ’em better seeing this.
But man, that’s some seriously rat infested ground. Don’t know what was going on there previously, but cropland should be nothing like that.
Yes, but only if the groups are broadly part of the same distribution, which seems to be the point the are making. But for that claim, one would also need to know how far the average for the breed was from the cohort mean and in what direction. “Within one SD” for the individuals could mask a large, significant difference in means if the individuals mainly clustered on one side of the mean.
Biden’s Major was sent back to Delaware, where he is still biting Secret Service agents from time to time and making them mad. “I don’t see why the taxpayers should have to foot the bill for my medical treatment, he should pay for it.” That was last summer.
It’s the usual–wealth, health, race, IQ, conscientiousness, knowledge. With age and obesity throwing in particularly with the Fauci. And then vaccination a kicker.
I have just wanted to add to your comment about the “moral panic” that WWI and post WWI anti-German propaganda had many manifestations including the silly ones like the denial that German shepherd was a German breed and thus it is was relabeled as Alsatian. Still German shepherds were in much better positions than dachshunds who people would not mind if they were exterminated.
It’s not word at all, especially when the dog is trained to act in a certain manner.
https://law.lclark.edu/live/files/32171-25-1-third-articlepdf
In the early 20th century, pit bulls were considered “prototypical American pets.” They appeared in recruiting posters for both World War I and World War II, nicknamed “America’s Dog.” The first dog to receive an army medal was a pit bull. Featured in The Little Ras- cals and Buster Brown ads—pit bulls, known as “nanny dogs” for their affectionate disposition and tolerance towards children—were part of Americana.
Though once a favorite family dog, the pit bull breed began to fall into disrepute beginning in the 1980s. A series of reports on rising crime rates surfaced during this period, connecting “attacks by ‘pit bulls’ to gang violence by urban youths.” By 1987, law enforcement announced that, “Street dope dealers and street gangs have gone to pit bulls.”
Pit bulls were swept up into the War on Drugs, with studies reporting that “in two out of three narcotics raids, pit bulls were used as the guard dogs.” Through this line of media narrative, pit bulls themselves became “carriers of the contagion of criminality.” “The American pit bull terrier has become a reflection of ourselves that no one cares very much to see,” one author wrote. These dogs came to represent a very different America from the one they portrayed decades earlier, splashed in red, white, and blue on draft recruiting posters.
Conflicting research exists with respect to whether pit bulls do, in fact, present a higher risk of injury to humans. Some studies suggest that they are responsible for a disproportionate number of fatal dog attacks. Other studies, however, find that pit bulls are no more dan- gerous than other breeds that are not included under such bans and, in fact, may be less dangerous. A 2013 American Veterinary Medical Association Study examining fatal attacks from the last decade found that a valid determination of breed was only possible in 17.6% of these cases, and found no increased risk from pit bulls.
However, DogsBite .org, a pro-BSL group, found that pit bulls were responsible for 65.6% of fatal attacks during a similar time period. One possible explanation for these significant discrepancies is the studies’ varying methodologies. Critics of BSL argue that increased safety concerns about pit bulls are largely the result of reporting bias: Some research has shown that animals that have bitten are more likely to be identified as pit bulls or pit bull mixes after the fact.
In addition, significantly more media attention is given to attacks involving dogs identified as pit bulls than to those involving other breeds. Pro-BSL studies, by and large, tend to rely on surveys of media reports to generate their estimates. Aside from statistics, a certain cultural mythology exists around pit bulls. Many believe that they are not only more vicious than other dogs, but more powerful and deadly. Part of this attribution is owed to their association with dogfighting. Such thinking is echoed in many of the court decisions regarding BSL.
Let’s do some NOTICING. The proprietor of the website, Colleen Lynn, herself was the victim of a dog bite by a pit bull. As a result, she has made it her mission in life to expose this breed, even advocating for a ban on this type of canine. The figures published by this site comes from a plethora of sources–media, hospital records, police reports.
The problem is that her site apparently groups different breeds, chiefly pit bulls, into one category, which would skew the data. It appears she personally defines the breed as consisting of “an American Pit Bull Terrier, American Staffordshire Terrier, Staffordshire Bull Terrier, or any dog displaying the majority of physical traits of any one of those breeds.”**
Thus, it would seem that the methodology is compromised, as she is falsely representing different breeds as one breed, so it is easy to show how it is disproportionately aggressive.
Moreover, when several dogs are involved in an attack, the incident is classified only in the pitbull category. In addition, she has routinely accused the American Kennel Club of trying to willfully rename breeds to hide what are really pit bulls. Furthermore, on her website, it makes the claim that “statistical data from DogsBite.org has been cited in multiple peer-reviewed medical journals”. When you click on the hyperlink (peer-reviewed medical journals), it takes you to one journal which discusses a trauma center’s experience with dog bites and makes no reference to her site.
**”This is problematic, since not only does the evidence suggest that pit bulls are not more aggressive toward people than other breeds, but few people even know what pit bulls are. American Staffordshire Terriers, Staffordshire Bull Terriers, American Pit Bull Terriers, and mixes of any of these breeds all can be called a pit bull, and even people who are familiar with pit bull breeds can have trouble identifying them. In several recent studies, workers at shelters misidentified dogs’ breeds 50 to 87 percent of the time. When DNA tests identified a dog’s dominant breed as Dalmatian, shelter workers called it a terrier. When the dog was mostly Alaskan malamute, they called it an Australian shepherd dog.”
Source –> https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/09/pit-bulls-are-chiller-than-chihuahuas/500558
Her site also relies heavily on the “research” of one Merritt Clifton. Interesting fellow, to say the least.
http://btoellner.typepad.com/kcdogblog/2011/09/merritt-clifton-when-the-numbers-just-dont-add-up.html
Generally true. What sticks out are the oddballs. Vermont between Hawaii and Utah? Should be near New Hampshire and Maine. Similarly, Arizona between Mississippi and Alabama? Much worse than California, Nevada and even New Mexico. I think the implication may be Vermont did some public policy better than neighbors and Arizona really screwed up bigly.
Why not? It’s calcium. The dogs love it.
I have observed that there is a rough correlation between the informality of a military uniform to actual battlefield success.
The Germans had snappier uniforms but were ultimately defeated by less sharp Russians and Americans and Brits. Japanese and Americans about the same.
Viet Cong barely had uniforms but won out over Americans. Ditto Taliban.
This isn’t a hard and fast rule, but a number of Third World military outfits have elaborate dress uniforms. Some are out of Victorian England. But few do much successful fighting other than coups.
The Redcoats were pretty snazzy, but the rough mix of Americans dressed however they could beat them.
Of course actual battle dress can differ from the more formal military dress.
And yes, the abundance of Fruit Salad is also a tell. Up until the Civil War the federal military had only one basic award, George Washington’s Purple Heart. As a consequence of the Civil War they began handing out the Congressional Medal of Honor. Quite a few of those in the later half of the 19th century.
The reason? It was the only other award they had other than the Purple Heart.
As Americans fought more wars, more grades of medals were created. The MoH is considered the highest one and not commonly given.
I think most of the Fruit Salad reflects units or areas of operation served in. Not actual war medals.
That Ike photo was great.
Sorry old chap but I’m pretty sure that the Germans were, and are, a more civilized people than the English.
And I thought that Putin’s most famous dog was the Akita bitch gifted to him by the Japanese. That dog really scared the crap out of old Angela though it did not give her the chomping she earned during her tenure.
I agree that many pit bulls are friendly and not dangerous. It’s that one in the yard with the rickety gate that has possibly been trained to attack other dogs that keeps me carrying a police baton, a small canister of Sabre OC spray, and, just for good measure, a 9mm pocket pistol. Thus I can walk my mutt around the block with some piece of mind. I find the problem to be owners who don’t have sufficient barriers to keep their dogs from roaming free more than the dogs themselves.
Another indicator of just what quality of people the Bidens are, no?
“RACISM is a social construct.”
I can’t believe I’ve only just thought of that phrase nor seen it written before.
What does this mean, exactly? These dogs are killing crippled and retarded kids, and it’s the children’s fault for not being able to interact “appropriately” with the dog? Does it mean they attack kids and old people who are not able to interact “appropriately” with the dog by running away really fast? Does it mean they attack crack dealers’ customers who are not able to act appropriately by not smoking crack?
As much as I would like to see nice neighborhoods and towns ban pit bulls, I think a universal ban would be a bad idea. Pit bull-type dogs signal menace to people whom the menacing people who own the dogs want to frighten. But the problem ultimately is not the dogs. The ultimate problem is that we share a polity with “people” who breed dogs to hurt and kill other dogs and people alike. It might take a while, but Darwin says pretty much any dog breed could be bred to be big, mean, and dangerous. It’s not like there would be a single ghetto breeding program. Various dumbs and evils across the country would breed horrid dogs out of a dozen or more breeds. Then, you would not able to “profile” dogs nearly as easily as we can today.
The solution, as AnotherDad might tell you, is separate countries.
This is all so true.
We live near an urban dog park, and so are there a lot with our dog. There’s a very nice (unmarried, late 30s, professional and pretty normal-seeming) woman who has a pit bull. She’s exactly the demographic you are describing. She cannot handle the dog. She has a shock collar on it and tries pretty diligently to train it, but I once saw her in tears just outside the dog park saying to her (husky-owning) friend “I turn the thing up to 100, and I still can’t get him to behave.”
This is a pretty small thing in the world, but it’s such a perfect example of people acting ideologically / emotionally because the world keeps incentivizing virtue signaling, and then paying the price. It’s like, lady get a lab or something.
Thanks — really informative, for someone who has spent a lot fo time around dogs, but generally given pits a very wide berth.
Don’t have stats handy, but Vermont’s population is very spread out, even more so than their coastline-clustering neighbors, NH & ME.
Might be that Arizona is taking the hit for that Indian reservation that got decimated early in the pandemic.
Pics! Pics! Pics!
(Or did you already post some and I missed it?)
Growing up, we had a bitch that would hump your leg. And if we were wrestling on the ground, she’d join in the fun by humping whoever was winning.
Okay, take your pick: it’s either the breed or the owners. Either way, you lose.
As other commenters have pointed out, an entire breed can be established in just three decades. Likewise a breed can be ruined in the same period. Three times that period has elapsed since the putative halcyon days of the American Staffordshire Terrier, and the ghetto pit pup breeders have indeed been furiously working their black magic on the breed during that time.
For you second, third and fourth major paragraphs: citation needed, as the wikifags say.
For your fourth, fifth and sixth major paragraphs, you complain that you don’t like how others have identified biters’ breeds, but you never say what the correct identification should be. Somebody is biting all those thousands of people and pets. If it’s not the pit bulls everybody else is seeing, who is it? Call us back when you and OJ find the “real killers”.
EightSevenEight, and you know this how?
AD, when I was a kid I loved going to our friend’s working farm where I could spend all day driving a tractor. I only remember seeing one rat and a few rabbits that I ran over with the disc harrow. What type of soil harbors that many rats?
White. Middle class. Some migrants from Italy and Turkey – Hockenheim (20 000 inhabitants), where the F-1 race track is situated in Badenia/ southern Germany. Near Heidelberg.
Yes, going back a week or two.
In 2007, Andrew Keen’s book The Cult of the Amateur: How Blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the Rest of Today’s User-Generated Media are Destroying Our Economy, Our Culture, and Our Values (title of the 2nd ed) came out.
Keen argued that the Web was destroying the idea of expertise. I doubt he would have foreseen the suicide of the expert, in which the pervasiveness of frauds claiming to be “experts” would lead to the moniker becoming an unwitting punch-line to much of the public.
Isn’t it ironic?
His thesis is one of pseudo-expertise, because it confounds two spheres: That of publicity with that of reason/ argument. The social laboratory Switzerland proves since ages, that a high number of participants in pubic discourse and (public decision making even – via direct democracy) resultes in a quite reasonable public debate. Notwithstanding that these public dicourses take (in part) place amongst people with four different languages.
Y, If you are still there, the theory is that cooked bones splinter and can damage / perforate you canine pal’s digestive tract. The ur canine, the wolf, did not eat cooked bones…….but then again maybe his Cro Magnon hunting partners around the campfire tossed him cooked bones.
Breeds among dogs DO exist, as some dogs are excellent hunters, others protect flocks, and others yet are useful in many other occupations that serve humanity.
The attempt to deny breed specialization is being done to defuse the idea of human specialization and attempting to hold on to the increasingly defunct premise that “there is no such thing as “race”–only the “human race” and that we (humans) are all alike–another falsehood. It is clear that race specialization is a normal part of the human condition, no matter how many “anti-racist” try to discount this fact.
Hunter Biden looks more like a Pitbull owner.
• Congratulations: Adam Smith
☮
They were all factors to different extents, Roger (most particularly the lack of good Hollywood role models since the time of Lassie and Snoopy), but the housing policy has been the worst. There was the leash-lining for one thing, then the blockbusting of dog houses at the kennels… don’t even mention the Rufus Crow Laws.
The splinters are dangerous and because they’re indigestible the dog just vomits them up. I found this out the hard way with some pork chop bones. Vomit on the carpet but luckily no injury to the dog.
Or, more and more, a turnip.
“Okay, take your pick: it’s either the breed or the owners. Either way, you lose.“
According to Who/Whom?
“and the ghetto pit pup breeders have indeed been furiously working their black magic on the breed during that time.“
Right, nurture at work.
“For you second, third and fourth major paragraphs: citation needed, as the wikifags say. For your fourth, fifth and sixth major paragraphs…”
Those paragraphs come directly from the source I cited, which is fully sourced.
It’s shocking how many rats are in that field. I’ve never seen anything like that. At the rate they’re going, a few square yards per minute, the density must be enormous. Presumably the rats were feeding on a root crop or something, but I don’t see any evidence of tuber tops or other food sources in the video.
Imagine having to turn over all your acres of soil by hand with a pack of terriers watching just to get rid of the vermin. Hard to raise any profitable crop in those circumstances.
Maybe it’s a British thing?
Is breeding nurture or nature? Either way, you’re racist.
No one is going to read that 74-page small text academic fantasy to find the “source” of your facially irrelevant quotes. If you can’t make the argument cogently in the comment box, you don’t have one.
Maybe Ann Linder can help you and OJ find the “real killers”.
Imagine having to turn over all your acres of soil by hand with a pack of terriers watching just to get rid of the vermin. Hard to raise any profitable crop in those circumstances.
Maybe it’s a British thing?
That is what I was going say.
I live near farmland and while the nearby county has a rat terrier service I have only seen them once. I’ve never heard of anyone nearby having a rat problem. Almost all the traps at the farm store are for mice.
It seems that the British have this problem of thousands of rats. I assume the problem is a lack of predators.
It seems that the British can also be squeamish about killing vermin. They actually have people that get upset over killing grey squirrels even though they are invasive and kill native bird species. The British also banned glue traps on account of being cruel.
You can have endless vermin problems if the neighbor isn’t doing anything about it. Some people in the US have the same attitude. They actually shrug if a mouse is in the house. I saw this in the South with cockroaches. Some people think that it is just part of living down there. Disgusting. They are actually quite easy to kill with modern pesticides.
Now that you mention it, I have heard there is similar problem in Australia, and probably for the same reason: they got rid of the predators to make the country safe for sheep, and now rats overrun everything.
A girl who went camping down there told me that you can’t sleep on the ground because the rats will go into your sleeping bag. Everyone had to bring a hammock and find a pair of trees each night.
OT. As a new Border Collie owner I came across an interesting explanation of these working dogs.
All dogs are predators and have an inborn means of survival: the following sequence of behaviors
ORIENT > EYE > STALK > CHASE > GRAB-BITE > KILL-BITE > DISSECT > CONSUME
In the Border Collie, breeders and trainers select and train dogs for first three and try to quash the rest – they truncate the natural behavior chain to turn the dog into a useful tool:
ORIENT > EYE > STALK
Stalking sheep makes the sheep walk away from the dog. It allows the dog to drive sheep. Much of the early training of a sheep dog is an attempt to quash the chase and of course the grab-bite. When the dog chases and dives into the sheep you yell at it, or shake your stick at it.
When you compete in a sheep herding contest the judge takes off points if the dog chases. If he bites the hind leg of a sheep you are pretty much finished and may have to pay a veterinary bill to the farm owner.
The source directly counters your narrative. Rather than offer a cogent rebuttal, you engage in female solipsism. You’re lucky to be playing in this sandbox. Mind your tome.
Your source says the same circular sophistry as you, only with more words.
The Corvinus dilemma:
There isn’t any dilemma. There are owners of pit bulls who happen to be black who, just like white and Latino owners, train them in such a manner as to be vicious.
Besides….
https://www.npr.org/2016/05/10/477350069/friend-or-fiend-pit-bull-explores-the-history-of-americas-most-feared-dog
BRONWEN DICKEY: Right. And that’s the biggest misconception is that the term pit bull refers to one distinct breed when really it refers to at least four pedigreed breeds of dogs and then all these other dogs that get lumped into the category. So you have the American pit bull terrier. You have the American Staffordshire terrier, the Staffordshire bull terrier, and a newer breed called the American bully.
But increasingly because those dogs are kind of generic looking and they share these characteristics with at least 25 other breeds of dogs, such as smooth coats or blocky heads, then anything becomes a pit bull. And so the category just grows and grows and grows. And when people ask, well, why are there so many pit bulls in the news? It’s because at this point almost anything is considered a pit bull.
….
DICKEY: Right. Well, there’s always been a kind of subset of people who didn’t like the dogs because of what they represented. And it is again – it is true that they did originate as fighting dogs. But throughout the 19th century, there were increasingly bred as pets and kept as pets by people all over the social spectrum but predominantly people in the working class.
And so the dog with the patch over his eye became kind of this branding symbol of pure tenacity and American fortitude and individualism. And then in the 1950s, there was more of a push for more genteel pedigree dogs – dogs like Labrador retrievers and golden retrievers and Irish setters that were more associated with kind of the genteel lifestyle that went more with what American families in the 1950s were trying to cultivate.
And then you had the ’60s and ’70s, there was a time of much more social upheaval. And there was a very well-intentioned move made by the humane movement to eradicate what was left of professional dogfighting because it was growing so brutal and sadistic. And because they operated in different states, they were very hard to catch.
So in order to make that crime a felony, the humane movement enlisted the help of the media. And there was this kind of media blitz to bring dogfighting to the forefront of the American mind and make people care. But it turned into kind of a speculative free-for-all, and the dogs really got caught in that.
And so once people started reading stories about these dogs called pit bulls that had these supposedly horrific characteristics, all the people who were already selecting dangerous dogs then just basically switched which dog they wanted.
GROSS: So you think the pit bulls were demonized instead of the people who were training them and fighting them?
DICKEY: Yes. Yes. They were almost presented as though they were kind of willing participants in their own torture, which was terribly sad and wrong-minded.
Well I’ve done a fair bit of camping in Australia and never had or heard of such a problem .
Mind you there are sometimes very localised mouse plagues in limited areas – I’ll be kind and say this is perhaps what your friend is referring to
To be fair this was three decades ago, and she said it was a particular part of Australia that sounded more like jungle than outback, but I forgot the name.
Wasn’t there a rabbit epidemic in Australia in the 20th century? It does seem like predator elimination generally leads to some kind of rodent epidemic.
more so
less so
yep.
Zzzzz, another ten-paragraph appeal to authority, in this case the “authority” of … NPR! Lol.
P.S. Is there any more parodically NPRish phrase than “wrong-minded”?
C’mon Corv, you can do better. I believe in you!
Not an appeal to authority, but a cogent argument that you entirely dismiss because doesn’t fit your world view and you lack the intellectual chops to address specifically it.
Lol, you’d rather use cartoons to as your appeal to authority. Suits your emotional style.
Okay, if you have a cogent argument, state it in fewer than thousands of words. Your own words.
Typical girl response. It makes no difference if it is my words or the sentiments of someone else. The reasoned argument that was laid out remains the same. Either offer a detailed counter position to what was stated or move on.
It seems like they always having a problem with an invasive species. Their continent evolved into a much more passive eco system.
They actually have a bounty on feral cats. People hunt them for sport.
Ah, so we’ve learned that you’re sexist as well as racist.
You’ve made no reasoned argument, so there is nothing to respond to in verbose sophistry.
Here’s my argument:
Lethal dogs are disproportionately pitbulls.
Lethal dog owners are disproportionately black.
Eleven words. Buttressed by facts. If you have a response, print it. I will even read ten times as much verbiage from you as I used. That’s more than fair.
If you’re response is just a bunch of circular blather about how “pitbulls don’t really exist, man, I mean, what really is a pitbull?”, then forget it, bzzzzt, fail, bye…
They used to have dingoes. What happened to those?
“Ah, so we’ve learned that you’re sexist as well as racist.”
There’s no such thing in your Alt Right world.
“Here’s my argument“
Which has been challenged by the sources I provided, and that you summarily dismissed because it doesn’t fit your world view. I get it. You’re kind is governed by emotion, not reason.
As before, you made no argument.
Bzzzzt, fail, bye.
Of course an argument was made and you simply don’t want to hear it. Your solipsism is getting the better of you.
What do they have to feed those enormous Tibetan Mastiffs? Live zebras?
Good grief, everyone believes they’re a psychiatrist these days.
Spontaneous, casually-taken photos often can be indicatively revealing of a person but, that one was taken by a professional (the lighting gives it away).
Which means the photog chose the dark backdrop and given the photo was going to be used for professional employment purposes a smile may not have been desired by her or her employer.
Actually, it’s more like Peter just chose the one he wanted to post. Try this for a wider range of armchair psychoanalysis, if you must. https://tinyurl.com/3x6nyacc
(FYI, some of those labeled as her, aren’t her. Image search engines are flawed.)
The problem may be statisticians.
Or maybe have us pay for it?
They could have chowed down on a serf or two.
The piece of dung by wapo whomever and the cons jabbering nonsense on their supposed ‘studeez’, remember you can skew any ‘study’. Anyone who’s owned many different breeds will tell you there are differences by breed. I grew up with a parent who raised different breeds, a pro handler, trainer. That’s fine they ‘found’ pits aren’t necessarily disposed to aggression, but the overall claim there isn’t much difference between breeds is nonsense. Further to some extent an owner’s behavior will obviously affect a dog, therefore if they are filling out surveys they’re not accounting their own inputs, personality type, as measure of behavior type. Behavior isn’t limited only to what barking or type of barking but is more core of tendency to nervousness energy, such as compare a jack russel terrior to a golden retriever. Or working dog or schnauzer or large schnauzer to a lay-about golden.
Any time you hear ‘researchers say’ –assume distraction or propaganda or both. The larger dog shows are often cons for directing ignorance, such as picking a golden retriever or some other lay-about as ‘winner’ then ‘famleez’ buy that instead of get something with some instinct or working dog such as a dobie, or you wouldn’t guess but standard poodle can be a good dog –if you don’t trim them to look as if they have balloons strapped on them. Stupid. Just do an even trim puppy cut. Point is working dog of some type.
The big hairy slackers also a dumb pick such as the ones in photos, the white and the orange one also. They are not the older origins of the dogs at all, the breeding has been directed over time, true of most the last two hundred years. Large lay-about hairy dogs, shorter lived, not a good influence for pushing our energy outward. It’s femy, self-absorbed, juvenile energy.
My perspective is people need to think about what influences them in or out of a reality where you have to fight for the future. Sick of morons. Also sick of guys with purse dogs. Stop. Just stop.
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What . . . no way . . .
environment, experiences: like training, treatment in said environment(s) out weighs genes . . .
what a novel notion
Exactly my reaction also. This idea that dog breeds are not really different is just another war-by-proxy against “racism”. Nowadays “science” has become full fledged politics, comparable to Lysenkoism in Stalinist Russia. We can expect only lies from academia, or should I type (((academia)))?
Not a “threat display”, it’s a fear display. Breeders of fighting dogs saw visible shows of threat as fear and lack of desire to fight and bred against it. Talking to people about fighting dogs who have no knowledge of them is like talking to a faggot about pussy. “He” might understand it on one level, but it will be a wasted conversation. Not all pits are fighting dogs, and not all fighting dogs are pits. Fighting pits were not bred for confirmation, but for gameness, an elusive trait, one that is mistaken as aggression. Many game dogs were very easy going. Most of you would not understand this as you live lives of fear, as displayed during this Covid bullshit.
This comment is symptomatic of sick US of A.
… knowing that you could blow any atracker’s brains out and, in a sense, give him a piece of his mind.
Agreed. I was career military until I got injured but by the time I got out I had a fruit salad and I am anything but a hero. I could be called the king of the smoke pit, I could have been called a “made man” in the NCO Mafia, and it could take me hours just to find a pen (I never ended up finding one) , but a hero hell no. It is all luck of the draw I think. I had a roommate who worked in admin that would do the paperwork for a Navy Achivement Medal for example and my LCDR signed off on it after looking at it for all of 4 seconds and that’s it. Most of my ribbons are for deployments, and Achivement Commendation medals. Some commands hate giving medals to junior enlisted but some are the opposite and thinks it is a motivater. No matter they are concerned about their officers first and foremost. Still to this day I have never bought %80 of my medals and ribbons. I just have the top 3 and wore those because it was what was required.
I actually did do a little bit of work to get my Warfare Badges and I am proud of those. When I was serving back when things were normal and you couldn’t be a out and proud fruit I wore my office uniform every day and it did not require ribbons and wore my dress uniform maybe once a year for a couple hours.
The sad truth is that the US military has become a total joke and a sad one at that. During my entire time in the military I only met one actual hero at a Marine Corps Ball a guy who earned the MOH in Vietnam and watched as he was treated like a precious metal. He was revered and I think he should have been, but most other medals and ribbons don’t have much meaning behind them including every one of mine.
I was given a medal for “not having an alcohol related incident” so trust me medals and ribbons are mostly a bad joke, except for that MOH.
I asked several pet groomers what they think about the article, after sharing it on a grooming site. While groomers are not statistians or researchers, they get daily exposure to all sorts of dogs. Some groomers work for 40 years, as they tend to love their jobs. They see a lot of dogs!
Each groomer flatly disagreed with the idea that breed doesn’t have a big influence on behavior.
My suggestion for leftists, pro gay, pro Ukraine, and covidiots is to go to your local pound and grab up the first pit bull you can find and rescue him. It even gives you a chance to virtue signal which we know those kind love. I suggest you get that pit bull even if you toddlers because to not do so would make you a racist and you would never want to be an awful racist like me would you?
(When I read online that the leftist family got mauled and faces were ripped off I will have a hearty chuckle and remain smug with satisfaction the entire day) (Oh wait I was just supposed to think that not type it).
I am sure that once the leftist covidiot dies of 52 bites he can be added to the covid death toll and their family can talk about how good those vaccines work.
(For the record I am a huge dog lover and have 3 dogs which I treat like spoiled kids. So I am the complete opposite of a dog hater, but I would NEVER own a pit bull.)
Almost all people and dogs are nice in a low stress and high resources environment, so thats never that important. What behavioral cues does it exhibit when it a high stress low resources environment suddenly appears? These paper researches are full of shit, so sheltered and arrogant with their excell sheet reality. Did they try to release a rat with different dog breeds? Threaten them with violence? Made loud noises? Made them hungry? Let small kids with them? Grab and play with the person they guard? Made their owners submissive? Entered their territory?
But instead, are they nice when they are fat, food satiated laying on a soft couch in the evening, fabricating reality.. same counts for humans. Only with humans maintaining a society as a breed would be an extra most important factor.
Dogs definitely are not aware of size. One of my female dachshunds charged at female German shepherd mix just the other day.
Add to that list researchers, journalists and WAPO editors.
My suggestion is they take their Mothers, Sisters, Daughters and Wives and go for a Sunday afternoon stroll in the Ghetto. Grab the first Dindu and rescue him. Take him home.
That would prove beyond doubt that breed does not matter.
Andrew Anglin once wrote an article stating that pit bulls should be exterminated and that there is no need for such a breed to exist. He commended people who went out and bought pit bulls just to put them down. Not one child or person is worth sacrificing because someone loves to breed or own pit bulls.
“He says he likes pitbulls, because most of them are so friendly!”
The operative word is ‘most’ but what happens if he runs into one that ain’t so friendly… I guess he would drop the mailsack and run for his life. Lol
Regardless of practical experience, everyone should know by now (or should) that the environment alone affects behavior, not genes.
When it comes to winning the Triple Crown, Shetland ponies and Thoroughbred are on an equal footing, as are Poodles and Greyhounds on catching rabbits.
Dog breeds are clustered into categories based upon the different JOBS they’ve been doing for humans for thousands of years. Only by narrowly construing “personality” could anyone conclude there aren’t vast differences between dog breeds. Herding behavior, in particular, can almost look like sorcery when you see a smart dog with a capable handler.
Anecdotally, I’ve had three German shepherd (dogs) in a row which somehow knew every time I began to put on my shoes. They all have come running from whatever part of the house to lick my face. Beagles and labs don’t care.
GSDs are easily potty trained and will make herculean efforts to not go in the house. A male beagle might come back from a walk, lift a leg, and pee on your drapes.
And so on…
Most terrorist attacks are caused by the U$A, their vassals and their proxies, especially economic terrorism.
The part about Pit Bulls tells me the study is all bull. Research done by a city near me when they were considering a law to ban pit bulls showed that most young Pit Bulls are friendly. The problems start as they put on a few years. Then they tend to become mean killers. They remain friendly and protective to their owners for the most part so these people try to keep reasonable people from passing laws to protect the innocent from Pit Bulls. A neighbor of mine had a Pit Bull. I almost shot him myself and got threatened by the owner. A few weeks later a deputy sheriff gave him a choice, either shoot his Pit Bull or pay for the damage to animals in our area caused by the dog and then go to jail. His owner shot him. I have no sympathy for Pit Bulls or their owners or poorly conducted studies.
Tellingly, some of the most strident deniers of significant inborn differences among dog breeds (in temperament and intelligence) simultaneously cling to the view that one human tribe is innately superior to the rest of humanity.
Weird skinner trannies
C’mon. Haven’t you heard of rinse and repeat?
So the data is a better representative of owner personality. Though I have heard that dogs and owners tend to to temperamentally resemble each other. So maybe it circuitously works.
Doesn’t cooked meat reduce the need for digestion, thereby increasing the nutritional yield? For example, 800 grams of cooked meat equals 1 kg of raw meat. Of course, you’d have to factor in cooking costs.
I think cooked bones are only hazardous to puppies and small dogs.
Science is truly broken today, especially the field of s0-called scientific studies that use no or incorrect statistical analysis.
And then on top of it we have TV programs that cute-wash pit bulls. PLEASE, don’t ever have a child around a pit bull.
U$A = Jewish Supremacy Inc.
Which, of course, has everything to do with breeding.
Hence their sensitivity to any discussion about stereotypes.
If breeds dont matter what is a Chinaman doing with THAT dog ?And why does my suspicious mind think he has a supply of chopsticks, a sack of rice , sweet and sour sauce and vegetables ready to be steamed discreetly out of sight.
I am asking again what is that man doing with such a large dog ? Is there such a thing as Chinese Thanksgiving ?
What you are also describing are Akitas.
https://www.akc.org/dog-breeds/akita/
Used to have several; they are quite unique, and one of the most loyal pets I ever had, and proof positive that OJ did it.
There simply should be a “driver’s license” for dogs too. And serious jail time for morons and criminals who don’t treat/train their dog properly. Or want to use it as a weapon/status symbol. My neighbour always told me: “Don’t shoot the dog, shoot its holder if the animal is out of control.”
I completely agree!!!
Doesn’t matter how much you pay for processed bags of dog food it’s still crap, and the dog will stink from eating it.
I prepare chicken/pork, rice, carrot, eggs, and my dog shits rose petals.
Fortunately not, they don’t celebrate hypocrisy.
Who were the ones who destroyed the native American tribe that saved their asses that first winter, and relegated the rest to living in “reservations”?
Chinese Thanksgiving
Fortunately not, they don’t celebrate hypocrisy.
Who were the ones who destroyed the native American tribe that saved their asses that first winter, and relegated the rest to living in “reservations”?
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The slippery Dinks do celebrate hypocrisy ! The ones who destroyed the native American tribe that saved their asses that first winter, and relegated the rest to living in “reservations” built this country up in just over 250 years ! China had 5000 years and is still a shit hole.
The Slopes, DInks, Chinks and other slimy Asians moved to said country and are now living on stolen land, stolen from the Natives LOL. Your sub-human slanty eyes are in possession of stolen property. They should return it to the Tribes. Perhaps you could persuade all those Chinky people who own property in Chinatown to return the stolen goods to those reservation Indians. Let me know how that goes.
By the way, why do you have a white handle ? LittleRedDot ? Are you ashamed of your heritage LMAO.
Good catch. Thanks. Probably autocorrect but I’ll take the hit. But really it’s mainly for the unknown dogs. I never feel threatened by another human in my neighborhood.
One day when I was hunting, I met another hunter, a man, with a big hunting male dog. As soon as he saw me, the dog jumped on me; standing on his hind legs, he was taller than me! He put his front paws on my shoulders and copiously licked my face, all joyful. His master exclaimed, “Ah women! Ah women! He can’t resist! “. I was with several other male hunters but this dog was only interested in me.
Another time, I met a big German shepherd in a forest: he did exactly the same thing!
Yes ! Dogs make the difference between men and women!
The author of this pseudo-study of the WP has certainly never had a dog in her life and may not even have been around one.
👍
This shows you know nothing of history.
From year 1 to year 1850, the two biggest economies of the world were always China and what would later be called India. What you have observed in the last 150 years is an anomaly. And in your uneducated mind, you think that it has always been that way.
Anyways things have already changed. Buy a ticket and visit China, if you dare to have your mind blown.
Built on loot of stolen land and slavery.
You brash boastful nouveau riche attitudes won’t last very long. Your empire is crumbling before your very eyes.
Maybe then Russia and China will return your land to their rightful owners…the Red Man.
Its a deal!
Everybody move back to the lands of their origins.
Chinkies to China
Blacks to Africa
Whites to Europe!
Lets do it now!
LittleRedDot is white?
I am forced to write in your language, because your mind is unable to handle a second language. Just like an adult talks to a toddler in baby talk.
I’ve read and seen too many Pitts in pounds, loose in yards, and the HORROR STORIES OF FACIAL Mauling, EATING OF BABIES, and other such horrors, articles like this are USELESS.
Every last Pit Bull should be genocided, and the entire breed wiped off the face of the planet.
Why didn’t he use the example of Cassius Clay? He obviously had some sub-Saharan African in his ancestry. There’s no way he was all European. [email protected]