Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
What kinds of pets do you all have? And why are dogs the best?
I really like @bonsaii's comment below for a mixture of reasons.
Story time...
Several years ago (COVID, lol) I fled from a leafy suburb that had lost its damn mind. Previously, it was purple in the neo-lib/neo-con sense; while people were accepting of the gays, abortion, and whatnot, they wanted low taxes and weren't quite alright with the heavy-handed presence of gov't. Of course, COVID removed all of that reticence. Paired with George Floyd's Amazing Awokening Medicine Show, 2020-21 had masked Karens roaming the streets with the other members of the religious police to ensure that all Red Hat wearers, be they MAGA voters or Catholic Cardinals, were appropriately verbally pummeled for their lack of conviction to the One True Faith.
Being fully and permanently remote work and financial quite mobile, I exited my lease and started a new one sight unseen in a small town in a deep red area of my state about 90 minutes away. The place I rented then was quite nice on its own. A solo developer had bought up a foreclosed house at a bargain price and so could put in real money for renovations and upgrades while keeping the rent roughly in an acceptable range for the area. To be sure, however, he was targeting re-locating out of towners like me and COVID turned into somewhat of a bonanza for him.
The neighborhood within which my new pad was located was .... "transitioning." Spoiler alert, it still hasn't finished.
More honestly and directly, the neighborhood was shitty although not exactly unsafe in terms of humans. It was mixed country black and redneck white with a literal dividing avenue. The residents were a mix of about three or four groups depending on how you count; elderly black and white folks who had been living in the town for 30+ years and never left. Some of them were now living in quite large and legitimately "historic" homes too big for their needs. Others had a rotating cast of grown children, grown grand-children, nieces, nehphews, and boyfriends and girlfriends rotating in and out. The second group was a corps of local rednecks who moved into the town from the county when the housing prices got attractive. This group was the most aesthetically blighted; yards (on less than 1 acre plots) full of BBQ grills, kids toys, kiddie pools and adult hottubs, abandoned outdoor projects, broken down motorcycles and cars. The final group was magical junkies. Roughly every fifth house was in a state of disrepair and inhabited by heavily tattooed and questionably skinny men and women below forty and of all races. Color my suspicious that they were related. My theory is that one "pilgrim" junkie would inherit a home from a relative, move into it after that relative died or was relocated to a senior living center, and then gradually invite their junkie friends to flop. These places had tin foil and garbage bags on the windows, broken roofs, security cameras (?!) and ..... dogs.
And so did the rednecks.
(A short but important tangent)
I grew up in a very safe suburb that had lots of dogs. But these were suburban dogs. Lots of golden retrievers and black labs. Every dog, even from the "mean" breeds (Dobermans, German Shepherds) had been picked up either from a breeder or that special kind of suburban shelter that only seems to have Sarah McLaughlin level pitiable dogs with the kindest of souls. No pitbulls. No problem dogs.
Therefore, my default approach to dogs has always been "Awesome! A Dog!"
In my new neighborhood, back in the turn of the decade, however, I quickly update my priors.
My nextdoor neighbor had a large Doberman he had named "Orion" because that's fucking cool, bro. The dog was constantly menacing anyone who got close to the yard. Which was everyone because, as I said, this was a clump of mostly .5 acre homes with small, fenced in yards. I never saw him leap over the fence, but I always assumed it was possible if he got riled up enough. The yard was full - full - of Orion's feces every day of the year. The owner simply didn't care to clean it up.
Down the street, at one of the junkie houses, was a pitbull mix of some sort. This was an evil dog. Though it was, thankfully, chained to a wall without exception, it still managed to kill several semi-stray cats in the neighborhood, another dog that had tempted fate by getting just a little too close, and mauled a pizza delivery man who got the address wrong and walked up to the front door without realizing the pitbull was under the porch.
Before any dog absolutists jump in with "those are both mean breads" the final example I'll use is one of a rather kind looking hound of some sort (he had the classic "baying" sound, which I still actually like). Although I never saw him actually harm another living thing, he was the worst harasser of the bunch. For some reason, he was permitted off leash constantly, albeit with a rather sadistic looking double shock collar on. He routinely pushed passers by into the street due to his aggressive stance and loud baying. It a lot of ways, he was scarier than the pitbull because of the incongruity of appearance to behavior. The pitbull was a very obvious murder machine. This hound looked like me might teach you life lessons, but then began schizophrenically wailing at you for no reason.
Challenges
The dog defenders out there will look at my little story and say "Well, obviously those owners are all incompetent. They are the problem, not the dogs!" And I do agree with this but only as far as it goes. I'm not holding dogs culpable in a legal or moral sense. I don't really think they have agency in the way we say humans have agency. I also know dog behavior can be shaped very well or very poorly early in the dogs life.
The problem is, past a certain point, I don't think the dogs can be "un-fucked-up." Sure, maybe with constant, daily interaction from hardcore dog re-trainers or something. But the overwhelming majority of fucked up dogs are simply timebombs. Eventually, they'll hurt someone or some other thing (cat, dog, squirrel, chicken etc.) And the correlation between people who have fucked up dogs and people who cannot be trusted to responsibility manage fucked up dogs is probably > 0.99. Thinking back to my own childhood in Suburbia, those families nearly universally prioritized safety and pleasantness and were highly conscientious of their neighbors. Therefore, any dog with even the hint of aggression wouldn't even be adopted, let alone tolerated.
But in the 'hood (such as it was) that pro-social consideration doesn't exist and so now you have these random violence machines in the hands of the careless, stupid, and self-absorbed.
Which has made me less sympathetic to dogs in general because I can't afford to be. I see them, sometimes, as uninsulated live wires. Yes, someone should be blamed for not doing their basic job with them long ago but, now, we have to turn off the power, remove the damaged section, and replace it with what is intrinsically far safer.
Implications
Some of these come dangerously close to violating a lot of my small c-conservative "the government should not do stuff" principles. But the common good interest of public safety, imho, totally and obviously outweighs it. Bad Dogs are like grenades with pulled pins and delayed fuses rolling around the street. After a bad mauling or bite, saying "this was an unavoidable tragedy!" is an epistemically bankrupt thing to say.
I think your proposals are reasonable except for this one. Pit bulls are fine in and of themselves. I've known more than one very chill, very friendly pit bull in my day who was that way because the owner cared and put in the work to teach the dog as a puppy. While it's certainly true that irresponsible dog owners disproportionately choose pit bulls, a bad owner can ruin any breed (as you yourself pointed out). The problem is not the breed, it is the owner, and I don't support outlawing something which responsible people handle perfectly fine just because a minority of people are irresponsible jerks.
A better proposal imo would be to strike this one altogether and let the revocation of someone's dog license do the work. If some underclass guy gets a pit because he wants to have a "tough" dog and he fucks it up, well, he won't have any dog any more. Sucks to suck.
'Pit bull' isn't a thing. Purebred American Pit Bull Terriers are mostly fine around humans, but there's plenty of mixes involving fighting breeds or whatever that are also called pit bulls. If you want a pit, get it from a reputable breeder. Most 'pit bulls' in America are mixes whose ancestry isn't well enough known to say if they tend towards aggressive or not.
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