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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8498 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 24, 2026

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The problem with those statistics is they're compiled by accepting the identification made by people, like police officers and news reporters, who don't have any expertise in dog breeds. For most non-experts, any big dog that's not obviously a shepherd or rottweiler gets labelled "pit bull". Then a category that actually consists of a dozen breeds—plus mixes—gets compared with attacks made by single breeds. Of course they're going to have larger totals.

From: In Defense Of the Pit Bull (Salon; Feb. 5, 2013)

Karen Delise studied every fatal dog bite reported in the years between 2002-2005, and found that “eleven dogs involved in fatal attacks with no Pitbull characteristics were counted as Pitbulls, while their ‘true’ breeds were not reported, and three dogs that were clearly not Rottweilers were identified as Rottweilers.” That was among a total of 47 fatal attacks (by all breeds) reported during that period.

AFAIK pit bull data is based off of lots of different sources which mutually add up. Many of these sources, like animal shelter personnel or police officers, can be taken as better at identifying dog breeds than average. Even pit bull breeders seem to recommend that it isn’t for first time dog owners.

That doesn’t mean every pit bull everywhere is A Problem, because as you point out it’s a varied group. But it does gesture to an issue with the group as a whole.

Unfortunately, as far as I can see these activists are the ones actually doing the thing they claim the police is doing. There certainly will be always be a small number of misreports, especially due to unfamiliarity, but it's in practice quite easy even for a non-expert to recognize pit bulls. As breeds go, they have very obvious features, you really don't need to be an expert. Obligatory Cremieux post.

On the other hand, activists consciously and deliberately mislabel closely related breeds, strays and other mixes to "protect" pit bulls. I've seen more than a few articles where everyone is totally surprised by an attack coming out of nowhere from a "loving family dog", and if there is an image, every single fucking time it's an obvious pit bull mix.

There is an old joke in anti-cop circles that certain words have an unusual technical meaning in police reports. On the list is "Pitbull": a small pale-coloured dog that barked at a cop and "Rottweiler": a large dark-coloured dog that barked at a cop.

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