Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Two new cases of 4 year olds killed by pits this past weekend Florida and Delaware

You can't fix stupid.

The keeping of wild dangerous animals has always been a special case in tort law, i.e., strict liability if anyone is injured or killed, i.e., no excuses like "I took reasonable precautions, but by some freak unavoidable occurrence the animal escaped." Reasonableness has never covered you with regard to the keeping of wild dangerous animals.

That's liberty, but which demands 100% personal responsibility. Dogs are domesticated animals, but the law traditionally dealt with dogs the same way if the owner had notice that his particular dog (breed didn't matter) was a danger to innocent folks, i.e., had already bitten someone without justification. That's also perfectly consistent with liberty combined with personal responsibility. That's been the law forever, and is the sort of law consistent with liberty. The kind you advocate are not.

Bull's eye number three. No pun intended.

I can't abide free-roaming dogs of any breed. I understand that sometimes they escape briefly, but habitual free-roamers don't get a pass from me. Have seen too many destructive events from loose dogs of various breeds. And the owners are just like those parents of kids who kill...."It couldn't be him - he would never hurt a soul...". You hear this line from owners of other-than-pits every time, sometimes before and sometimes after the damage is done.

Reasonable laws just don't resonate with fear-mongers.

Or pit owners.

Or gun owners?

A lot of folks think semi-auto bans are reasonable. Their argument sounds about like the anti-pit argument, and has about the same kind of science behind it.

It's not reasonable to just hold people accountable for their actions or the dangers they create?

Between 1966 and 1980, 74 Americans were killed by dogs (not counting those killed by guard or police dogs in the course of their intended duty). Of all those deaths, some of the dogs involved were eight Saint Bernards, six English Bull Terriers, six Great Danes, two Boxers, and one Rottweiler. In that entire span of time, not one case was recorded of a single Pitbull killing anyone in the United States.

- University of Texas Southwestern Medical School Study

It's not the Pitbull breed that's the problem. There were plenty of Pitbulls in the US prior to 1980, but you never heard of any of them killing anyone (If you thought about Pitbulls at all, it was about Petey from The Little Rascals). Instead, such horror stories were about those other breeds killing people. Remember Cujo? Remember The Omen? What changed?

What changed was that at some point after that date Pitbulls became wildly popular among the black "gangsta" underclass. These people didn't raise their Pitbulls like folks did before that date. To them, the owner of the meanest Pitbull in the neighborhood had the highest status. They developed techniques for "making their dogs people-mean," involving chaining the dog and having strangers come over periodically to torment them with brooms and sticks to the point that they would snarl and go crazy whenever anyone approached them. That's the norm in these communities. When these dogs, so conditioned, get loose, the first thing they often do is attack someone, either a family member or a stranger. No way the owners then tell the police that the dog was so conditioned, either.

If Boxers were wildly popular in that subculture, we'd be barraged with stories of children killed by loose Boxers.

Pit advocates here seem akin to supporters of the present administration, in the truth doesn't matter as long as we can run on emotion..
This is a waste of time, your minds are already set on a course that no amount of fact can change, but here it is anyway.
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Pit bull myths ::

Pit bull owners, breeders and animal advocacy groups have created a slew of myths and distortions about the pit bull breed to fight breed-specific laws. Below are the top 10 myths.

Myth #1: It's the owner not the breed

The outdated debate, "It's the owner, not the breed," has caused the pit bull problem to grow into a 30-year old problem.1 Designed to protect pit bull breeders and owners, the slogan ignores the genetic history of the breed and blames these horrific maulings -- inflicted by the pit bull's genetic "hold and shake" bite style -- on environmental factors. While environment plays a role in a pit bull's behavior, it is genetics that leaves pit bull victims with permanent and disfiguring injuries.

The pit bull's genetic traits are not in dispute. Many appellate courts agree that pit bulls pose a significant danger to society and can be regulated accordingly. Some of the genetic traits courts have identified include: unpredictability of aggression, tenacity ("gameness" the refusal to give up a fight), high pain tolerance and the pit bull's "hold and shake" bite style.2 According to forensic medical studies, similar injuries have only been found elsewhere on victims of shark attacks.3

Perpetuators of this myth also cannot account for the many instances in which pit bull owners and family members are victimized by their pet dogs. From 2005 to 2013, pit bulls killed 176 Americans, about one citizen every 18.6 days. Of these deaths, 52% involved a family member and a household pit bull.4 Notably, in the first 8 months of 2011, nearly half of those killed by a pit bull was its owner. One victim was an "avid supporter" of Bad Rap, a recipient of Michael Vick's dogs.5

Link to more

700LH - why didn't you name the link? Is it because I already mentioned that dogbites.org (your source at the link) is clearly agenda-driven and uses unscientific "data"?

I've read their site, and it reads pretty much like many of the anti-gun sites....complete with unsubstantiated claims and skewed data. Even one source they claim for support actually does not support them.

If it's the breed, explain the differential stats from pre-1980 to more recent times. There were plenty of Pitbulls in the US prior to their wild popularity in the black "gangsta" subclass which occurred post-1980.

700, of course there are characteristics that are breed associated, but it's not a characteristic of viciousness. The breed characteristics are related to combat ability, i.e., once in combat, they are capable of great performance due to power, courage, and tenacity. If you don't raise the dog to be vicious, those capabilities never express themselves in aggression unless they are themselves attacked by another dog or person.

The trait of viciousness, in fact, was not only not bred for, but was actually considered a major flaw during the breed's multicentury development. It was well known that any inclination towards viciousness was an indication of a lack of fighting ability. Any such inclination also disqualified a dog from the pits, since these dogs needed to be constantly handled in the midst of battle, and often by strangers.

It sure wasn't because pits weren't around. I saw them in the '70s and never had any occasion to think of them as a threat back then. Dobermans were the boogy man at the time (also unfounded).

+1 I remember when Dobermans were the MSM's devil dog. No one had ever heard of Pitbulls, because Pitbulls just didn't attack anyone.

No one questions their capabilities (Boxers and other breeds have similar capabilities). What I'm saying is that those capabilities didn't express themselves in fatalities prior to their wild popularity in a particular subculture in the US. Were Boxers in that position, those stats you cited would be about Boxers.

Oh great! A link that links dogbite.org as it's source. And it's a fund-raiser, to boot. With more unsubstantiated claims. You don't see the agenda here?

CDC statistics, Read the tables mid page, take a good look at table #2.

http://www.cdc.gov/homeandrecreationalsafety/images/dogbreeds-a.pdf

You think I didn't already read that? But the real question is....did you read it?

It doesn't support your argument, Bro. Make it easy for ya if ya don't feel like reading it all - just read their own conclusions in the upper-left-hand box.....where it says "Conclusions".

I referenced this very study earlier. It's key to my argument. Have you considered anything I've been saying?