Dogs

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A community about dogs.

Breeds, tips and tricks about training and behaviour, news affecting dog owners, canine photography, dog-related art and any questions related to dog ownership.

Rules

Posts must be related to dogs or dog ownership and must not be void of content.
This is a neutral space. No bigotry or personal attacks. Criticism should be polite and constructive.
No automated content. This includes AI generated imagery, post body, articles, comments or automated accounts.
No advertising or self-promotion.
Illegal or unethical practices are frowned upon, and any comments or posts suggesting them will be removed. This includes, but is not limited to, backyard breeding, ear and tail cropping, fake service animals, negative reinforcement, alpha/pack/dominance theory, and eugenics.
No judging or attacking community members who care for dogs with cropped ears, docked tails, or those from puppy mills or questionable sources. While we discourage these practices (per Rule 5), all dogs deserve loving homes and compassionate care regardless of their background or physical alterations.
No breed discrimination, all breeds welcome.
Citing your sources when making a claim is encouraged. Misinformation will be removed.

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isVeryLoud@lemmy.ca

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This is Piggy (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 weeks ago by ickplant@lemmy.world to c/dogs@lemmy.world

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[–] gid@lemmy.blahaj.zone 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I'm curious, do you have any experience with training and handling dogs? Because breeding really doesn't work in the way you are implying or assuming.

Describing these dogs as bred for fighting implies that these dogs are pre-programmed to attack and fight. That's not how dogs work. Breeding for traits is about selecting for particular behavioural and physical attributes. "Fighting" isn't an isolated behaviour, it's a collection of traits like defensiveness, aggression, threat identification and so on, and to "fight" dogs need training on these.

As previous commenters have said, in the tragic cases where bully breeds have been involved in lethal attacks there are indications that the dogs were not handled/trained/socialized correctly.

[–] svcg@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

As previous commenters have said, in the tragic cases where bully breeds have been involved in lethal attacks there are indications that the dogs were not handled/trained/socialized correctly.

Nevertheless, to account for the kind of disproportionality on display, it seems to me there's only really two ways to explain it:

bullies are innately more likely to attack when poorly trained, or;
people who are unable to train dogs are more likely to own bullies.

[–] gid@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

bullies are innately more likely to attack when poorly trained, or;

Unfortunately I can't find statistics for the UK, but these statistics for the USA show that pitbulls account for 22 lethal attacks a year. That's out of roughly 4.5 million pitbulls (source). That is an incredibly low percentage, even if it is higher than the percentage of lethal attacks by other types of dog breed, to the point where we're comparing differences of fractions of a percent.

To give that figure of number of fatalities some perspective, roughly the same number of people (21) are killed per year by cattle.

But taking either of your points to be true, both these cases can be resolved without banning (and putting down or destroying) particular breeds, for example:

provide education on training and dog handling
better controls and standards for dog breeding
licensing/training as part of a condition of dog ownership

There are existing organisations and dog clubs that already offer some of these services, and would be well-placed to tie in as providers if these things were legislated.