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The entirety of Bay Area lib news is obsessing over the dangers of the homeless. It's sickening.
God this is maybe slop but I don't care.
Also the pitbull angle is purely based in racism (not saying the guy in the article that said it was pitbulls is racist but that there is a lot of racism around what is perceived as a "pitbull" and how media reports on such things).
I wrote a whole effort post about this phenomenon years ago on reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDeprogram/comments/z7ze2b/pit_bulls_the_proletariat_and_racism/
Of particular note is this one line from The Black Man's Dog: ""We don’t want those people here,” a city council member said of the bans." It has never been about the dogs. And furthermore this article similarly dehumanizes people based on their living situation. It vilifies the dogs, dehumanizes the owners, and minimizes what actually is the problem and that is people not being availed of adequate shelter for them and their pets and possible mental health issues or material conditions that afford one the ability to care for their non human companions in a healthy way.
And what about other countries where there isn’t the racism angle?
Here in the UK we barely have any bans (only one very specific targeted breed). The right like to bring up pits whenever possible though because it's a useful tool for spreading ideas about behavioural genetics. When people fully buy into the concept these dogs are inherently dangerous instead of having poor owners/conditions they also buy into the idea that human beings have genetic behavioural traits. Of course, this leads to white people being the superior master race.
Usually still a classist angle to it. Over here in Aus they have a reputation for being the sort of dogs only bogans have.
Or here in germany where pitpulls are usually owned by neo-nazis and which tend to be let loose on kids too dark for their tastes.
I’m in Australia and I don’t agree that the narrative is classist. Tends to be toxic masculinity if anything.
It’s also generally framed as severity of outcome vs other dog attacks.
Maybe it's just my part of the country then. Or maybe we're talking about slightly different things? Around here the idea is that bogans (who will usually be examples of toxic masculinity themselves) are the only sort of people who have dogs like that.
Meanwhile, I've been attacked by way more fancy pants fuckin' labradoodles and other middle class "pedigree" dogs than I ever have by anything I would call a "pit bull"
The only dog I have ever been actually terrified of was a Queensland heeler.
Well straight up I’ll just say I’m in Melbourne. And the type of people that own pitbulls are generally aligned by a specific trait; machismo.
There’s hundreds of breeds. Why own one of the few that has an extreme killing capacity compared to others? Never heard anyone be killed by a Pomeranian.
I don't like comparing animals to humans, domestic animals have been selectively bread for centuries for various traits, both physical and psychological.
The history of pitbulls traces back to Joseph L. Colby, a professional dog fighter. They would selectively breed the most vicious and game dogs. Game meant that they would keep on fighting even with serious injuries.
Here is a book from Colby about breeding and fighting pitbulls (serious CW: animal abuse)
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.%24b28129&seq=1
When dog fighting was beginning to be outlawed, that's when pitbulls started to be promoted as family pets. The curret advocacy for pitbulls is some multi million dollar industry ran by former Scientologist members, who don't even own pitbulls themselves.
I will agree that pitbulls are a class issue, shelters are full of pitbulls, and dogs from breeders are expensive. Not every pitbull will snap, but there are so many stories about vicious dog attacks, that leaves horrible injuries, mostly to children and elderly. The statistics shows that they are mostly pitbulls or pitbull mix. There are certainly other vicious breeds out there, like Dogo Argentinos, but these are rare and expensive so they aren't very prevalent.
Also people have the ability to think and learn that is for all intents and purposes an evolutionary glitch and imho places humas in a totally distinct category from other animals, not on a biological level of course (universal common ancestor and all) but existential one. On a biological any comparisons or analogies between humans of any "race" and animals (say dog breeds) are from a total lack of understanding of biology and genetics. Selective breeding has pushed the phenotypic differences in the dog species to its absolute extremes. So these weird analogies are essentially people saying really stupid things because of completely baseless and unfounded belief. Or they just want to spread propaganda. The sad reality is most people do not have an adequate understanding of a lot of topics that they talk about.
I'll edit this in but things like intelligence and personality are simply not based on genetics but consciousness, something we have basically no understanding of. Even neuroscience can somewhat explain the foundation on which consciousness sits but nothing more as of yet. It's also why "AI" is a fucking joke. We are millenia away from actual AI
I've seen discourse on how "pitbulls are inhumane to breed", but to be fully honest, I just don't know about this issue to form an opinion either way, if that's OK.
Ya I'm sure much of the news about pitbulls is racist.
Pitbulls are great, you see far less people talking about the inhumanity of breeding french bulldogs or pugs who are widely known to have inherent respiratory problems.
Now to be clear I am a firm opponent of pedigree dog breeding or dog breeding in general on the grounds of consent and animal exploitation, but Pit Bulls are not even much of a breed in that regard. Their classification is relatively new (as in less than a hundred or so years).
German shepherds, who I used as an example have been bred for guard dog purposes for far longer also have predisposition to hip displacia and as noted in the sources I linked were the go to demonized breed in the 40s and before back when Germans were also not considered white. Ben Franklin lumped them in with the "swarthy" races alongside Italians.
Dog discrimination has ALWAYS been intertwined with notions of eugenics and racial purity.
In modern times the Pitbull hysteria has been used as a back door to plant the seed that an animal, human dog or otherwise, can be genetically predisposed to violence.
This also leads back to your earlier point. "Pitbull" isn't a specific breed of dog, it's a floating label that can be applied or not to any dog that looks "dangerous" enough.
Also a dog is more likely to be labeled a pitbull (in the US at least) if the owner is not white.
Ya this is likely the correct take to have on all this.
inhumane to breed? how about we stop breeding pugs then
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