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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