Let's Use Logic to Talk About Pit Bulls -- It'll Make Things Better for Everyone General Chat

Malka · Jul 10, 2014

Another article by Arin Greenwood, Editor of the Huffington Post, which I found very interesting and a good explanation of why Pit Bulls garner such an incorrect bad name.

Here's a puzzle I used to give my LSAT students, back when I was helping prepare ambitious would-be lawyers for a lifetime of paying off law school loans:

Shark attacks have gone up this summer. So has ice cream consumption. Does that mean that eating ice cream causes shark attacks to go up?

Most of my students -- even the ones who really, really hated logic, and whose future job prospects I worried the most about -- were able to understand that shark attacks and ice cream consumption goint up are correlated, but that eating ice cream does not cause shark attacks to go up.

Factors can go together, in other words, without them being responsible for one another -- and if you're looking to decrease the overall number of shark attacks, strictly regulating ice cream is probably not the way to do it.

Go with me from here, to a beach just outside of Boston, where at the end of June, one dog killed another dog, and injured the killed dog's 83-year-old owner.

This is a terrible story in every way. The details that we get from the Boston Globe's account are that a 10-year-old mixed breed dog was being walked by his elderly owner, when a pit bull attacked the pair. The pit bull's owner, the story goes on to report, was unable to stop his dog "because he was on rollerblades, State Police said."

It is tempting, given these details -- and no more -- to conclude that pit bulls are dangerous, or at least to reinforce the belief that the dogs have dangerous tendencies. To think that the dog being a pit bull somehow caused the attack.

That's the conclusion that the Boston Globe editorial board came to, certainly, in a profoundly wrongheaded, and unsigned, editorial called "Pit bull owners: know your breed." The piece argues -- citing no evidence, since there isn't any -- that this gruesome attack is just one example which proves that pits "have been bred to fight, with lower inhibitions for aggressive behavior," and that while it may be impracticable to ban these dogs, "owners also need to acknowledge the characteristics of their breed and take responsibility for them, including proper leash restraints when out in public."

Except these dogs -- and keep in mind that "pit bull" isn't actually a breed in itself, but can mean one of several types of terriers, or, more often, just a dog whose genetics are unknown but who has a certain stocky appearance -- don't have lower inhibitions for aggressive behavior, and the data shows us that "knowing your breed" does not in fact tell us anything about a dog's viciousness.
...[snip]...

Everyone should take responsibility for their dog, including proper restraints in public. That has nothing to do with breed and everything to do with the fact that any dog, of any breed, can bite.

So which factors do matter, when it comes to dog attacks? Here are a few, according to the JAVMA study: If the dog is spayed or neutered. If the dog's owner has a history of animal abuse. The "absence of an able-bodied person to intervene" -- like, say, if the owner is on rollerblades, and therefore not in control.
Click to expand...

Full article and some delightful photographs at the end of it here...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arin-greenwood/pit-bulls-boston-globe_b_5568613.html?utm_hp_ref=dogs
Click to expand...

Let's Use Logic to Talk About Pit Bulls -- It'll Make Things Better for Everyone General Chat

Malka Member

Let's Use Logic to Talk About Pit Bulls -- It'll Make Things Better for Everyone

Share This Page

Official threads