It’s not the owner (although pretty often the owner doesn’t help matters), it’s the breed. I sincerely don’t know how many children have to be eaten by these monsters before everyone wakes up to the reality of these dogs. They have bloodsport fighting genetics hard wired into their brains, the same way you can’t stop a pointer from pointing or a herding dog from herding. They are the most impulsive breed, and they turn even on kind and loving owners all the time. Pit bull owners will flock to the comments to gaslight everyone about what wonderful dogs they are and how they must have been triggered by the child breathing or blinking and it’s not the dog’s fault. I’m attaching an image of such an argument I saw today.
I think many pit bull owners secretly like owning a killer dog, and just have some sort of oppositional defiance that makes them want to prove to everyone how wonderful their dog is, and until the dog turns on them will defend them to insane degrees. I think they like seeing people and pets and livestock get hurt or killed. I understand some people get caught up in romantic thoughts shaped by publications like The Dodo of helping a poor abused dog become a wonderful pet, and I totally understand wanting to help, and this isn’t their fault, but stark reality sets in quickly when they bring the dog home and it promptly tears apart their cat.
The Bennard family is a prime example, they are middle class people who lovingly raised their pits from puppies, and when they were 8 years old one day the dogs killed their baby and toddler and hospitalized the mom in the ICU. Pieces of that baby were everywhere. Apparently the reason was because the toddler picked up the ball the mom was throwing for the dogs, but she had had to break up a very vicious fight between the dogs shortly before. For that two innocent children lost their lives, from family pets who were lovingly raised.
I know what many of the comments here will be like, but I stand convinced that not one of these dogs is safe simply because of genetics. They are doing what they are bred for, and it’s high past time people get realistic about them.
No, that’s horseshit.
Pittbulls and mutts with pitbull partial genetics just are:
More impulsive / Less predictable or consistent.
More likely to engage in physical violence, for basically any reason / in basically any circumstance.
Have more and/or more dense musculature, allowing that violence to be more seriously damaging, in a pound for pound comparison.
More aggressive / territorial, over … people, places, things, anything they think is theirs or part of their ‘pack’.
You’re saying its 99% Nurture, Nature doesn’t matter but for 1%, its just people doing the equivalent of acting out stereotypes of training as it comes to ‘imagined’ dog personalities.
No, that is false.
Maybe flip those numbers to more like 75% Nature and 25% Nurture, and realize that different dog breeds simply have different baselines, that different dog breeds require more effort to overcome that baseline with more training, and in some cases, it just isn’t possible to totally train out some base impulses/tendencies.
You’re assuming dogs are blank slates and they have to have all their behaviors, good and bad, programmed into them… this is just obviously, laughably false to anyone with any knowledge of animal behaviors, or how the development stages of a mamallian brain works.
Pitts and partial pitts are (much) more difficult to train to the same level of compliance and predictability as many other more agreeable breeds.
Any serious dog trainer with experience amongst a wide variety of breeds will tell you this.
My service dog has some pit bull ancestry (roughly 16%), I know this because I did a DNA test on her. She is none of the things you listed, despite being part of the scariest years of my life that involved actual domestic violence against me. And even after we were attacked by a GSP on a walk last year, she has not shown those tendencies you mentioned. She’s also very gentle with the impolite tomcat I adopted recently.
I doubt most pet owners can rise to the level of training she and I have done. And service training is not a “boot camp then done” thing, it’s continued throughout their working lives. But they absolutely need the temperament for service first.
And just for fun: she also has Rottweiler, GSD and Chow Chow ancestry. She was donated to me through a reputable program that screens shelter puppies for the temperament needed for service.