Should Pittbulls be eliminated? Im not saying go out and gather them all up and destroy them, but perhaps they should have a way to filter the breed down so that they are not as common and mabye even die off entirely. In my opinion they are a dangerous breed, even ones that are raised correctly have the potential to hurt someone if they snap. You can say that any dog can snap, this is true, but if a pittbull snaps you are going to get hurt more then say if a beagle snaps.

We touched on this once in the middele of another discussion. I think my standpoint was that if pitbulls are being bred and used as weapons, they should have to be registered and licensed as weapons. In other words control them like you control guns.

I realize that guns aren't controlled very well, and guns don't give birth to baby guns, but I think putting regulations on pitbulls would at least help. They're not just any other pet, after all.

I disagree with your post completely, comicracy. (and yours to some degree too, Hawk.) No breed of dog is more 'dangerous' than another, unless you're pulling a dog from the wild like a wolf or coyote. Calling them 'a deadly breed' is just ignorant- how much have you researched pit bulls as a breed before you came to your opinions? It's all down to the owner. An owner who doesn't care for or train their dog properly, no matter the breed, is going to have a bad dog on their hands. Think of how many horrible little terrier-dogs are out there. People think it's cute with them because they're small and can't do damage. But if you treat larger dogs the same way suddenly it's the dog's fault they behave poorly?

I don't think putting regulations on DOGS will help anything - if anything I think there should be regulations on ALL pet owners. However in the US pets are considered property and not a responsibility which is unlikely to ever change.

Pit bulls are affectionate to humans. They were bred to be aggressive to other dogs and to submit completely to humans. It makes complete sense when you think about why they were bred- why would you want a fighting dog that might attack its handler? If they are 'a deadly breed' it's deadly to other dogs, NOT to humans.

For truly willful and 'wild' dogs you need to look at other breeds- Shiba Inu, Basenji, Akita, and others - only an experienced dog owner (like the dog whisperer) can and should handle these dogs as they view humans as competition and need incredible training. A pit bull is a cake walk to train, easier in fact than many 'safe' breeds of dogs like labradors etc simply because they are smart and SO eager to please their human. The reason these other dogs don't come into the news is because they're not as readily available as pit bulls and the responsible people who breed them screen all their potential buyers. However, any moron with a couple of dogs can go around breeding pit bulls. (Backyard breeding is a whole other issue with me, don't ask.)

I don't know why pit bulls in particular have been getting the bad rap lately. It's unfortunate that a few bad examples have changed people's perceptions so much. You'll find however in most of the sensational cases about their attacking someone, the dog will have been poorly socialized, left unattended with small children (who tend to provoke animals out of ignorance), and not cared for the way they should have been. I bet if there were more comprehensive records of dog attacks on people available, there wouldn't be very many from pit bulls.

Ignorant people think pit bulls are some kind of trophy or sign of toughness so they get one and don't care for it like they should. So a couple bad examples ruin it for everyone.

Any true pet owner who has a pit bull or a pit cross will tell you that pit bulls are incredibly affectionate and willing to please them and would never hurt them. If there are aggressive problems it's toward other dogs and that kind of thing is easily solved (don't let your dog run loose, which is apparently too hard for many people). It sucks that a couple of morons have got people thinking like you guys, that pit bulls are somehow a defective or undesirable breed and need to be regulated, banned, and killed off. (Killed off? You seriously think that?)

I agree with skoolmunkee.
Someone I know has a pitbull. She's the sweetest dog ever.

Aren't pitbulls in short just a mixture of breeds and there are multiple mixes? So wouldn't that make it a vast amount of different mixed dogs being thrown into the same catagory of 'pitbull' causing public perception to be all pitbulls are 'dangerous'? Isn't there also the possibility that some attacks could be misclassified and pitbulls become wrongly accused?

Besides...it seems alot of times they don't always include posible contributing circumstances to the attacks.

Yeah you might as well destroy Dobermans, Rotweilers and German Shepards. Irresponsible breeding and rearing can ruin any generation of dogs. That doesn't mean the whole breed is suspect.

Like I said, they said the same things about Dobies in the seventies, And i know lots of Dobies which are as dumb and sweet as any Lab.

bobhhh
Yeah you might as well destroy Doberman, Rotweilers and German Shepards. Irresponsible breeding and rearing can ruin any generation of dogs. That doesn't mean the whole breed is suspect.

Like I said, they said the same things about Dobies in the seventies, And i know lots of Dobies which are as dumb and sweet as any Lab.

I agree. and not to metion...

You can't always believe everything the media says about dogs. Too many times I've seen them talk about a so-called "pitball" attack and then when I look at a picture of the offending dog, it's not even a pitball!!
They deliberately mislabel the breed of the dog to get more hits/readers, because pitball is the next "scary thing"!

And when more humans learn about pitballs and how much of a great dog they can be, they're going to move on to the next "intimating" breed. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if the media one day starts focusing on Saint Bernards as the new "scary dog" or something because of their legendary size. :P

Aw but St. Bernards are so cuddly ^^"

Daxy
Aw but St. Bernards are so cuddly ^^"

You obviously have never read or seen "Cujo", by Stephen King

One thing that really pisses me off is the fact they, like others have said, never take into consideration the circumstances...

My family (my wife, son, Chihuahua, Pomerainian, Bull Mastiff, Parrot, and Bull Mastiff cross Staffy called Congo, lived next to some tennis courts and park in a small Australian country town.

Every Monday after school there would be tennis training and literally a hundred kids running riot in the park. Kids being kids they soon learnt that a couple of scary-looking big dogs lived there and so would dare each other to stir them up through the fence.

Now Congo is a big baby to his pack (3 other dogs, a child and a parrot... the parrot used to chase him around the yard, even though he had killed a couple of wild parrots that had gotten drunk on the palm fruit), but a terrific guard dog.

He is extremely intelligent and only barks if he percieves someone as a true threat to our property (which saved us from getting broken into numerous times).

One kid used to really stir him up into a rage, which would have looked extremely scary to the kids.

I cornered this kid with some mates one day and told him that he was training Congo to hate kids and by doing so may cause him to attack someone one day.

The stirring stopped for a while but then started up again.

One day we were walking the dogs (we did every day), this kid and the neighbours and their son came up to us. While I was engrossed in conversation with the adults their son came up behind me to try and pat Congo, he was sitting obediently on his leash. I tensed but Congo let him pat him.

The other kid (the stirrer) thought he would try and give Congo a pat too. Congo knew who he was of course and bit him!

It was only a warning bite, but having a bull mastiff father, a nip from him was like being nipped by a lion so of course skin broke and one tooth went in about an inch. I have seen Congo crunch up large joints in seconds and swallow the lumps whole... if he had wanted to hurt the kid he would have.

Of course, the neighbours (cat people) freaked out.
The kid's Dad came over in a rage and demanded we put Congo down. After he cooled down we told him what his kid had been doing every Monday afternoon. He was furious, he had dogs himself, and went home and gave his kid a tongue-thrashing.

Lucky for Congo the dad was a 'dog person' and understood.

Sorry for the long story, but yeah... humans cause the problem every time, not the dogs.

unfortunately, pitbulls are HUGE as a 'status symbol' sort of thing. people want to look tough, so they get a tough dog to sort of help their image along.
a lot of these people have either no desire or no idea how to train a dog. (i would think that you'd have better reasons to own a pit bull than that it makes you look cool, if you're really serious about having a dog)

some of the sweetest dogs i have ever met have been pit bulls. it's all a matter of training and socialising. pitbulls are very powerful and, yeah, could potentially really hurt someone. so it's important that people make sure they take full responsibility for ensuring it doesn't become a danger. really though, that comes with owning any dog. i have a beagle and a german sheperd/great dane/god-knows what, and while one is much bigger than the other, we have to make sure they're both well-behaved. it's just part of owning a dog, or at least it should be.
(incidentally i've read about a pomeranian killing a baby. any dog can be deadly.)


it's awful that they have such a bad reputation. looking through shelters for a dog was heartbreaking, because there were so many pitbulls in there. it's difficult enough for an adult dog to find a home (everybody wants puppies) but an adult pitbull? there are too few people willing to love a pitbull, and shelters are just full of them.

I think I didn't express myself clearly. When I talked about regulating the ownership of pit bulls I meant the ones trained to be guard dogs. Obviously the ones with no more training than "fetch" and "play dead" aren't any more dangerous than the usual dog.

EDIT: I just went to learn more about pit bulls and it turns out that some countries and areas have actually banned the dog. These places include Ontario, Winnipeg, Norway, Denmark, Miami, and a some towns in Utah, Iowa, Washington, and more. It's interesting to see the varying reactions to this type of dog.

The behaviour of a dog depends so much on how it is raised and trained that banning a dog breed because some people have trained theirs to be violent is as stupid as banning baseball bats just because they have occasionally been used to inflict harm on other people.

Sometimes, you get the odd "problem-dog", which suffers from some sort of inherent flaw, but then it's usually due to inbreeding. They are exceptions, and exceptions should not the the basis for judging an entire breed.

This has been mentioned but I want to clarify it:

Most of the time there's a problem of what a pit bull 'is' - technically it's a specific breed of dog (American Pit Bull Terrier) but because they share physical traits with many other breeds of dog (many mutts look pit-bull ish too) lots of dogs are usually called 'pit bulls' as a catch-all term. It's difficult to determine the number of actual pit bull attacks vs staffordshire vs whatever attacks - so those statistics when it comes to pit bulls are usually inflated.

Anti-breed legislation has gotten popular in the last few years- sometimes in an effort to make dog fighting more difficult, but usually because people think pit bulls are bad. There's no real proof however that the genetics of a dog breed make them dangerous, and there are a lot of groups fighting that legislation. (The laws can range from 'need to wear a muzzle on walks' to outright banning.) It just makes things worse though as people who want pit bulls to be 'cool' aren't going to care about that, and people who want a pit bull as a genuine pet can't have one. :[