Comic Strips

Because if a pitbull snaps, someone is likely to die.

Because their stereotype can attract shitty owners who want a badass dog but can't be assed to train or care for them.

Or they literally abuse, possibly even with dogfights, and abandon them.

Because most people can't identify one and use it for any mid size dog.

See: Rottweiler, doberman in previous years.

Edit: that includes cops. Same thing applies to police reports. Guess what insurance adjustors use as part of determining insurance rates?

That isn't the slam dunk of info you think it is.

'Pit bull' doesn't even have a real definition. It's sometimes considered a breed or sometimes a family or class and may include more than a dozen different breeds and their mutts depending on who is counting.

Both the CDC and AVMA say there is no sufficiently reliable source for breed data related to dog attacks.

DogsBite.org literally states their objective is convincing people pit bulls are dangerous and claims they can reliably ID a breed from a photograph.

So go pound sand with that 'facts' horseshit.

Even if we wanted to ignore those problems and take it seriously as a source, it completely neglects the only relevant question of the proportion of dogs within a breed that attack. Without reliable information about the sizes of the populations of included breeds, the chart is useless.

Real research on this exists.

CONCLUSION Maulings by dogs can cause terrible injuries47 and death—and it is natural for those dealing with the victims to seek to address the immediate causes. However as Duffy et al (2008) wrote of their survey based data: “The substantial within-breed variation…suggests that it is inappropriate to make predictions about a given dog’s propensity for aggressive behavior based solely on its breed.” While breed is a factor, the impact of other factors relating to the individual animal (such as training method, sex and neutering status), the target (e.g. owner versus stranger), and the context in which the dog is kept (e.g. urban versus rural) prevent breed from having significant predictive value in its own right. Also the nature of a breed has been shown to vary across time, geographically, and according to breed subtypes such as those raised for conformation showing versus field trials.37 Given that breed is a poor sole predictor of aggressiveness and pit bull-type dogs are not implicated in controlled studies it is difficult to support the targeting of this breed as a basis for dog bite prevention. If breeds are to be targeted a cluster of large breeds would be implicated including the German shepherd and shepherd crosses and other breeds that vary by location.

Those of us who have adopted and loved pitbulls for their entire doggie lives know that pitties aren't inherently violent. People who have been victimized as a result of people's mistreatment of these very powerful dogs don't know that.

Liberal Portland, Oregon is filled with pitbulls, but it is not filled with lifted trucks. The city is just aware of how great they can be when you don't abuse them into being bad citizens.

My pit died last year at old age from cancer. He was a sweetie who never did anything violent. We have a puppy now (corgi mix, hilarious clown of a dog), but I still miss my lunkhead every day. There's something different about them and the way they need to cuddle at every moment of the day.