Someone was trying to citation bomb to defend pit bulls, and the citations I could verify were mostly irrelevant, looking at attitudes to or representations of pitbulls rather than whether they were really dangerous.
The closest any of the articles came to making a case for why they weren't dangerous was Pit bull panic by Judy Cohen & John Richardson (2002).
While it was mostly about why the media supposedly misrepresents pitbulls and looks at individual media articles, barely addressed the fact of whether they are actually dangerous and was published in "The Journal of Popular Culture" - not "The Journal of Dog Bites" or something relevant to the subject, it did throw out various lines without explication, which we can take as an attempt to make a case for pitbulls not being dangerous:
"Figure 1
Arguments Supportive of Pit Bulls
• Pit Bulls were not bred to attack people, like some other breeds were; instead they were bred for dog fighting (Sanchez-Beswick 2).
• Pit Bulls were bred to be people friendly because the traditional dog fight had two dogs and no less than three people in the pit (a referee and two handlers). Any dog that bit either handler or the referee was immediately disqualified and usually destroyed (Stratton 34).
• Because Pit Bulls have a high tolerance for pain, they can take rough handling by children and not bite or otherwise become aggressive (Stratton 16).
• At the time that the survey was given, the American Temperament Test Society ranked Pit Bulls fourth highest out of all breeds for reliable good temperament (American Pit Bull Terrier web page). Now that more dogs and more breeds have been tested, both the passing rate and the relative ranking of Pit Bulls have gone down. But their 82.3% passing rate (American Temperance Testing Society 1) is
comparable to (indeed slightly higher than) that of the “All-American Family Dog”, the Golden Retriever (81.9%) (American Temperance Testing Society 4) and is close to (but again actually slightly above) the cumulative average for all dogs of all breeds tested (80.2%) (American Temperance Testing Society 7).
• Pit Bulls are used in therapy programs by animal welfare organizations (Jessup 201).
• People who call Animal Control to complain about their neighbor’s Pit Bulls are usually upset about the neighbor for another reason and are using the Pit Bulls to retaliate (Sanchez-Beswick2).
• The qualities that make a dog a good fighter—intelligence, strength, stamina, agility—also make them good pets (Sanchez-Beswick 3).
• Civil liberties are at stake, because authorities have confiscated Pit Bulls and caused the owner to engage in prolonged legal battles and risk the chance that their dogs would be destroyed (Sanchez-Beswick 2).
• The media, by insisting that Pit Bulls are vicious dogs, have led to a trend where violence-prone people want to own them and are more likely to be looking for dogs who are violent as individuals, so this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy (Sanchez-Beswick 2).
• Pit Bulls don’t bite more often, but when they do, the media is more likely to publicize the attack. This is partly (but only partly) because the severity of injuries is likely to be greater than with most other dogs (Rowan 9). The only valid way to determine if a breed is more prone to bite is to look at the ratio of bites to the total population (Rowan 4-8; Swift 75). Pit Bull owners are less likely to register their dogs, due to the maverick nature of the breed, thus the total population is likely to be underestimated, and the ratio overestimated.
• Often vicious dogs are identified as Pit Bulls when they are not (Stratton 48). A recent example (January 2001) was the attack in San Francisco by what was later identified as a Presa Canario XBullmastiff Cross. Early print and TV media reports had misidentified the dog as a Pit Bull (personal communication with
people local to the scene on the humans4anti-bsl@yahoogroups.com e-mail list)."
Let us s look at these claims in order:
"• Pit Bulls were not
bred to attack people, like some other breeds were; instead they were
bred for dog fighting (Sanchez-Beswick 2)."
This isn't really
relevant. You don't need to be bred to attack people to be dangerous to
people. It is telling that this is an admission that they were bred for
fighting - i.e. they are aggressive, even dangerous.
"• Pit Bulls
were bred to be people friendly because the traditional dog fight had
two dogs and no less than three people in the pit (a referee and two
handlers). Any dog that bit either handler or the referee was
immediately disqualified and usually destroyed (Stratton 34)."
I
can't check what Stratton said, but not biting 3 individuals (probably
marked with special clothing) within the context of a dog fight doesn't
mean they won't bite humans.
"• Because Pit Bulls have a high tolerance for pain, they can take rough
handling by children and not bite or otherwise become aggressive
(Stratton 16)."
This is weird, because some pro-pit sites call
this a myth. But pain is not the only thing that can set a dog off (not
all "threats" cause pain before dogs react to them). And a tolerance for
pain means that trying to get an attacking pit to stop is going to be
harder.
"• At the time that the survey was given, the American Temperament Test Society ranked Pit Bulls fourth highest out of all breeds for reliable good temperament (American Pit Bull Terrier web page). Now that more dogs and more breeds have been tested, both the passing rate and the relative ranking of Pit Bulls have gone down. But their 82.3% passing rate (American Temperance Testing Society 1) is comparable to (indeed slightly higher than) that of the “All-American Family Dog”, the Golden Retriever (81.9%) (American Temperance Testing Society 4) and is close to (but again actually slightly above) the cumulative average for all dogs of all breeds tested (80.2%) (American Temperance Testing Society 7)."
One should note the methodology behind the ATTS test:
"The dog experiences visual, auditory, and tactile stimuli. Friendly, neutral, and threatening situations are encountered, testing the dog’s ability to handle each appropriately. A dog fails if they show unprovoked aggression, panic without recovery, or strong avoidance. Other dogs are not involved in the test. Participating dogs must be spayed or neutered and at least 18 months old."
Real world results could change due to no spaying, other dogs being involved or pit bulls being uniformly aggressive compared to other breeds (e.g. 13% of American Pit Bull Terriers fail, but maybe all 13% showed unprovoked aggression, vs 14% of Boston Terriers failing, where 4% showed unprovoked aggression, and 5% panicked without recovering and 5% had strong avoidance). And "unprovoked aggression" is all lumped together in one bucket. The unprovoked aggression of a Boston Terrier might be growling, whereas the unprovoked aggression of an American Pit Bull Terrier might be ripping your face off.
"• Pit Bulls are used in therapy programs by animal welfare organizations (Jessup 201)."
There have been quite a few examples of this going wrong, showing why this is not a good idea.
To get more timely information on this, I went through 30 pages of Yahoo search results (Google and DuckDuckGo have both disabled paginated search results, making it very hard to quantify the depth of my search) and the only case I could find of a "therapy dog" attacking people (or indeed anyone)... was an American Bully pit bull mix and one of the victims was "seriously injured with wounds to his face, eye, head and arm". How peculiar. We're always told that it's all about how you raise/train the dog, yet even a trained pit bull attacked a human
"• People who call Animal Control to complain about their neighbor’s Pit Bulls are usually upset about the neighbor for another reason and are using the Pit Bulls to retaliate (Sanchez-Beswick2)."
This is irrelevant. Calling animal control doesn't make a dog attack humans or other dogs unprovoked..
"• The qualities that make a dog a good fighter—intelligence, strength, stamina, agility—also make them good pets (Sanchez-Beswick 3)."
This is just reaching. Even if they're good pets, 3 out of 4 of those attributes make them more dangerous when they act up.
"• Civil liberties are at stake, because authorities have confiscated Pit Bulls and caused the owner to engage in prolonged legal battles and risk the chance that their dogs would be destroyed (Sanchez-Beswick 2)."
???
If I have a nuclear bomb at home and authorities confiscate it, I might be pissed off but to call this a danger to civil liberties is ridiculous.
"• The media, by insisting that Pit Bulls are vicious dogs, have led to a trend where violence-prone people want to own them and are more likely to be looking for dogs who are violent as individuals, so this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy (Sanchez-Beswick 2)."
Ah. The "self-fulfilling prophecy". But this is irrelevant, because it doesn't change the fact that the pits out there are dangerous. In fact it embraces it. People don't care why pitbulls are dangerous - just that they are. So this actually provides more justifications to ban pits.
"• Pit Bulls don’t bite more often, but when they do, the media is more likely to publicize the attack. This is partly (but only partly) because the severity of injuries is likely to be greater than with most other dogs (Rowan 9). The only valid way to determine if a breed is more prone to bite is to look at the ratio of bites to the total population (Rowan 4-8; Swift 75). Pit Bull owners are less likely to register their dogs, due to the maverick nature of the breed, thus the total population is likely to be underestimated, and the ratio overestimated."
This pro-pit site claims 32% of dogs put in shelters are pitbulls. Given the usual spiel about "stereotypes",. this would be an upper bound on the proportion of dogs that are pits.
Meanwhile, Politifact finds 3 estimates of the pitbull population from various shelters, which go from 13-23%, so these estimates are other upper bounds on the pit population.
Yet 72% of fatal dog attacks in the US in 2018 were from pits, which makes them massively over-represented.
And pitbulls are consistently one of the top dogs responsible for serious injuries, and in recent years they are the top (The United Kennel Club and the American Dog Breeders Association refused to provide data on pit bulls, which is telling)
"• Often vicious dogs are identified as Pit Bulls when they are not (Stratton 48). A recent example (January 2001) was the attack in San Francisco by what was later identified as a Presa Canario XBullmastiff Cross. Early print and TV media reports had misidentified the dog as a Pit Bull (personal communication with people local to the scene on the humans4anti-bsl@yahoogroups.com e-mail list)."
Wow. One anecdote.
Anyway, this cuts both ways. We don't have evidence of massive systemic misidentification in a way that would make pits look bad. i.e. You can't claim the aggressive dogs identified as pit bulls were not really pit bulls, but the aggressive dogs not identified as pit bulls were definitely not pit bulls. And the same goes for the proportion of pit bulls in the population (on the claim of their not being over-represented).
Even if misidentification really were a factor, would this alone account for the massive over-representation of pitbulls in the fatal / severe dog attack statistics?
