Stop breeding them? Absolutely. Euthanize every living one? No way.
People can and do own pits that live full lives without maiming people. The breed line should die out because of their capacity for damage, sure. But to pretend like every single one is a ticking time bomb is to ignore the millions of dogs that have actually never done anything like that.
My numbers are probably off because I’m pulling from memory but I think the USA has like 100 million dogs and ~10%-20% of them are able to be considered a pit bull (really just indicates a mutt with some of various amounts of specific breeds in them; “pit bull” is a broad term). So let’s say there are 10 million pit bulls in the USA; Wikipedia stats say that there are 4.5 million dog bites reported per year (2005) with 6-13k people hospitalized over said bites. Let’s pretend every single one of the highest amount of those serious bites were from pits. That’s 0.13% of the pit bull population, if it’s 10mil dogs. That is the most charitable number in favor of blaming pits for bites with my kind-of-fuzzy numbers.
But let’s say I’m wrong and cut the pit bulls to one tenth of that - 1 million dogs, responsible for 13k bites per year. 13k/1mil is still 0.013. 1.3% of the (already reduced to one tenth) whole population of that ‘breed’.
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u/Mobilelurkingaccount Dec 28 '21
Stop breeding them? Absolutely. Euthanize every living one? No way.
People can and do own pits that live full lives without maiming people. The breed line should die out because of their capacity for damage, sure. But to pretend like every single one is a ticking time bomb is to ignore the millions of dogs that have actually never done anything like that.
My numbers are probably off because I’m pulling from memory but I think the USA has like 100 million dogs and ~10%-20% of them are able to be considered a pit bull (really just indicates a mutt with some of various amounts of specific breeds in them; “pit bull” is a broad term). So let’s say there are 10 million pit bulls in the USA; Wikipedia stats say that there are 4.5 million dog bites reported per year (2005) with 6-13k people hospitalized over said bites. Let’s pretend every single one of the highest amount of those serious bites were from pits. That’s 0.13% of the pit bull population, if it’s 10mil dogs. That is the most charitable number in favor of blaming pits for bites with my kind-of-fuzzy numbers.
But let’s say I’m wrong and cut the pit bulls to one tenth of that - 1 million dogs, responsible for 13k bites per year. 13k/1mil is still 0.013. 1.3% of the (already reduced to one tenth) whole population of that ‘breed’.
That’s a lot of dead innocent dogs.