We DID PITT BULLS BEFORE!

[PeaceNikki]

1. Salon did a good piece on pits this week.

http://www.salon.com/2013/02/05/in_defense_of_the_pitbull_partner/

Dog Racism

Some people are understandably offended when the demonization of pit bulls is compared with bigotry against ethnic minorities, but there’s one aspect of the analogy that is just too apt to ignore.

Pit bulls are disproportionately involved in serious attacks on humans, just as African-Americans are found guilty of a disproportionate number of crimes in the United States. That’s simply what the raw data say.

Most people consider the claim that blacks are inherently more criminal than whites, based on that raw data, to be pretty darn racist as it ignores the social, economic and legal context of crime and instead ascribes it to some imagined genetic or cultural flaw among African-Americans.

And yet, when you strip away the overt falsehoods about pit bulls – those locking jaws and shark-like bites – the raw statistics, stripped of social context, is the entirety of the case against these animals (made even worse by the unreliable nature of data based on media-reported breeds in attacks).

So when Matt Drudge hypes stories of “packs” of black youths rampaging in America’s streets, he’s rightly called out for race-baiting. But when sex advice columnist Dan Savage, who writes numerous posts about pit bulls behaving badly with titles like, “Pit Bulls Should be Boiled Alive like Lobsters and Fed to Their Idiot Owners,” and compares these domesticated canines with wild tigers, he’s doing the exact same thing as Drudge. (Worse, Savage doesn’t appear to make any effort to confirm that the dogs implicated in the stories he promotes are actually pit bulls.)