We DID PITT BULLS BEFORE!

[Nine]

127. try again

1. The dog shown in your first link is not a golden retriever; it's a mix.



2. This dog in your third link is not shown but is described as "a 50-pound Labrador retriever mix with a black-and-white coat."

3. As for German Shepherds and Rottweilers, dog researcher Alexandra Semyonova addresses this here: http://www.nonlineardogs.com/100MostSillyPart3-2.html

There is now a second group of problematic dogs starting to arise: the breeds that are most commonly used as guard dogs and police dogs. These dogs are not only used and trained by police, but also by hobbyists who engage in competitions for points. In their anxiousness to gain points at contests, these hobbyists started to mess around with the breeds they work with. The German Shepherd and the rotweiler are the most common victims of this trend. In some countries, more local breeds have suffered the same fate. Some kennels breed these dogs to be both nervous (the hair trigger) and capable of real aggression.

When we breed dogs for these qualities, we are in fact breeding changes in their brains. Recent
research (Peremans 2002) has shown that this artificial selection results in abnormalities in the parts
of the brain that govern aggression and impulse control, and in the brain’s chemical housekeeping
(the neurotransmitters). The breeders make no secret of the fact that they do this. If you buy a dog
at a kennel that advertises its dogs for guard and police work, you know you will get a dog that bites
soon and doesn’t stop until a lot later. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a laboratory where our
experiments are securely contained. The German Shepherd and the rotweiler are also popular as
household pets. Owners don’t always know what kind of kennel they are visiting, and kennels don’t
always care who they sell to. The genetic selection for aggression has ended up leaking into the
general population of these breeds, and they are now becoming more generally problematic than
one would expect from pet breeds.

The fact that these police dog breeds are so strongly represented in the dog bite statistics is
sometimes used to prove that the truly aggressive breeds are no more dangerous than any normal
dog. After all, the German Shepherd and the rotweiler are old breeds with a long history as
household companions. Serious bite incidents with these dogs are cited in attempts to prove that the
all-out aggression of the triggered pit bull (or American Staffordshire terrier, or Presa Canaria, etc.)
is perfectly normal canine behaviour. People conveniently forget (or omit to mention) that for at least
several decades these breeds have been subject to the same slanted artificial selection that
produced the pit bull (etc) in the first place. The increasingly aggressive behaviour of these police
dog breeds constitutes, in fact, proof that breeding for aggression most certainly does get you a
genetically aggressive, abnormally dangerous dog. These breeds account, together, for almost one
hundred percent of serious to fatal dog bite incidents. Eighty percent of serious to fatal attacks (on
humans or other dogs) are committed by pit bulls/American Staffordshire terriers and other fighting
breeds. The remaining twenty percent is claimed mostly by the breeds that are used for police work.