Children Need Pit Bulls: A Picture Book

[DirkGently]

58. Bad logic, up and down. Any large dog can do harm.

If the argument is that no one with small children should own an animal physically capable of harming them, okay, although that's a bit hyper-protective.

(on edit: It looks like the author is suggesting no powerful dog should be allowed "in public?" And he/she lumps in Rottweilers to enlarge a statistic purporting to show a special problem with "pit bulls.&quot

The big irrational elephant in the room is the canard that there is some special, deadly magic surrounding the term, "pit-bull." The term "pit bull" encompasses three separate breeds, plus mixes, plus people with no idea what breed they're talking about and bascially any dog in a news report about a dog attack where no one knows what the heck breed it was.

The infamous, "Cat saves small child from dog attack" viral video of recent vintage involved some kind of Akita mix, I think. Not that big, no particular street cred for fighting. No indication the owners bred it for agression or abused it. Got out through an unlatched gate, as I recall. Just a normal, mid-sized dog that reacted to a small child as prey and appeared to be in the midst of killing him.

The rationale that there is one "type" of dog that can be identified as being particularly dangerous is simply nonsense.

"Pit bull" is a cultural identification not much different from race. It's what people call certain dogs, and it's what certain people call any vicious, aggressive dog they come by.

The actual rational argument would be to understand that 1) dogs bite, 2) large dogs bite hard and 3) depending on socialization, training and innate personality some dogs exhibit various levels of aggression, and 4) without proper socialization and training, some dogs also react to small children as prey and will try to eat them.

The rest is silly generalization based on fear and bad information.