Bully breeds

[Jenzine]

There are many understandable concerns regarding these types of dog, and as a dog owner myself, I have taken to avoiding places that I’ve encountered them, as a precaution, because dog aggression is common in them as a breed instinct, just as ratting is to terriers and herding to collies.
Areas I can walk my dogs (I always walk them individually, I don’t trust other people’s training of their dogs, and want to be sure that I can manage any situations that arise, which is always infinitely harder when walking multiple dogs) are vanishing at a fast pace with the baffling popularity of these mutants.
Defenders of these dogs always claim it’s the owner not the breed, however there are bad owners of every breed and most breeds still aren’t killing people fairly regularly. There also seems to be no consideration among the defenders and deniers that even if the dog is genuinely nice and loving, that it could become unwell (brain tumours, neurodegenerative conditions, general sickness) which can make even the friendliest Labrador have a sudden change in behaviour.
If any of my dogs, god forbid, ever get poorly in a way that makes them react aggressively, I know that I’m physically capable of preventing serious injury to myself and others by restraining the dog; I don’t believe the same could ever be said of an American bully XL or their owners.
All this to say, what is the justification for an otherwise reasonable person (not the drug dealers and chavs buying status dogs) with or without children to get one of these dogs? Just “liking them” surely is not an acceptable answer when weighed against the lives of human beings? What can they offer as a companion animal that you cannot get from any other breed of dog that you are actually physically capable of controlling?
How are these enormously heavy and powerful dogs not automatically in violation of the dangerous dogs act just by existing as a creature capable of exerting about 240kg of force at the higher weights of 60kg (dogs being capable of exerting force at 4x their own weight)? I don’t believe any human is capable of controlling these animals physically, and verbal control of dogs is never 100% and as someone with a lurcher, I know that no matter how well my dog recalls in general situations, the moment her prey drive is activated, she will not even hear the command to be able to follow it, which is why she’s only off lead in enclosed fields.

I don’t believe in any of the myths about these dogs perpetuated by either side (E.g the locking jaw myth of the anti-bull breed brigadiers, or the nanny dog myth of the staffy/APBT nutters) dogs are dogs, they can be good/bad, well treated/abused, but I don’t believe that owning dogs is a right, I believe it’s a privilege that is too often abused, even by well-meaning people.
How many times do we have to mourn children and adults before “[dog’s name] has never done this before!” Is no longer something we hear all too often from people with dogs that can’t be restrained by anything less than a cruise ship anchor, after their “loving family pet” has mauled a grown man to death in a park, or dismembered a toddler in their own home?
People often compare this argument to the argument against guns in America, however, a gun is not an autonomous animal capable of physically overpowering its owner and firing itself at will; dogs are.

Posts like this are so awful. Have you looked at the list of children killed by dogs?

So many non walking babies who were asleep in their cots at the time of the attack.

Children doing high risk activities like building a snowman, lying on the sofa unwell, talking to a friend.

Blaming the dead victims is such a horrible thing to do.

Of course children killed by dogs aren’t to blame. Of course not. But the adults who put them in that position are to blame. I have two giant dogs. I love them and they are very well behaved. No way would I leave them alone with a sleeping baby or allow a toddler to clamber over them.

But that is not what the poster above was saying, @Wolfiefan .

don't run around them screaming, don't try and take food or toys from their mouths, don't flap your arms around them, don't grab them or hug them, don't bother them when they're sleeping

So then we read of a seven year old boy who had his jugular vein bit through - “The dog, being walked by two boys, 7 and 8, leapt at a snowman being built by the victim and his 8-year-old friend.”

And yes the dog should not have been left with children, I agree, but that’s not exactly a comfort for the child building a snowman, is it?

Or how about the one month old baby girl who was “laying in a bouncing chair by her mother’s feet when the dog suddenly grabbed the baby by the head.” Again, we can argue about dogs and babies but the mother was right there.

I am not going to go through every case because they are too upsetting. And I am not disagreeing that in some - not all - of the cases that neglect of the children was a factor. But that is hugely different to children taking toys away from dogs and screaming at them. In most cases as far as I can see the children did nothing wrong at all. There is only one case - where a child climbed into a garden either to get a ball or as a prank - where he was savaged by Rottweilers. Clearly he should not have done that but an old fashioned telling off, grounding or no TV is an appropriate punishment, not being so badly mutilated that apparently his own mother did not recognise him.

We can’t, IMO, have dogs that do this in a civilised society.

To be honest, some victims are to blame for being bitten, but due to naivety or not understanding dog behaviour.

Educating children how to behave around dogs is just one part of the puzzle to help prevent dog bites. Yes it is often technically a child's fault they got bitten, but it's the adult's fault for not managing the dog and the child's interactions properly - whether that be the parent of both the dog and the child in the home, or someone out walking a reactive dog off-lead near unrelated children. My dog is reactive to other dogs, but loves people, she's never off lead in public areas but she's also tiny and more likely to injure herself than the other way round.

To use your example of children out building a snowman in a public area or a front garden, then there should be an adult in the vicinity with their wits about them, not staring into their phone. The children should know how to behave if a dog comes running up to them (the answer is to stand still and quiet, not run away screaming which just agitates an already agitated dog, assuming this is just an excited dog which is the more common occurrence) And any owner of a dog who is known to be excitable or reactive, should be keeping that dog on a lead, or muzzled if they are liable to mouth when excited.

And for your example of a dog suddenly grabbing at the baby, there will have been signs prior this dog could have snapped at or been uncomfortable around this tiny human in a strange bouncing thing, but the signs were missed by the parents. It never happens out of thin air.

Education is the answer, not banning of breeds or crossbreeds, which we already see just plain doesn't work. I know two of Labrador cross puppies that came into a rescue, one of the litter was typed as a Pit Bull and put to sleep, but the other wasn't deemed of type and was rehomed. Puppies. Not even a purebred anything. Bans don't work.

Fatal dog attacks aren’t like an “ordinary” bite situation.

They have done research in America about correlation of factors and what come out on top are the dog has a history of abuse and neglect, their owner* isn’t present and the victim has some sort of weakness, age, disability etc that makes them vulnerable.

• sometimes the legal owner is present, but it’s not someone the dog is actually used to.

If you look at cases in the U.K., most of them also fit that.

I suspect there would have been warning signs that the dog wasn’t stable, but in general over time, not necessarily anything that could be picked up on right at that precise moment in time to do anything about it.

No clue why I got weird layout there 🤣

I don’t really want or need to be educated on how dogs show aggression to be honest @bunnygeek . I just want to go about my day and business, and have my children do the same.

Read bits but not the full thread. I don’t agree with BSL, it doesn’t work. We have more bite deaths now than we did before we had BSL, and did we ever have dogo argentinos in this country anyway?

It needs to be harder to get a dog.
The trends for these huge powerful dogs is so scary. I’ve had dogs and been quite involved in the dog community my whole life. 15 years ago I knew one person with a mali, who did shuzthund to a high level, and one person with a cane corso, who had to import it as there were so few in the country, and the breeder flew over (at my friends expense) to do a home check before she could have a puppy. They are EVERYWHERE now.
I actually got talking to a vet in the pub last week, who was saying a huge thing for them is they feel their needs to be a process to report cropped eared dogs and it should be SO hard to own them, and that at least would squeeze out that practice. You should need paperwork confirming that that dog is either rescued or from a country where it is legal. So many people claim it’s imported and then can’t think where from when asked…

Dog licenses were a bit like car tax and very easy to get hold of but some sort of system, like horse passports, where you need paperwork to own the animal and should be able to produce it when asked might work. It might not stop morons getting hold of dogs but might stop them being able to keep hold of them, and eventually might put them off?

The thing is, that’s the sort of stuff I think people should know and more people knowing it would stop things like random bites and help people not develop phobias or just being harassed by dogs.

But fatal dog attacks are not that. Most dogs - even ones willing to bite, wouldn’t attack like that, it’s not just a dog with minor issues suddenly escalating to a bite or a stable dog who’s just had too much stress and will give a snap.

Breed bans don’t work, but that level of education isn’t the answer either.

To use your example of children out building a snowman in a public area or a front garden, then there should be an adult in the vicinity with their wits about them, not staring into their phone.

Oh, so now it's the child's parents that are to blame. Ok. This thread is about massive, powerful dogs. Even a parent that's fully focused on their child might struggle to fight these things off.

The child building the snowman was in 1988, so I doubt the parents were staring at their phone but what an awful post. I can’t believe people are so determined to blame babies and children and parents who have done nothing wrong at all.

There is only one figure in these scenarios that isn't a "victim" and that's the human responsible for training the dog.

When a dog is involved in a fatal attack, the human dies, and so inevitably does the dog. The focus should be on the person who was responsible for handling that dog, for training that dog, they are the ones that need all the weight coming down, not the breed.

I don't see how encouraging people to be aware of dog behaviour, especially the more subtle behaviours like how dogs try to avoid situations they are uncomfortable with, and how to avoid and prevent dog bites is "victim blaming", it's learning how to be a responsible human.

@bunnygeek you said that the parents of the child killed when building a snowman were staring at their phones. That was disgusting victim blaming and undermines anything else you might say to be honest. (And it wasn’t even true.)

And perhaps you would have a point that it was the owners to blame except in a lot of cases the owners were also the victims - maybe of their own stupidity if you see the world like that, or maybe of misguided kindness or maybe of a mix of the two. Either way, I don’t think that anyone deserves that sort of death to be honest. I am hard pushed to think of a worse way to go. Reading about the babies killed by dogs makes me feel very, very ill

If laymen require training in dog behaviour/body language to be safe around someone’s dog in a mundane setting, that dog should not be out in public without a muzzle. A regular dog should be trained in bite inhibition and socialised enough that any concern about the dog reacting to anything they find uncomfortable in the actions of a strange person should be monitored by the owner of the dog. My dogs wouldn’t be likely to bite anyone, and if they were in an uncomfortable situation, I’d be monitoring them and get them out of that situation well before they became uncomfortable enough to resort to biting.
People are right in saying that dogs show signs, but it’s the dog OWNER that should be watching for them. I don’t expect random 12 year olds in the park to know, so I make certain I DO.

@Giltedged to be fair to @bunnygeek I believe they meant an adult owner of the dog being walked by children, not an adult responsible for the children building snowmen, and I do see a lot of people walking their dogs off lead, staring at their phones, these days, paying absolutely no mind to the dog.

@bunnygeek

"The children should know how to behave if a dog comes running up to them (the answer is to stand still and quiet, not run away screaming which just agitates an already agitated dog, assuming this is just an excited dog which is the more common occurrence)"

I think we all know we shouldn't rely on children's behaviour to avoid dog attacks. I don't know any child that would stay still if a strange dog comes running up to them, no matter how many times they are told. Even children who have their own dogs in the home.
And I agree with @tabulahrasa fatal attacks are a totally different nature to bite attacks (which most of the actions in your post would help to avoid). But in a fatal attack there isn't anything the victims or the owner of the dog (if they aren't the victim) can do. That dog will kill, unless it itself is killed.
I'm all for powerful breeds. The majority of them are absolutely beautiful beings, and live harmoniously amongst us. But there are exceptions to the rule.

My issue is that an abused shih tzu mix, recently rehomed, is not CAPABLE of a fatal attack, an abused XL Bully is, and even non-abused dogs can attack, not necessarily with the INTENT to kill, but due to a neurological disorder or other illness, that may cause a fatal attack outside of the dog’s control, and you can expect most adults to be able to hold off an attack from a small, or even medium breed dog, fairly easily, compared to an attack by a dog that weighs more than a lot of grown women.

Except that’s not true, the one linked up the thread was a medium sized dog, the mother couldn’t get it off, she ended up going and getting a knife to stab it.

A Lakeland terrier, Jack Russell and a dachshund cross have all been involved in fatal attacks in the U.K.

Staffies appear multiple times on the fatal attack list, they are barely even a medium breed.

The dachshund attack always gets brought up. It wasn’t the UK, it was the US and they were pit bull crosses here

There has been one fatal attack by a Lakeland terrier cross in the UK in the last forty years, the victim was a three week old baby. This article explains in more detail. Notably “the attack by the foot-tall dog could easily have been stopped, but the father did not wake up and the mauling may have lasted up to 20 minutes.”

Then we have a six day old baby girl who was killed by a Jack Russell in 1986, a three month old baby boy who was killed by a SBT and a Jack Russell in 2009, and an eight day old boy killed by a Jack Russell in 2012.

The other fatal attacks are all bull breeds, Rottweilers or German shepherds apart from two huskies and a cane corso.

Maybe you (in a general sense) are against banning breeds and maybe you genuinely feel it doesn’t work - that’s fine, but the tiresome insistence that all breeds are equally dangerous just means no one gets anywhere. It isn’t true.

“The dachshund attack always gets brought up. It wasn’t the UK, it was the US and they were pit bull crosses”

That wasn’t the one I meant, though I did misremember and it was in Ireland.

“Maybe you (in a general sense) are against banning breeds and maybe you genuinely feel it doesn’t work - that’s fine, but the tiresome insistence that all breeds are equally dangerous just means no one gets anywhere. It isn’t true.”

Actually I was trying to point out that size and being able to physically overpower a dog is often irrelevant in fatal attacks.

Often there’s no-one else present, when there is, by the time there’s anything to react to, it’s usually too late.

That isn’t breed specific.

But breed isn’t irrelevant in fatal attacks.

There are a tiny handful of exceptions but they really aren’t the norm, and that narrows even further when you look at adults killed by dogs.

Fatal attacks aren’t the norm (thankfully) they are all a tiny handful of cases.

The problem with focussing on the breed is that firstly, they’re all outliers really, but also, “those breeds” didn’t just appear, they’re not imported pedigree dogs, they’re mixes of dogs that were already here... so they’re not the answer as to why fatal attacks are rising.

We have a culture of irresponsible breeding and irresponsible ownership of dogs, if the focus of fatal attacks is breed then you carry on ignoring that and nothing changes except which breed is getting looked at.

If the breed getting looked at is a scapegoat for all attacks, but responsible for few to none, I’d agree, but it’s one particular mixed breed that’s responsible for a disproportionate majority of attacks.

Firstly it entirely depends how you break down fatal attacks, which time period you look at, what types you’re putting together as the same “breed” or breed type.

But mostly it is a few, last year there were 10 fatal attacks, which is a huge rise, and obviously 10 too many, but it’s still a very small number, every dog in that list accounts for 10% of fatal attacks last year.

Pitbulls can actually pull 5000lbs / 2.25 metric tonnes.

A Bull XL is about three times the size of a pitbull, so I'd expect it to be able to pull at least 5 tonnes, but pulling ability may increase exponentially.

There is no way any human could control a Bully XL that has entered 'maul mode'.

Their bloodsport genes and ultra high 'gameness' make them completely unsuitable as any kind of pet. They're an abomination created by humans and need to be humanely removed from the planet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gameness

Dog fighting breeds[edit]In dog fighting pitbulls bred for gameness are valued as the ability to not quit, despite injury, dehydration, exhaustion or broken bones.[2][3] As one writer describes it, "Game is the dog that won't quit fighting, the dog that'll die in the ring, the dog that'll fight with two broken legs." The scope and method of training to develop a game dog varies dramatically depending on the level and experience of the dog-fighter. Most "gamebred" dogs have a high pain threshold.