hey did you watch the philosynoir video on pitbulls? i feel super vindicated for thinking that pitbull hate and the way people talk about them doesnt pass the sniff test.
I hadn't seen it before now, but I have talked about and shared this very topic and in fact many of the sources he uses to draw mostly the same conclusions.
I am someone who is fairly frank about aggression in dogs, being that aggressive behavior in dogs drives a significant portion of my hobby Dog Attack Simulator. I spend quite a lot of time around dogs that do actually want to bite people, and I am constantly a little frustrated with the way people who do not engage in this hobby or profession act like you have to force the dogs to behave this way. Aggression is just as genetic as any other instinct-based dog behavior. The difference is what we as humans consider appropriate forms and contexts for aggression, and what we consider inappropriate.
The American Pit Bull Terrier was created in and for bloodsport. This is not an untrue statement. As a result, many of them are at least somewhat intolerant to other dogs and I find many of them to be pretty bad communicators with other dogs, while also being prone to emotional highs and rough play. This isn't necessarily a bad thing- in fact these are all traits that I find endearing in the pit bull clients I've liked over the years.
They also were intended to be incredibly safe to handle because often times the dog fighters are standing in the same ring or pit as the dogs are going at each other, and need to be able to do so safely without getting drug into the fight or onto the floor- which is an incredibly dangerous place to be as predatory drift is very likely to trigger once you're in that state. As much as humans are omnivorous predatory animals, we act a lot like prey once a different predator has hold of us, and that does include dogs (and is why the most serious maulings often result in death or disfigurement as the dogs tear off pieces and consume them- predatory sequence is real). To prevent this, the goal was to create a dog that would A: fight without stopping B: not be discouraged by pain (we call this "game" or "gameness" and it was the actual point of the pit bull, with dog fights simply being a means to test gameness in a dog) and C: not bite the fuck out of the human pulling it out of the fight once there was a clear winner. Fights were not always to the death- in fact most fights did not end in death even for the loser dog.
But that does not mean that pit bulls are uniquely evil or dangerous or aggressive. As mentioned in the video, many other breeds have been used for dog fighting and many additional breeds have been used primarily for the maiming and mauling and, yes, even killing and consumption of human beings. And yet, while there may be breed bans and heavy suspicion of the safety of those breeds as well, pit bulls seem to be what most people get stuck on and focus on when it comes to aggression and human injury.
To put it simply, the Belgian malinois has been used for years as a police and military dog, is known to be heavily inclined to biting without prompting, exists on a hair trigger, and often delights in biting for the sake of biting. In the world of bitesports, protection, and working dogs, these are traits that are lauded and celebrated. And yet for some reason I have had *malinois owners* who are happy with these traits tell me to my face that they will never trust a pit bull and think they should all be destroyed. I'll let you guess the average color of skin someone with a malinois might have.
jacobvanloon
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