this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2025
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No need to be snarky here. It’s just good practice to provide a source when making claims to statistics. “Just Google it” doesn’t validate a position.
Now that you’ve provided a source, we can talk about the information at hand instead of talking out of our asses.
With the source you’re quoting, and in fact the specific sentence in this Wikipedia article, the sources provided for that claim are 3 news articles and a UK government webpage.
That government web page details the way someone can safely and legally have a dog of these breeds.
With the news reporting, even a cursory glance at those news articles show that there could be reasons other than the biology of the breed in play here.
Asks for sources. When gets source, comes up with any excuse including government figures as to why they're wrong.
You don't want source, you just don't to believe it because you always had that believe that all dogs are good, they just got bad owners. Maybe you're partly right, owners and training plays a big part, but even with that, these dogs are overwhelming involved in incidents and fatal incidents in the UK despite there being horrible dog owners of every breed.
The allowing these dog breeds was a compromise to try and get the legislation through, but most know these dogs are bred for fighting, and are so strong, they are lethal. Even families who cared for the dogs and loved them well, and one accident, and a child is dead. Ooops. Some dog breeds just ain't safe.
I'm curious, do you have any experience with training and handling dogs? Because breeding really doesn't work in the way you are implying or assuming.
Describing these dogs as bred for fighting implies that these dogs are pre-programmed to attack and fight. That's not how dogs work. Breeding for traits is about selecting for particular behavioural and physical attributes. "Fighting" isn't an isolated behaviour, it's a collection of traits like defensiveness, aggression, threat identification and so on, and to "fight" dogs need training on these.
As previous commenters have said, in the tragic cases where bully breeds have been involved in lethal attacks there are indications that the dogs were not handled/trained/socialized correctly.
Nevertheless, to account for the kind of disproportionality on display, it seems to me there's only really two ways to explain it:
Unfortunately I can't find statistics for the UK, but these statistics for the USA show that pitbulls account for 22 lethal attacks a year. That's out of roughly 4.5 million pitbulls (source). That is an incredibly low percentage, even if it is higher than the percentage of lethal attacks by other types of dog breed, to the point where we're comparing differences of fractions of a percent.
To give that figure of number of fatalities some perspective, roughly the same number of people (21) are killed per year by cattle.
But taking either of your points to be true, both these cases can be resolved without banning (and putting down or destroying) particular breeds, for example:
There are existing organisations and dog clubs that already offer some of these services, and would be well-placed to tie in as providers if these things were legislated.
This is basically a forum, people discuss things on forums. There are statistics that you provided and now they're discussing them.