this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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Highlights: In a bizarre turn of events last month, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced that he would ban American XL bullies, a type of pit bull-shaped dog that had recently been implicated in a number of violent and sometimes deadly attacks.

XL bullies are perceived to be dangerous — but is that really rooted in reality?

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[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

And there it is people Good old American racism.

I'm certain you've also followed the Russian experiment where they managed to take wild foxes and domesticate them in under 50 generations and now you can adopt one as a pet. So what you're telling me is that a dog that has been with humanity for over 10,000 years and then went through a period of roughly 300 years of pit fighting is irrepidly damaged but the fox that went through 15,000 years of being a fox It's just magically now perfect pet in under 100 years. And you're telling me that it's genetics and not nurturing and raising the animal that has an impact okay...

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I mean, to my understanding, those domestic foxes, while tame, are still not quite so perfect of pets as animals that have been bred for longer like dogs are. Though there is no reason it can't be both, while a dog raised to be aggressive will probably be aggressive, and one raised well should be far less likely to be, it's not fair to say that there is no genetic basis for friendliness and aggression, else there would be no need for domestication in the first place. A lot of selective breeding can be done in century, so the past few centuries of what an animal has been selectively bred for probably matter a bit more than the centuries before that, to a point anyway. I doubt anyone is really arguing that pit bulls are irreparably damaged as a whole either, but if an animal has been bred for aggression for awhile, undoing that is going to require breeding for the reverse, or crossbreeding with another line that does not have that trait and selecting offspring that do not display it, or similar.

I'm not really sure what stance to take on pitbulls and similar breeds myself, I've known some people with rather nice ones and it seems to me that any law targeting a specific dog breed is going to be somewhat impractical given that breeds are "fuzzy" categories with ill defined edges, not clear and sharply defined, so determining what animals are close to pitbulls but are not quite, and which are considered to be pitbulls, but barely, is going to be a very difficult line to reliably draw.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Sorry, can you clarify what part of OPs post is racism? Genuinely struggling with that connection.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

They didn't even undergo 300 years of pit fighting.

Handfuls of these dogs kept by handfuls of people engaged in pitbull fighting.

The substantial majority of pitbulls out there were just living their life, living amongst families and children, not bothering anyone.

And if they were bred to fight other dogs, so fucking what?

You can read first-hand accounts from people who are involved in dog fight organizing who said over and over that dogs who are aggressive towards humans were banned from competition and often euthanized.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago

A lot of domestic animals can go feral, as cats will do as kittens, under one generation. Creating a dog breed requires a lot of intentionality — selective breeding and conformance to some kind of breed standard, like making some specific breed of fox into something that can live in a house.

That’s not what is going on with pit bulls in 2023. Such as they can be defined, they’re usually selected for their capability to protect. And otherwise they’re bred randomly with other breeds and maybe lose that capability, but then they’re not pit bulls anymore. and to be honest nobody really knows what their capabilities are at that point. It’s a total mess, it’s nothing like concentratedly breeding non-aggressive, non-asshole foxes relentlessly until you can tolerate each other indoors.

By the way I heard fox piss is.. unsuitable for human co-habitation, is that still a problem?