Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected] or [email protected]
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
There are always exceptions, there are also Labradors or whatever race you want to name that were raised properly and attacked anyways. But as a general rule the life that a dog led is the deciding factor, a Labrador mistreated and made to fight others will have a lot more chance of attacking someone than a pitbull who's been raised in an apartment chilling on the sofa with kids.
I've had almost every races considered dangerous, and never ever have one of my dogs attacked anyone. I have home movies of me as a kid using a great dane as a horse, wrestling a German shepherd, and sleeping in the same bed as a doberman, and the only time in my life I was bit by a dog it was a miniature pinscher.
Dogs are rational beings, they can be taught, claiming a race is more aggressive than others because it's responsible for more bites to humans, without considering that it's also more popular by the people who are assholes to their dogs and mistreat them until they become aggressive is akin to claiming that black humans are more aggressive than white humans because statistically more violent crime is committed by blacks without taking into consideration the social and historical differences that created a scenario in which a disproportionate amount of the marginalized society is black. Just like how it's not a race problem with humans it's the same for dogs, you're completely ignoring the environment in which each individual being was brought up, which has a lot more influence in the aggressiveness outcome, and trying to cast judgement on the race as a whole, in short you're being racist. Put on any other individual of any other race through the same ordeal and you're likely to get the same outcome in average.
That's not a "general rule" based on the statistics. Which you try to excuse by saying "all pitbulls have shitty owners therefore they all bite more and kill a shitload of people despite being less populous than other breeds". Except statistics doesn't work that way, not with a large sample, such as "the entire breed of dogs". So according to statistics with a huge sample size, pitbulls are more deadly than any other breed.
Your argument about human race and trying to somehow equate some sort of "dog racism" is ridiculous and I won't even dignify that with a response.
Here's your argument summarized:
Is that your argument? Or am I misinterpreting?
Assuming that is your argument, you're correct in saying that, but what you don't understand is that "statistically abnormally dangerous" is not the same as dangerous or aggressive. You're forgetting one of the most important rules in statistics: Correlation does not imply causation. You have a correlation between dog races and violence, and your conclusion is that the race causes the violence, ignoring all other possible explanations for why it could be that there's a correlation there, for example my example of "some people who mistreat dogs prefer pitbulls, therefore pitbulls are statistically abnormally mistreated".
Following a couple links from the Wikipedia page on list of fatalities by dogs you will find this quote:
Which links to this, in which you can find this quote about pitbulls:
Which is very similar to the point I'm trying to make, remember correlation does not imply causation, that is a very slippery slope that anyone with a basic understanding of statistics knows.