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I think this graphic should also be taking into account the number of owned dogs by breed, kinda like per capita. Because what if almost everyone owns pit bulls, and all the others are just outliers, then yeah, most attacks are by pit bulls because there’s more of them.
In my opinion, this would probably actually make pits look even worse, but whatever end result would actually be more representative of real data
A lot of mixed breeds are labeled as “pit bulls” which can skew the data as well. There’s several different types of “pit bulls” like American Staffordshire Terrier.
And as another commenter pointed out, this graph is coming from a biased source.
i have seen posts on other platforms of people being obsessed with the GSD, but they dont want to deal with the high energy of the breed, so they try to create new 'mixes with them to make them mellow and call it a "certified breed".
If you look at the chart "mixed breed" is it's own category and they excluded reports where the breeds were unknown.
And didn't disclose how many there were of those. For all we know, that was the vast majority of cases.
Even if pit bulls are a minority of the population and the majority of attacks that doesn't mean they're aggressive, it shows there's a correlation, but not a causation link. Read my other reply, but in short, this is the same argument racists assholes use to say black people are aggressive, because they're a minority of the population but are the majority of homicide offenders.
Dude, you've spent a long time arguing from a point of view that fear of pitbulls is equivalent to racism.
Doing this is trivialising racism and painting a breed bred for agression and fighting as innocent victims of oppression.
It's bogus and offensive and trivialises racism. Stop it.
You should be ashamed of yourself.
And I suppose you also think that in this comment I'm trivialising the struggles of pit bulls by comparing them to apples.
Bad logic is bad logic, whether applied to dogs, humans, apples or whatever. The fact that you can instinctively understand the argument is wrong when applied to people is the exact reason I used that, so people would understand it's a bad argument that proves nothing.
Racism is racism, whether it's direct and obvious or just casually equating ethnic minorities to the most feared "dangerous" dogs whilst claiming that you're "just explaining logical errors".
No, you don't get to pretend you didn't make an awful and offensive analogy (based on your irrational belief that the pitbulls are falsely maligned).
If the logic is as flawed as you claim, there must be hundreds of analogies you can draw that aren't racist and don't equate black people in the USA with pitbulls.
There might be, but I've only ever heard "X is a minority yet causes the majority of fatalities" used for two Xs, it's bad logic in both cases, it would be bad logic in any other case too, feel free to find me another example of that logic that people instinctively understand it's wrong and I'll use that next time.
Just fucking stop the racism.
It's not my job to write your reality denying nonsense for you.
If your one and only recourse is to call black people violent dogs, you're the one whose logical thinking is broken.
STOP with the racist crap.
At no point in my reply did I mention race, I said the argument of "X is a minority, yet causes the majority of fatalities, therefore X is dangerous" is a bad argument. That is the whole of my point.
Two possibilities exist: Either you think it's a good argument argument, or you don't.
Which is it? Do you think the argument "X is a minority yet causes the majority of fatalities, therefore X is dangerous" is a good argument?
I think you're a closet racist who won't give up comparing black people to violent dogs even when asked not to, and that you like to hide behind generalities.
Three possibilities exist:
I thought it was option 1 at first. It isn't.
The way you're behaving reveals to me that it was your intent all along to make this false equivalence because you thought it was a cool own-the-libs arguing position. If that really isn't you, I beg of you, take a step back and reconsider how you're communicating.
I have at no point compared black people to dogs, or even mentioned anything related to race beyond a comparison of statistical facts to showcase how ridiculous the argument is. You're creating a Straw man to attack and deflecting my question, so we'll keep going in circles forever, because answering a straight yes or no would compromise you.
Read everything that I posted so far and you will realize the entire time what I'm saying is "a small subgroup causing the most fatalities, therefore subgroup aggressive" is a bad argument. That is the whole of what I'm saying, and you haven't replied whether you think that is a good or a bad argument. The reason why you haven't done so is simple:
If you say it's a bad argument you're agreeing with me, therefore no reply is needed.
If you say it's a good argument then you're agreeing with any racist asshole who uses the same argument applied to people, and you should take a long hard look at yourself to see whether that's the kind of peraon you want to be. And honestly, I don't want to keep talking to anyone who thinks like this as they have been so brainwashed they won't get convinced by a random person online.
In reality I'm fairly confident you want the argument to apply to dogs but not to people, and that's just not how logic works. Facts are facts, you can't disagree with them, the conclusion from those facts is logic, and that can be flawed (as is for the case of the proof of aggressive behavior). So when confronted with the fact that you're defending a logic argument that can be made about people, instead of thinking "huh, I guess it's a bad argument" you go "I'm not racist, you're racist", that is called deflection. So you attack a Straw man argument that I'm comparing people to dogs so that you don't have to admit that your prejudice against pitbulls made you agree with an undefendable racist argument. Still the conclusion is the same, there's no reason to reply to someone who's being fallacious at best and making bad faith arguments at worst. If you honestly expect any answer from me your reply should clearly state whether you consider the "X is a small subgroup yet causes the majority of fatalities, therefore X is dangerous" a good argument.
"I'm not being racist, but..." - you.
The way you’re behaving reveals to me that it was your intent all along to make this false equivalence between black Americans and aggressive, child-killing dogs, because you thought all along it was a cool own-the-libs arguing position.
I think you're the racist asshole comparing black people to dogs
You need to work on your reading comprehension, I compared arguments, not people. The two are an example of "a minority of a group causes the majority of the fatalities, therefore that group is dangerous", showing an example of that same argument people can instinctively understand it's wrong.
Except no- it doesn't.
Take a pitbull and a labrador. They aren't simply the same animal with different colours.
Labradors were bred to assist fishermen in retrieving fish. So this would mean being controlled and obedient, not eating what they were sent to retrieve, etc.
Pitbulls were bred to fight other dogs- they were bred for fighting and destroying and that's it. They're essentially weapons that decide for themselves. Sure, any animal can be tamed, but it takes effort.
For your argument to work, you have to "concede" (although I wouldn't use that term because it's an outright lie) to the racist narrative or what have you that black people are inferior and have less control and are inherently less civilised than white people due to their race. So your argument is a racist one, because it assumes and only works that black people are significantly different to white people, like a different breed of human.
The differences between black people and white people in reality are negligible. They're not different breeds, they're both homosapiens. Essentially it would be like arguing black labradors are more violent than white labradors, which just simply isn't true.
Not only that, but you're trivialising the struggle of black people against racist oppression to that of people whining against their fighting dog being banned for good reason.
Worst of all, if they were the same argument, it's like telling racists that comparing black people to white people is like comparing pitbulls to labradors, which would bolster their argument massively, as they're completely different breeds of dog.
I urge you to recant your argument, you're basically saying black people are like a more aggressive, dangerous, and less controlled breed of human compared to white people which is an absolutely vile, disgusting, and false thing to say.
None of that matters to the point that "X is a minority yet produces the majority of Y" in a vacuum is an example of a "correlation does not imply causation" fallacy. More specifically it's an example of Simpson's paradox, where you look at the data as a whole and derive a statistically significant result that X is more prone to Y, but if you were to normalize for some factors (in both these cases standard of living) you would see that there's absolutely no correlation between the 2.
I never compared dog to people, I'm comparing the argument to show how it doesn't make any sense. All of the new arguments you pulled there are an entire different can of worms, but in short while you're correct that artificial selection of dog breeds has altered then genetically to a greater extent than what natural selection did for humans, it's still the same species in both cases and your argument sounds straight out of a Nazi science book in Eugenics.
Let me be very clear here since you seem to not be able to understand, I'm saying people who claim black people are more aggressive are stupid idiots who can't understand basic statistics when it's starting them in the face. I'm saying there are a lot of factors at play here and reducing things to a simple "the majority of attacks are caused by X subgroup" ignores all of them and is a BAD ARGUMENT.
I think that the problem here is that you can't seem to accept that the argument is bad, therefore when presented with the exact same argument applied to people you don't stop to think that if the logic doesn't apply here it also doesn't apply there. It's like someone said "I never met a green bird, therefore no bird is green" and I replied "that's the same as saying I never met an asian therefore they don't exist" and you went into a rampant about the struggles of Asians in our society.
We all have a single common ancestor so where do you draw the line? All humans are genetically closer to each other than dog breeds are. That's the fault of eugenics. The theory isn't wrong as it falls off of the theory of evolution, the facts are wrong because humans are so generically close to each other regardless of race. Dog breeds are different to the point that it's scientific fact that they have different traits. Your argument just digs your grave further as you have to say different races of humans are like different breeds of dogs. Which in fact is a racist narrative - once again you're helping contribute to the eugenicist argument by saying humans are like dogs.
"Correlation doesn't equal causation" yet when 99% of lighting strikes happen during a storm, maybe it's worth investigating if the storms contribute to lightning strikes happening. People have investigated this with black crime statistics, and turns out that it was systemic racism. So thus it was debunked. The argument for pitbulls is purely emotional. Sure they may be as aggressive as chihuahuas, but I can beat a chihuahua in a fight. A pitbull, probably not.
I'm not drawing the line, you are when you claim races exist as anything more than social constructs over shared characteristics.
In any case, all of what you're saying are red herrings ignoring the point I'm making that the logic is flawed. Which you clearly agree with:
If the argument was solid it wouldn't need investigation, the fact that investigation disproves that argument lets you know it's not solid logic.
Since similar studies have not been conducted for dogs and we can't exclude other factors (for example that assholes who want a dog to mistreat prefer aggressive breeds), the argument is just as pointless as it is for people.
Race is a social construct, dog breeds very much aren't. They were bred for a reason. Numerous countries, including my own, have banned pitbulls for that reason.
Red herring: That is an entirely different argument from the one I'm replying to and has absolutely no bearing on the point I'm trying to make.
That being said you should really pick up a history book sometime, slaves were also sometimes bred in much the same way dogs are now.
Plus dog breeds are also mostly social constructs, to the point that the majority of Pitbull attacks are not actually done by Pitbulls but were misidentified.
It'll be hard for breeds of slaves to become "lesser" beings because it's still humans v humans. There are some groups for example that are slightly better at diving because they live near water, and black people do fare better in the sun compared to white people. But again, the differences there are negligible.
Human is a species, dog is also a species. The exact same argument could be made that it's still dogs v dogs. The only difference is that slave breeding didn't happened often or long enough, humans are not special we're animals and subject to the same biology that dogs, our lifespan are longer so it takes longer to breed us into anything as drastically different as a Chihuahua and a Rottweiler but it could be done just as easily and using the exact same techniques. And biologically speaking the differences between dog breeds is very minimal, they're still the same species, and still can inter breed, it's just a matter of different phenotypes which would erode in a couple of inter-breed generations.
You need to stop thinking that humans are special in any way or that races/breeds exist as anything more than "these look similar". Sure, there is a genetic explanation of why they look similar, but claiming dogs that were bred for X are lesser, or more aggressive or anything is a slippery slope argument when humans have also been bred in recent history, and if you had read any statistics about this you would know that in both cases once you normalize for standard of living these differences disappear. In short the data proves that a Pitbull is not statistically significantly more aggressive than a Labrador that were raised in the same condition, but take a Labrador from puppy and spank him daily show him no love and make him fight for food and then act surprised Pikachu face when he attacks someone, it's just that there exists a correlation between pieces of shit who like to do that and people who like Pitbulls.
In any case, this has gone terribly out of the point I was making originally, which you never replied to, and I'm tired of every answer you pulling a new Red Herring to avoid acknowledging that "X is a minority yet it's responsible for the majority of fatalities, therefore X is violent" is a bad argument.
The number of dogs doesn't matter, it's tracking the number of human beings killed by the breed.
Yeah, Chihuahua might bite you, they aren't going to kill you.
What? The number of dogs absolutely matters. This is like, basic statistics.
Again, what we’re shown here is the number of fatal injuries, but we don’t necessarily know the distribution of dog breeds. Imagine testing this by putting a child in a room with one of each breed of dog and seeing if they get attacked, except with one breed we put in 200 dogs instead of just one, odds are that yeah, one (or multiple) of those dogs is aggressive because there’s so many of them.
This example is basically what the data above represents, it doesn’t consider that maybe pits actually very rarely bite people, but there’s just so many pits that more bites happen.
It is my personal opinion that pits are a more dangerous breed, but I won’t let that cloud my vision of accurately representing data.
For this to be reflective of an even amount of bites per number of each breed of dog owned, half the dogs owned would have to be pit bulls. That doesn't match my very casual observations. This site, whose accuracy and validity I haven't bothered to verify in any way, puts pit bulls at about 20% of the dogs sent to shelters. It seems very likely that the dog fatalities are outsized relative to the number of pit bulls owned in America.
I totally agree with that. The problem is that this graphic doesn’t represent it. The fact that it’s not an equal #/each is exactly what I want to be shown, but the problem is that this graphic doesn’t show that
The number of dogs is irrelevant because the statistic is counting human deaths by dogs.
You wouldn't say "well, how many people are there?" either.
Think about it in the extremes.
If there were a billion poodles out in the world, and they caused 10 human deaths.
And there were 50 terriers out there and they caused 10 human deaths.
Which breed would you buy for your grandmother?
For every five terriers out there, one is killing someone on average. I would go with the Poodle.
You haven’t made any argument against the information presented. You will not get a response from me unless you actually respond instead of repeating the same statement.
Again, you are willfully misunderstanding what the statistic is stating:
Here are the total number of PEOPLE killed by dogs.
Of that number, here's how many PEOPLE were killed by each breed.
This isn't tracking bites, or overall attacks, it's tracking human deaths.
A similar stat would be tracking vehicular accident deaths, if in a year you have accidents involving "brand x" accounting for more vehicular fatalities than all other brands combined, that points to a massive, massive problem with the brand.
It doesn't matter how many cars there are, that's not what the stat is tracking.
But if you really want to know, Google says there are around 90 million dogs in the US and 4.5 to 18 million pit bulls depending on how you count. So 5% to 20% of the dog population accounting for 66% of the human deaths.
Then replace every time I said “bite” with “someone died”. That doesn’t change anything about my argument or the validity of it.
In your car example, that is exactly wrong, let’s say that 99 out of 100 cars are Toyota Corollas, and as a whole, they get in 50 fatal accidents every year, but the remaining 1 car is a Ford F150 which got in 1 fatal accident every year. Does this mean that corollas are more dangerous? No! It just means that there are more corollas and therefore more opportunities to kill.
The correct way to represent this is as a percentage of each car brand. 50 accidents divided by 99 corollas is a little less than 50%. 1 accidents divided by 1 F150 is about 100%. According to this, F150’s are actually more dangerous because 100% of them get in fatal accidents, whereas only 50% of corollas get in fatal accidents.
Good on you for looking into the actual data, but the problem is that this specific graphic isn’t showing the actual data. The only reason it looks correct is by coincidence.
Sure it matters, if you don't normalize for sample size your data is meaningless. Here's a similar example:
You would think that red apples spoil 10x easier than green ones, but you're missing the crucial information that my farm produced 10.000 red apples and 1.000 green ones, so in both cases it represented 1% of the whole amount.
This could be the same thing, if there are more Pitbulls than other races it would be expected that they bite more in absolute numbers.