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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
1. ALL dogs can bite, maim or kill (small dogs have killed infants, for ex).

2. Focusing on the breed is a red herring, because there are lines in each breed that can have very different personalities.

3. Focus on the lineage of each individual dog. Some lines have been bred to fight, and those dogs are the most dangerous, because their escalation time from warning signs to killer lunge can be less than a second.

4. Focus on the environment of the puppy. Bite inhibition develops only when the dog is part of a litter that stays with its mother for at least 6 weeks, because that is when puppies learn that hard bites are socially unacceptable and will be met with pain and maternal correction.

5. Conclusion: adopt or rescue at your own risk and advocate for spaying and neutering. If you don't know the parents of the dog, and the puppy history, or worse, if you know that the dog was bred as a fighting dog or that the dog was born in a puppy mill and never socialized, you are putting people at risk. The risk is greater if you adopt a supposedly aggressive breed, but again, this is a red herring. [b]A Golden can kill as well.[/b]

6. In a perfect world, people would get their companions from reputable breeders who breed not only to the physical standard, but also for mellow personalities.

[/quote]

Yet you would be hard-pressed to find an example of that, unlike the many horrifying examples with pits. Breed does matter, and anyone owning a pit is taking a risk.[/quote]
Well, let's see. I also don't know that my husband isn't going to take a gun and shoot me and the children. I read those stories too, quite often in fact. There's a risk. That must mean I shouldn't have a husband, right?--I don't know that he isn't going to snap and kill me. It happens all the time.

I would not have a dog that I was afraid of. I never, not once, feared that our pit bull would hurt me or our children, or anyone else's children. (All bets are off for the intruder who breaks into the house while we're gone). And why is that? The same reason I'm not afraid that my husband will kill me. Because I know them.

I don't blame other people for not knowing my dog, but we had absolute, 100% trust that he would not hurt us. We observed his behavior and demeanor and reactions in all sorts of situations. Because he was solid as a rock, I never, not once, kept my children away from him for fear they would be hurt. If I had had that fear, we wouldn't have kept the dog. The first thing we did when we brought each infant home from the hospital was put the carrier on the floor so the dog could sniff and lick them. As they grew, they crawled over him, ate his food, chewed on his ears. If he got tired of it, he got up and walked away. Of course, he was not chained, he could walk away. And there were no incidents, ever.

So you can say, well, I was lucky. In 15 years of living in a house with children (and cats), somehow no one ever hit the "trigger" to turn on the vicious killer lurking under the surface of that pit bull. Or you could say, that was a good dog, the same as all the millions of other dogs that live in families and are trustworthy and never hurt anyone.[/quote]

It is idiotic thinking like this that makes the world so much harder to live in.[/quote]

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