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this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2026
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When you look at annual statistics of dog bite fatalities, pit bulls aren't just the #1 cause of dog bite deaths, they account for more deaths than all dog breeds COMBINED.
According to Wikipedia (I understand the irony here) dogsbite dot org has been accused of publishing misleading and inaccurate information. However, pit bulls are terriers and terriers don't let go when they bite. Most terriers are small ratting dogs where this doesn't matter so much.
When I was bit by a pit, I was in a fight with his uh, human. The dude was being a dick. The dog looked at me, looked at his "owner" and then lunged at me. I put up my left arm to block my face, thats where he caught me, in my upper arm. The guy jumpped on the dog, started punching it in the head (this guy was a complete moron) and he wouldnt let go.
I played dead. It was isntict, I dont know. After what felt like enterity, I just, took out a deep sigh, pushed all the air from me, went limp. the dog let go, the guy whos dog it was threw him in the bathroom and locked him in there, and I went to the hospital.
My neighbors had a pit that hated other dogs. My sister brought her dog over and it escaped the backyard and jumped through an empty screen door to attack her. I was right there on the porch though and got the dog by the collar. As soon as I got it away from my sister's dog, it was wagging tail and happy face. Pit bulls are capable of intense focus when they have identified "prey." Most dog owners are not equipped to deal with the reality of training a dog like that. Luckily I only got grazed in that altercation.
I worked with a lady who had an Akita that did this - she got a call at work one day that her dog had attacked the neighbor's dog. Had busted through the screen door, jumped OVER the pool, busted through the pool screen, jumped over the fence, and attacked the neighbor's dog, because she could see it in the neighbor's yard.
Dogsbite.org is super diligent about showing the supporting evidence. For example, the last complete year they have is 2019:
https://www.dogsbite.org/dog-bite-statistics-fatality-citations-2019.php
Each death marked with multiple citations.
read any of their about us/other similar links and their bias couldnt be more obvious.
especially funny is the page the dedicated towards complaining about how they're the target of a misinformation campaign.
https://blog.dogsbite.org/2022/03/humane-groups-leveling-fake-racism-to-force-pit-bull-agenda-on-insurance.html
majority of studies they link to don't list breed information at all (because it's rarely if ever recorded at hospitals).
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.
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.
It's a pikachu face when you're dog bred to destroy other dogs just so happens to be dangerous, and maybe we really should wipe out that entire breed from existence.
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.
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 only reason that this graphic looks correct is coincidental. 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.
Repeat after me, correlation does not imply causation. Two things can be correlated without there being a cause/effect relationship.
What you're saying is essentially: Pitbull-like races are around 14% of large dogs, but are responsible for 55.9% of fatalities, i.e. more than all other combined. Therefore Pitbulls are dangerous.
I bet you would agree with that logic... Except those are not dog numbers, that's USA statistics on the African-American population. Congratulations on the racist argument.
Similarly to how there are multiple factors that explain the disparity for African-Americans there are also multiple factors at play for dogs, for example:
I'm fairly confident that if you normalize for living conditions the numbers would not show any significant difference for breeds.
Did you just call black people dogs...? What's wrong with you...
No, I showed how the argument of a minority of population causes the majority of fatalities is flawed by showing an example of the same argument no sane person would defend. The argument is ridiculous for pitbulls but people don't see it, use the same argument for people and they see why it's ridiculous.
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.
Answered in the other copy of this reply.
But I whole heartedly believe that pit bulls by nature were meant to be farm dogs. And if you get one and raise them from birth in a good and loving home than bites won't happen. With this statistic did any owner say that yea I hurt my dog but only because he or she deserved it....etc etc etc. I didn't think so. No one man or animal is inherently mean. That is a learned behavior. And with all avenues of information getting to people and children is more likely going to be people who are mean. But born that way. Fuck No. Anyone feel free to prove me wrong for this discussion.
the fuck you mean "by nature"? man made dogs.
I think your thinking of hot dogs.
I'm confused now. Do you genuinely think dogs are a natural species? Because... that might explain a lot about this entire post
Speaking from experience. I adopted a pitbull about 10 years ago. Spent countless hours training it, sent it to a daycare to make sure it was socialized.
Strike 1 was when he got kicked out of the daycare for fighting. Strike 2 was when out of nowhere he bit my friends dog. Strike 3 was when he turned on my border collie and nearly killed her. She was the dog he grew up with and spent every single day with. I had to beat him with a grill spatula to get him to let go, and I was bitten in the process.
My observation with the breed was that they have an instinct built into them and when it triggers they become possessed and they lose all control. Humans don't usually trigger it, but other pets tend to.
That would be expected behaviour, they have been bred to kill other dogs.
Yep. We found a more suitable home for him.
Should have been destroyed. It's a ticking timebomb.
We did fully explain the dogs history to the new owner at least. Honestly at the time I dont think I had it in me to put him down tell you the truth.
Fair enough, there's one thing being on an armchair talking with the benefit of hindsight, and someone else in the moment with something they're attached to.
It's pretty well known they were bred to be fighting dogs for blood sports. It doesn't mean they end up that way, but intervention is needed in places other breeds do not require it.
The real question is "why would you believe that?"
They were bred to kill bulls, bears, and rats, in pits so that none of the animals could escape.
Truly one of the worst takes I have ever read. What you "believe" means nothing.
Pitbulls were bred to be as aggressive and strong as possible. They are literally attack dogs made for fighting.
It's a shit breed that should be made illegal, period.
Animals aren't mean, but they can be bred to be aggressive and dangerous. A pitbull probably doesn't feel malice, but the reasoning in it's head is incapacitated by years of breeding to essentially be a weapon that will effectively kill and attack ruthlessly. That was it's purpose. It's just following it's instinct. And that's what makes them so dangerous as well, they don't realise it's wrong.