We had a Pit & another mutt - yes the pit bull was good natured and polite, gentle under normal circumstances, easy to train to be obedient to me - but she was strong as fuck, and if another dog, including our other dog, wanted to fight, she was all in, I do think they are bred to fight. Thankfully she moved out when my daughter moved down the street from us, we would have kept her or the other dog but not both of them. We still get to see her & my kid gets to see the mutt, they are practically next door, but it's better with them living in separate houses.

All that to say - yes they are just dogs, trainable and sweet. But so so strong and willing to fight, you have to be able to redirect them quickly if they see another dog get aggressive.

I've been around dogs my whole life. Big dogs. Mastiffs, Labradoodles, Rhodesian Ridgebacks, German Shepherds, Dobermans... Along with some experience with little dogs. The only dog ever to bite me, or attack my dogs, were pitbulls. Two attacks, my whole life, all pitbulls.

I dunno, man. It's just my personal experience, but shit. I know what kind of dog I don't trust.

Ill die on the hill that no matter the breed the dog will always be as good as their owner but I also have enough empirical knowledge of seeing what pitbulls and other similar breeds are capable of. DONT ADOPT DOGSCUZ YOU WANNA RESCUE THEM! I know every leading heart dog lover will call me crazy but duck that. If you wanna be a good owner to your dog than the time it takes to be a good owner for a puppy you had from birth should be where you start. Then after raising 5 generations, THEN YOU FUCKING IDIOT AND ONLY FICKING THEN you should entertain he idea of helping at your pound with canines who need rehabilitation. All youre doing adopting is talking yourself out of getting another dog. I have seen more people than i can count growing up who go to the dog store, see the posters to rescue, get their dog and either never see it thru its full recovery before getting rid of it or it was the last dog that person pr couple ever got.

From personal experience I had a friend who raised a pit bull from a puppy and his dog was well behaved and trained well. Then when the dog was about 5 years old, it just snapped one day and attacked my friend mauling my friends arm in his bedroom. When he got the dog into the back yard it started ramming the glass door with his head and then ran and scaled a six foot wall and took off never to be seen again. I knew this dog as a puppy and how it was raised so this was a a shock to everyone. This was also in Arizona, where the vet said they have cases of pit bulls “going crazy” from the heat but ever since I have been wary of pit bulls.

dobermans arnt really that aggressive, compared to pitbulls, which are bred for baiting bulls and likely fighting too. dobermans were originally used as guard dogs, or at least escort police in the past. the amount of people owning Huskies, GSD, Mixed breeds and pitbull far outnumber those of dobermans, and poorly trained they all have potential to be aggressive, some more than others due to them being bred to bitey. alot of people cant hand high demands of some breeds.

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.

pit bulls are just better equipped for certain things like using their uniquely powerful, clamping jaws to rip animals apart. pair this with the lowest common denominator human and you have a possible recipe for accident.

I can't speak for every dog and every dog owner, though many anti-pit bull people will tell you they can and that they're all just waiting to bite the face off a child.

What I can say is that, of the pit bulls and pit bull mixes I know, they're lovable softies with their owners, and I know one (our neighbors) that I can say with confidence could not/would not hurt anyone or anything else, as even when another dog attacked him he would not fight back. This dog is in a house with multiple small children, numerous cats, chickens, a turkey, and over multiple years being their neighbor I've never heard of him being hostile towards any of them, he's always been a Very Good Boy.

What I believe it comes down to is that pit bulls are big, strong dogs, with strong jaws, and some people are neglectful owners who fail to socialize them and train them properly. A poorly trained and poorly socialized Yorkie will bite you all the same, it's just you can punt one like a football. People who are not prepared to train their dogs to behave appropriately -- which is a part of caring for them, just as important as grooming or feeding them if not even more important -- should not own dogs, full stop, irrespective of breed.

It is, however, much easier for other people to blame the dog, have the dog put down (and let me say, if they did something bad enough to earn an early departure across the rainbow bridge, rightly so), and then promptly forget about the owner who didn't bother to train them. The owner who will, then, almost certainly, get another dog to neglect.

The vast majority of pit bulls are loving, loyal and make great pets. The problem is if they do attack, they tend to not want to quit attacking. I used to schutzhund train and our club was open to training any breed, we even had a border collie do it for fun. The catchers didn't let pit bulls do it because the way they tend to bite and re-bite wasn't safe for the dog or catcher. Even with my American Bull dog at the time, they asked to see when the last breeding with a pit in her breeding line was just to be safe, and they were more cautious in the beginning with her than the shepard's, rotts, malinois and dobies.

The conversation is nuanced and long, but TLDR is that it is a breed which requires more training than other breeds. It's also important to note that many owners' version of training is ineffective or counter productive.

Pitbulls are highly energetic and much like great Danes, grow up physically much faster than mentally. They end up being an extremely powerful dog, chalk full of muscles, who crave constant attention and behave like a puppy. Well, puppies bite, and when a dog bites you, you tend to address it (give it attention). Compounding this, they're also not very smart and it takes a while to train them. Compounding this further, they have instincts like all dogs where pushing is met with resistance (something Cesar talks about a lot with food etiquette around dogs), and basically everything they do is exaggerated with their enormous energy.

Comparing them to a breed like a Labrador, the obliviousness, energy, strength, and attention needs are not the same.

They can be very good dogs, but effort was made to achieve that. There are dogs who have been bred to be home bodies and they much more naturally fall into a "good dog" category. Pitbulls were bred for dog fighting and blood sports. This is not a good start for family's first dog.

To put this into other terms. There are chickens who have been bred for cock fights. They can be good roosters, but watch your back and be ready to remove them if they attack your hens. That being said, predators beware. Different breeds have different specialties, if you want one for the look be very deliberate about what actions you are going to take to change the "natural outcome" of their behavior being the behavior you don't want.

What has four legs and an arm?

A Pit Bull in a playground.

They're bred to be fighting dogs. Attacking and killing is in their genes, both physically and mentally. The likes of german shepherds have to be trained to kill, pitbulls have to be trained not to kill.

Generally, it comes down to which statistics a "hater" believes. I'll refer to twain here about lies, damn lies and statistics, since numbers always seem so certain, but can be cooked.

It doesn't help that "pit bull" isn't a breed, it's a "type", which is vague as fuck all. There's something like a dozen breeds that get called pit bull, each with their own range of traits. What they have in common is an origin as fighting dogs, including those bred to fight bigger animals.

But if a dog just looks similar to any of those breeds, it's a pit bull, including mutts with no known ancestry in fighting breeds.

So, folks see a scary looking dog and that's that, they hate scary looking dogs.

Is the hate justified? IDGAF tbh. Assuming any of the statistics are accurate and applicable, I can understand wanting to limit breeding more, as well as the strict side of enforced euthanasia once a dog turns aggro. But with the vagueness of what gets counted as a pit bull in those stats, and the cherry picking that goes on in such debates, I can't work up any emotional response to the subject.

But that's why the hate. They're scary looking dogs, and when a dog that looks like they tend to look attacks, it'll fuck its target up worse than something like a Chihuahua or poodle. That much is fact, a big muscular dog with strong jaws can fuck shit up.