Pit bulls are a canine scourge, and the numbers prove it

Breed bans work, no matter what the activists say

Two weeks ago, a Montreal woman was viciously attacked by her stepson’s previously amiable pit bull, losing two litres of blood from some 20 lacerations on both arms. Heavily bandaged victim Melanie Chartrand, marvelling that she survived, told TVA News (in French), “She was chewing my arm and she liked it,” adding, “These are dogs that were designed for fighting. I have the impression that it can happen to anyone, at any time.” Chartrand is right on both counts.

Four decades ago, when pit bulls were associated almost entirely with dogfighting, the general public understood the danger of the breed as empirically received wisdom. Then, pit bull related fatalities were vanishingly rare. Now, pit bull types are the most popular dogs in America, making up six per cent of the U.S. dog population. Between 2005 and 2019, they accounted for 66 per cent of 521 U.S. dog bite-related fatalities. There are far fewer pit bulls in Canada, but their disproportionately high attack numbers here mirror those in the U.S.

What eliminated the cultural guardrails that prevented so much carnage?

Ideology. Notably multiculturalism, which attributes all social discrimination to racism, and speciesism, which precludes moral distinctions between humans and other species. What we got, when these theories were applied to pit bulls, was “multicaninism,” and with it the assumption that, for example, if police shoot more pit bulls than other breeds — and they do — the disproportion is racially motivated. In fact, the police shoot more pit bulls because of public safety and self-defence.

Stereotyping individuals according to their race is wrong, but to describe the stereotyping of any animal breed as racism is simply absurd, since the entire point of “breeding” animals is to produce specific traits. Thus, the conflation of human “race” with animal “breed” runs completely counter to scientific facts. And yet the propaganda mill of the pit bull advocacy movement — resting on bogus “studies” by speciesism-enamoured academics — has successfully gaslit the media, many politicians and otherwise brainy public intellectuals into the belief that they are combatting racism when they defend the “right” of pit bulls not to be “profiled.”

Katja Guenther, for example, a gender and sexuality studies professor and pit bull advocate, is the author of the award-winning book, The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals, which emerged from three years of field work at a high-intake animal shelter. (Pit bulls are the highest-intake breed in the U.S., making up between 19 and 32 per cent of the shelter population.)

In a 2020 interview, Guenther described pit bulls as a “very powerful place to look for the ways in which race and class and gender intersect.” She linked issues to dogs that are irrelevant to them, like “misogyny,” “transphobia” and “environmental justice.” She compared caging dogs to incarceration. She embraced the promotion of “diversity and inclusion” in animal shelters.

It’s somewhat ironic that the entire animal welfare industry, at least in the United States, is dominated by middle-class white women, based on the demographics of respondents of a 2020 study by the American non-profit Project Implicit. The leadership of every pro-pit bull organization that fights against breed regulation is virtually female and colour-free, as well.

For a fine capsule tour of the pro- and anti-pit bull horizon, I recommend an excellent, comprehensively researched 2017 Fifth Estate documentary with host Mark Kelley, titled “Pit Bulls Unleashed: Should they be banned?”

The documentary featured a 2016 study of 1,616 dog bite injuries treated at an Atlanta pediatric trauma centre, whose lead author was a facial reconstruction surgeon.

The most prevalent breed in the study was the pit bull, which sent more than 40 per cent of patients to the hospital. Pit bulls were “2.5 times as likely to bite in multiple anatomic locations as compared to other breeds,” and were responsible for 50 per cent of all bites that required surgery where the breed was identified. Analyzing these figures, the authors noted, “Although other breeds may bite with the same or higher frequency, the injury that a pit bull inflicts per bite is often more severe.”

Infants, they found, were “more than four times as likely to be bitten by the family dog, and more than six times as likely to be bitten in the head/neck region.” The lone mortality in the study’s four-year period, a five-day-old girl who died three days after surgery, was victimized by a pit bull.

Pit bull advocates will shun canine epidemiology as an annoying intrusion on their fantasies, but you, rational and unsentimental reader, should not. Hundreds of jurisdictions around the world restrict or ban dangerous dogs, pit bulls foremost, including on military bases and in public housing. When enforced, breed bans work.