OT - I apologize for some of the content in my previous post
I want to apologize to the board. I am not sorry for the post, but I am sorry that due to my stress and trauma I named the breed of the attacking dog. My intention was not to have the tread move into a breed debate. In my comments throughout this thread I have stated and stand by the fact that I do not support breed bans. I do support the laws being changed to allow real action to be taken when an incident like this occurs.
After many years of reading and occasionally posting on this board I am aware that several members are residents of Ohio and if they found this to be concerning then to please contact your state rep.
If the admins choose to lock or take that thread down I fully understand. Maybe this wasn't the right place for this, but that being said, I did learn another course of action within the state law that I can follow up on so like I said, I apologize for naming the breed.
October 5th, 2022 at 2:34 PM ^
You're upset. Understandable. However, complaining about almost any law is naturally divisive, so mixed responses should be expected.
October 5th, 2022 at 2:36 PM ^
Oh I thought we were just talking about hating Ohio....
October 5th, 2022 at 2:46 PM ^
Hopefully that's something we can all agree on.
October 5th, 2022 at 3:43 PM ^
Some breeds deserve a general* ban
*Michigan-related exception caveats apply
October 5th, 2022 at 3:56 PM ^
I saw the word "Ohio" and just assumed the breed was "inbred"
October 5th, 2022 at 4:30 PM ^
The voluntary action that, indeed, should be a law!
October 5th, 2022 at 2:40 PM ^
My intention was not to have the tread move into a breed debate.
Not your fault cKone, that's just how discussion on the internet goes.
October 5th, 2022 at 2:42 PM ^
I wouldnt worry about it. A pit bull DID attack your dog so naming it isnt some great transgression and you didnt use any verbiage in your post that even insinuated the issue was the breed, the problem was the owners not having it leashed and the size/weight disparity between your dog and the attacker.
Naturally someone in the thread made a comment about pit bulls being aggressive dogs so even more naturally the pit bull owners all leaped to the breed's defense at being unduly accused. But you didnt do anything to provoke that in any way so you're fine in my book.
October 5th, 2022 at 2:43 PM ^
More information is always better.
And to reiterate:
“I say we take off and nuke the entire state from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.”
But most importantly I hope your dog makes a full recovery.
October 5th, 2022 at 7:20 PM ^
This is poorly thought out. With no ohio what happens to all the water in the lakes? They're like the stopper in the tub down there.
October 5th, 2022 at 2:49 PM ^
Haha.. This kind of nailed how I felt as I read the debates on the thread. haha
October 5th, 2022 at 2:47 PM ^
Pit bulls are dogs
They sometimes attack stuff
DMX was a dawg
He also sometimes attacked stuff and also attacked crack pipes
October 5th, 2022 at 3:20 PM ^
Interestingly enough, Pitbull isn't a dawg. He's more of a clown.
October 5th, 2022 at 3:28 PM ^
I thought he was a cave salamander?
October 5th, 2022 at 7:04 PM ^
I remember when pitbull was on the front page of mgoblog. I was glad when we got our current cover page.
October 5th, 2022 at 2:51 PM ^
I think it's an interesting topic with a lot of different opinions obviously.
October 5th, 2022 at 3:01 PM ^
I do too, but not for a sports blog. I simply wanted this to be informational to the Ohio residents on the board. If I would have given thing 30 more seconds to think it though I would have known to remove the breed from the discussion.
Simply by naming the breed (To be honest, I'm pretty sure it is a pit-mix due to it's enormous size) the point of my post was very much overshadowed by the breed debates.
October 5th, 2022 at 3:08 PM ^
There's only so much we can discuss Harrell's pass rushing technique or Mel Tucker's ego.
October 5th, 2022 at 3:50 PM ^
speaking of which, best msu coach in recent history:
- Melvin Tucker II
- John Lawrence Smith
- Robert Vann Williams
DISCUSS
October 5th, 2022 at 4:10 PM ^
My roommate, for two years, had an English pit-bull that had “Staffordshire Terrier” in the official name. It was much bigger than the typical American pit bull. The thing was big and solid and had a nose as solid as a boulder. Maybe that was the type of dog
Commenting on the overall topic, I’ve met many sweet pit bulls. This one was not. The owner was an excellent owner. He did everything conceivable to train the dog. He was definitely an expert in the breed. He also did many things to make sure the dog was not a risk to others.
The point here is, contrary to the comments in these threads ( yes there are good pit bulls, there are good and bad owners) there are also bad pit bulls with good owners. And because of the temperament of the breed you cannot just compare this to other breeds and bad dogs. And that’s according to an expert.
After too many incidents, after we stopped living together, he had to put the dog down.
A funny story, when i first arrived to move in, I hadn’t met this roommate/owner or dog. I also didn’t know it was a pit bull. And I had never met a pit bull. I had definitely heard all the negative news on “dangerous” put bulls. This was a while ago.
When I arrived at my new house, I first met a different roommate and he said “did you hear about the dog”. “It’s a put bull”, with a tone that I should have an issue or be concerned. “They are out back with the family” he said.
So I walked out back to say hello, wanting to make a good impression on my new roommate and his family. But right when I walked outside to say hello this big pit bull ran up to me and shoved his nose in my crotch to check me out. I stood my ground, and while that big nose rammed into my crotch, I “pretended” to be fully confident (that I would not lose my private parts) and not let my voice crack as I said hello.
I survived that day, and it turns out that after living with the dog and hearing all the stories, I should have been more scared. However, I also learned that showing dominance over the breed is critical and had I flinched, I might not have my 3 beautiful children today.
This was not everyone’s pit bull. The American ones Ive met have always been sweet.
October 5th, 2022 at 6:18 PM ^
"To be honest, I'm pretty sure it is a pit-mix due to it's enormous size"
Wait. You're not even sure that it's a pit mix? If it's 90+ pounds odds are it's an American Bulldog or a Cane Corso or a mastiff mix of some sort, most pits max out around 75.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sorry your dog was attacked and hope you're both okay. What you went through sounds awful. You're right in saying that it would have been wiser to not mention breed at all.
October 5th, 2022 at 10:18 PM ^
I’m not a vet or breed specialist. What I know is the owner said he was a pit when they moved in. He looks just like a pit just larger than any I’ve seen or been around in the past.
October 5th, 2022 at 2:51 PM ^
Can we all agree and be thankful that chihuahua’s aren’t any bigger, as that’s the only asshole breed of dog?
October 5th, 2022 at 2:55 PM ^
Let's take this up to species level. Bears are bigger assholes that chihuahaus or any other dog breed for that matter.
October 5th, 2022 at 4:51 PM ^
Wolverines are huge assholes, but they're our assholes.
October 6th, 2022 at 9:40 AM ^
Username checks out.
And hear hear... chihuahuas are indeed assholes.
October 5th, 2022 at 2:56 PM ^
Naming the breed is relevant to your message because it helps the reader understand the severity of the attack. As a fact, pitbulls have strong mouths. A reader can understand that a bite from a pitbull is likely to be more severe than a bite from a maltese. The responses of others who derailed the discussion are not your fault.
October 5th, 2022 at 3:06 PM ^
This apology is unnecessary. A pitbull attacked your dog (and you). You’re the wronged party, not the people offended by what happened because they want to blame the owners or whatever.
October 5th, 2022 at 3:09 PM ^
You posted something for discussion. The Pit Bull was part of the story and some wanted to discuss that aspect. That’s the internet. There’s no reason to apologize.
October 5th, 2022 at 3:12 PM ^
Like 6 years ago, there was a thread with arguments over the best sandwich chain.
You're fine.
October 5th, 2022 at 3:47 PM ^
JIMMY JOHN'S!!!!!!!
October 5th, 2022 at 3:13 PM ^
There's nothing wrong with naming the breed. Letting a pit bull run unleashed through the neighborhood is grossly irresponsible, no matter how well it's been trained.
Besides, if you hadn't named the breed, 50 posters would have asked.
October 5th, 2022 at 3:17 PM ^
Not only would they have asked. They would have demanded that the breed was an integral part of the story. The Internet is a weird place man. No need to stress, or apologize. I hope everything turns out well.
October 5th, 2022 at 3:15 PM ^
As a pitbull owner (well, a pit mix in our case - she has labrador-ish hair on her back - it's weird), I don't take offense to any apprehension people have about them, but I can definitely attest to irresponsible, uneducated (in the ways of training dogs) owners being the primary problem, and you sadly don't need to go further than the neighborhood dog park to see it sometimes.
Our dog, Penelope (call name "Penny", of course), was a rescue and she was not properly socialized early in her life, so she's very anxious and nervous but with a few years of periodic trainings, she's turned out well enough. If you invest in your dog, you get something wonderful. A frightening number of people just get a puppy and then.....yeah....nothing.
Hopefully, you get compensation for your experience from the owner of the other dog.
October 5th, 2022 at 3:39 PM ^
Thanks for that, and that is exactly the way I feel. I have 3 dogs, Charlie (Full name Charlotte) is a 3 year old lab mix. We got her as a pup but has been a very scared and anxious dog from the beginning. As responsible owners we identified the issue early on with her interaction with our other dogs so we took her to training weekly and after a year and thousands of dollars got her to the point that she was starting to trust.
Because of what we know about our dog we took care to make sure she was always on her leash and most of our walks were always around our yard. On occasion I would take her to the local dog park if I happened to pass it and noticed it was empty, but knowing my dog, if others began to show up we always leashed and moved outside of the fence.
We had just gotten to the point recently after 3 years that she wouldn't panic if we were outside of the dog park fence and another dog came to sniff her through the fence. We were making baby steps as they say.
My biggest worry other than her healing from her injuries properly is that we will be back at square one with the socialization training, and I'm not sure she will ever be able to work back to a point where she can be around other dogs outside our our own.
My brother has a pit and he is a great dog, but my brother works from home like I do and gives his pit the attention and training that he needs. My brother also put up appropriate fencing and the dog never leaves the property without a leash. He put up the fence long before he adopted the dog because he knew the the liability would be steep if there was ever an issue.
Speaking honestly, the steps my brother and I have went through with our dogs should be taken with any dog regardless of breed. I don't care if it's a 5lb yorkie like one of our other dogs. The yorkie is the alpha of the 3 which is kind of funny.
October 5th, 2022 at 4:04 PM ^
I don’t know about Ohio, but I just found out through a sparty lawyer friend of mine that in Michigan there is no strict liability for dog attacks. If it is a first offense, the law allows that the owner could not have known that it’s particular dog was capable of an attack. So basically, there is a one attack mulligan. By the way, he said that there should be strict liability, but there is not.
October 5th, 2022 at 4:57 PM ^
The two best dogs we ever had were/are a German Shepherd and a Pit Bull, both fosters, abandoned in Detroit.
The German Shepherd came to us at 55lbs (should have been 110), with mange and heart worm. He wouldn't let us pet him for about 2 weeks. Once he did, he was basically my dog. We had to take him in for two heart worm treatments and they wanted to keep him overnight. We pleaded with the vet to let him come home because we didn't think he'd adjust well to being away from us again. They insisted on monitoring him. So, we sent him with his thunder shirt and instructions to try to give him the best chance of surviving the night. They ignored all of it. He ended up biting a vet tech and they were planning to put him down until the lady who ran the organization laid into them for ignoring everything we had told them.
We ended up getting a call to pick him up at 10:30 at night. When we got there, they had us pull around back so that we wouldn't have to walk him through the building. I went inside and the lady who let me in stood back as I opened the kennel door. I knelt down and he jumped into my arms and gave me a hug. The lady who let me in started to cry because she realized that the monster they had created was really just a scared dog who wanted to go back to a home where he was loved.
Once he completed his second (outpatient) treatment, we were able to find a home for him with a family with an 8-year-old boy and they were best friends from the time they walked into our house to meet him for the first time. We used to get pictures on occasion of their adventures, but we got a text message about a year ago that he had died. Never once, aside from the incident I described, was he aggressive toward a human or another dog.
We got our pit bull shortly after that. She was my wife's dog from the moment she was picked up and became very protective of her. We used to bring her to the dog park by our house, but she got into it with another dog who approached my wife for pets one time (neither was injured), so we stopped bringing her to parks. She's fine on a leash and in our yard with other dogs and she and our other dog are fantastic with our daughter (we were very careful despite nothing to suggest we needed to be). The only time she's ever hurt anyone was by wagging her tail too hard when people come over.
I've had a lot of dogs. I've been around a lot more. I've never met a dog who I thought was a bad dog, only dogs put in bad situations. I had finally had my fill of the demonization of certain breeds of dogs after having these two and looked at the studies that are often quoted for the statistics to justify these claims. What I found:
- Pit Bull isn't a breed, but a set of 4 breeds that share common characteristics.
- The population of Pit Bulls in the US is much higher (almost an order of magnitude) than other breeds for this reason, especially when mixes tend to still get classified as Pit Bulls.
- The numbers presented in the one paper that really started the trend used absolute number of incidents involving breeds without adjusting for population, so just by the fact that Pit Bulls are more common in the US than other breeds, they have a higher number of incidents. Looking at rate of incidents with respect to the population, I believe it was golden retrievers with the highest rate of incidents, but I might be misremembering.
Nowadays, I do find myself getting upset with people who judge dogs by their breeds. There's nothing out there to justify it beyond misinterpretation of data and stereotypes. Most people don't realize that they're spreading misinformation, but they are and it has the same negative effects as other misinformation...like anything from Yoder. So, I am glad that this post was made because that other thread was filled with garbage. OP didn't intend for it and the information was relevant, but I think it is right to question whether it was necessary to tell the story because of how that information influences perception.
October 5th, 2022 at 5:34 PM ^
- Pit Bull isn't a breed, but a set of 4 breeds that share common characteristics.
- The population of Pit Bulls in the US is much higher (almost an order of magnitude) than other breeds for this reason, especially when mixes tend to still get classified as Pit Bulls.
- The numbers presented in the one paper that really started the trend used absolute number of incidents involving breeds without adjusting for population, so just by the fact that Pit Bulls are more common in the US than other breeds, they have a higher number of incidents. Looking at rate of incidents with respect to the population, I believe it was golden retrievers with the highest rate of incidents, but I might be misremembering.
THANK YOU. Breed-specific prejudice is for people who want to hate things based solely on ignorance, inaccurate generalizations in the media, intellectual laziness, and confirmation bias. Not much different than racism, come to think of it.
October 5th, 2022 at 9:28 PM ^
These "stats" are dubious. Labrador retrievers are the most popular breed in the US and have been for years, with goldens and german shepherds in spots 2 and 3. Pit bulls make up only 6% of the population, but according to this 2014 Time magazine article (linked below), account for 68% of dog attacks, and most importantly, 52% of dog-related deaths since 1982, according to research compiled by Merritt Clifton, editor of Animals 24-7, an animal-news organization that focuses on humane work and animal-cruelty prevention.
I don't know "Animals 24-7" but I do trust Time magazine at least more than random internet guy claiming to have done research and providing stats with no citation.
https://time.com/2891180/kfc-and-the-pit-bull-attack-of-a-little-girl/
October 5th, 2022 at 10:02 PM ^
It would have taken you all of 5 seconds to click on "Animals 24-7" and see the picture with the caption "There is no such thing as a safe pit bull" to realize that source is a biased pile of horseshit that should be trusted roughly as much as Alex Jones.
October 6th, 2022 at 8:13 AM ^
I just spent five minutes on multiple Google searches. I come up with material that corroborates that pit bulls make up only 6% of the canine population of the US and over 50% of human deaths. Even a petpedia page devoted to "breaking pit bull stereotypes" acknowledges these numbers. I do not find (and I specifically looked) any material that rebuts these statistics. If you do, please cite.
October 6th, 2022 at 6:17 PM ^
You're making a few erroneous assumptions in trusting those (or any) stats on dog bites.
First, the breeds of dogs are rarely verified in any reliable way. Someone not in the know isn't going to be able to differentiate a pittie (American Bully, Amstaff, red/blue nose American Pitbull, Staffordshire Bull) from an American Bulldog, Cane Corso, Presa Canario, Boxer mixes, or the many other types of dogs that share physical characteristics with pitties.
Second, as per https://www.pitbullinfo.org/pit-bulls-population.html, pitties make up roughly 20% of the American dog population in 2022. They use ASPCA shelter data, which isn't perfect but a decent sample size and certainly more reliable than sites that make their money from fear and/or confirmation bias clicks (Time is included in that, Forbes also regurgitated that study, etc) of pit bulls.
BTW, the ASPCA's position on pit bulls: https://www.aspca.org/about-us/aspca-policy-and-position-statements/position-statement-pit-bulls
"Today’s pit bull is a descendant of the original English bull-baiting dog—a dog that was bred to bite and hold bulls, bears and other large animals around the face and head. When baiting large animals was outlawed in the 1800s, people turned instead to fighting their dogs against each other. These larger, slower bull-baiting dogs were crossed with smaller, quicker terriers to produce a more agile and athletic dog for fighting other dogs.
Some pit bulls were selected and bred for their fighting ability. That means that they may be more likely than other breeds to fight with dogs. It doesn’t mean that they can’t be around other dogs or that they’re unpredictably aggressive. Other pit bulls were specifically bred for work and companionship. These dogs have long been popular family pets, noted for their gentleness, affection and loyalty. And even those pit bulls bred to fight other animals were not prone to aggressiveness toward people. Dogs used for fighting needed to be routinely handled by people; therefore aggression toward people was not tolerated. Any dog that behaved aggressively toward a person was culled, or killed, to avoid passing on such an undesirable trait. Research on pet dogs confirms that dog aggressive dogs are no more likely to direct aggression toward people than dogs that aren’t aggressive to other dogs.
It is likely that that the vast majority of pit bull type dogs in our communities today are the result of random breeding—two dogs being mated without regard to the behavioral traits being passed on to their offspring. The result of random breeding is a population of dogs with a wide range of behavioral predispositions. For this reason it is important to evaluate and treat each dog, no matter its breed, as an individual."
I'm going to go ahead and trust the professional organization of vets that actually are experts in their field over the people with a clear agenda trying to profit from panic clicks or dog bite lawsuits.
Third, in a dog bite scenario, the breed of the dog is of least concern to the people taking the reports and it's unverified. It's not like they're going out and performing genetic testing and running dna analysis on dogs that bite people. It's like a gunshot victim focusing on the brand of ammo that was used.
October 5th, 2022 at 3:19 PM ^
"When a dog goes bad, the fault lies with his master."
-Ser Kevan Lannister
October 5th, 2022 at 3:28 PM ^
Nothing wrong with naming a breed. People have issues and are too easily triggered
October 5th, 2022 at 3:37 PM ^
Give me a break we can't even talk about different breeds of dogs now? Wth is society coming too. Dogs lives matter I guess.
October 5th, 2022 at 3:42 PM ^
That's not the point. The point is that by naming the breed it completely overshadowed the point I wanted to make. Contact your state rep if you live in Ohio.
October 5th, 2022 at 3:59 PM ^
Discussions are good. I’m confident there are some very gentle pit bulls in the world that are well loved.
October 5th, 2022 at 5:38 PM ^
Might as well post Yoder's site - it's the same level of accuracy.