The only way to dissuade the pit, after what was at least a couple of minutes of this and with the smaller dog being disemboweled, was that I stabbed the pit bull in the neck with my pocket knife.
Their physical power and stubbornness should not be taken for granted.
Both dogs survived the incident.
The smaller ~20lbs dog was being courageously held onto by its owner underneath both dogs for the entire ~fight~ mauling to prevent it from being taken away and killed by the ~100lbs pit bull. I didn't see in that situation that I had time to consult with a respected behaviorist and get into the dog's upbringing, give it some positive reinforcement, tummy rubs, and treats, but I did finally get its attention.
Stabbing the pit bull ended the attack within seconds. My intent was to kill it at that point, but I was unsuccessful. That is my only regret in the situation.
Another bystander took the small dog and its owner to the pet hospital in her car where emergency surgery saved its life.
I'm not sure the eventual fate of the pit bull but I know that it was turned over to the custody of the local SPCA and the owner was given some type of citation.
No, it's about how to de-escalate a severe situation without loss of life. (Good) policemen don't break up a fight between an 18 yr old and 10 yr old by viciously beating and then stabbing the 18 yr old. My point was only that the instincts of those involved made the situation worse before it was made better. And based on the new facts, starting with the owner.
Just as with humans, there's a well understood hierarchy of severity of tools for handling situations such as that one, though only a small minority of dog owners know them. It's incredibly unfortunate that dog lives are more or less toys for humans to play with, otherwise this fight is likely to never have happened if it was a severe as you say before it turned into a five animal brawl.
Bottom line the three of you DID make it worse before it was made better. The punching and kicking won't help in all probability. It's simply not on the spectrum of effective tools. Killing is on the far end, so I'm not begrudging your actions, I'm begrudging the behavior before it: yelling (probably), kicking, and punching instead of forcing the bite, wheelbarrowing, and other environmental tools that may have been available. Y'know, the things that animal behaviorists have figured out, how to cause specific behaviors, like stopping a dog from biting another during a fight.
I'm not sure why I wrote this comment since apparently your only regret is not achieving your intent which was to kill the dog. You managed to stop the fight without causing death, a huge win, but you wish otherwise. I sincerely hope your future is brighter than your past.
Nope, this was more like a 10 year old being savagely beaten by a 30 year old very strong, very violent, out of his mind MMA fighter who wanted to kill the 10 year old.
What you're saying makes sense for some breeds. The whole point was that pitbulls are more agressive and violent than other breeds.
My biggest issue from the start was the socialization of "three bystanders took part simultaneously in kicking and punching the pit bull to get it to release," which failed, predictably, and I didn't want anyone to think that that was a good thing to try in the first place.
I don't know what would have been, so to speak, appropriate and would have been effective. The one thing I knew to try was to do the wheelbarrow and that did nothing at leas in attitude of the pit bull. I was totally focused on my not being excessively injured or letting the other dog be torn apart and didn't organize anyone else's interaction, like "I'll hold the legs and you kick it."
If anything it was the opposite of bystander syndrome where everyone thinks someone else will do whatever is needed. Everyone there was doing whatever they could with the tools and knowledge or lack of knowledge that they had.
You cannot ever know what his intentions were, and to accuse him of that is pretty disgusting.
> "My intent was to kill it at that point, but I was unsuccessful. That is my only regret in the situation."
Why do you think such a terrible leap of logic would work here?
I hope your logic is not: "I can imagine how A might cause X, therefore I believe B cannot possibly cause X." Easy way for people too fool themselves into believing unsupported ideas.
Pit bulls are stronger and more capable of injuring or killing a human than most other breeds.
Both can be true. But if you want the "bad owner" theory to explain why 80% of all fatalities are pit-related , you are essentially calling at 80% percent (or higher) of owners dangerously negligent.
Bad pit owners exist. Pits have a dangerous combination of mentality and strength. You can use a gun as a can opener if you want to, that doesn't change the ability it has to remove a life.
1. 80% of fatal dog attacks are by pit bulls.
This is complete nonsense from dogsbite.org actually nobody tracks this. This "statistic" is at best comprised by trying to compile news articles that notoriously misidentify any large breed mutt responsible for attacks as pit bulls.
2. If 80% of fatal are attacks are caused by pit bulls and negligent owners were the cause of attacks then 80% of owners must be negligent.
3. 80% of owners being negligent is an absurd conclusion thus the conclusion that bites are largely caused by negligent owners must be false.
Premise 2 is the result of what I like to call number gluing. To explicate people have 2 entities which they can attach a numerical identity to that seem related so people just mentally stick them together instead of doing the mathematical reasoning to figure out how the 2 relate. It's not that they don't "exactly" relate how you said they do they don't relate AT ALL. With no other numbers its entirely impossible to reason about which portion of owners are negligent or even how their average negligence relates to owners of say rottweilers and dobermans. There are 3.6 million pit bulls in the US and 40 people are killed annually. Even if every fatality was caused by a pit bull we could conclude from that fact that 1 in a million pit bull owners are negligent. The prior poster wasn't distracting from your argument he demolished it like a bulldozer.
2. Shifting all the blame onto owners is ignoring the clear trend. If 100% of gun owners were safe and responsible, there would still be gun deaths because of the capacity of a gun to kill someone. Same with Pits.
3. I agree but that's your logic, not mine.
You are also shifting focus from Pits attacking other dogs (the point of this thread) to attacking people. Fine, they account for most dog attacks on other dogs and on people. You seem to have your own justifications for why that is, and why it's ok, but those only work on you. Because you want to believe your Pitbull is an angel from heaven and not a well trained, but inherently dangerous animal.
https://www.dogsbite.org/dog-bite-statistics-fatalities-2020...
Entry after entry is pitbull.
"Pictured are the two most deadly dog breeds in America: pit bull terriers and rottweilers. Research from DogsBite.org shows that during the 14-year period from 2005 to 2018, canines killed 471 Americans. Pit bulls and rottweilers accounted for 76% (358) of these deaths."
https://www.snopes.com/news/2016/10/25/bsl-and-dog-bites/
> Restricting breed ownership has not reduced the incidence of dog bites. A survey of reported dog bite rates in 36 Canadian municipalities found no difference between jurisdictions with BSL and those without. Likewise, a 2010 Toronto Humane Society survey found no change in dog bites in Ontario in the years before and after Ontario’s BSL.
> Calgary, however, saw a five-fold reduction over 20 years – from 10 bites per 10,000 people in 1986 to two in 2006. Rather than banning breeds, Calgary uses strong licensing and enforcement plus dog safety public education campaigns.
It would be great if you stopped promoting strategies that don't work and started promoting ones that do.
Looking at the link it relies on news paper stories to report that the death happened and then uses the reporters words to correctly identify the breed even though this may actually result in pit bulls being over counted and some fatalities being missed. In fact if you peruse the source its sufficient for an attack to be pit bull related for any given source to refer to the dogs as pit bulls. So if a dozen sources report on the matter and one misidentifies the culprit as a pit bull pit bull kill it is. As an example I found in the first dozen cases a "pit bull kill" wherein nobody saw the person get killed but a neighbor testified that there were problematic dogs in the neighborhood which the neighbor says are pit bulls. I found another which was a literal homicide in which the murderers dog attacked the victim while he was murdering them. It's hard to justify digging through 400 some cases when 1/6th of the first 12 are obviously complete nonsense and the rest are of unknown quality without extensive research not composed of finding newspaper articles and grepping for the word pit in any article about a particular incident.
The citations show the article title but not a url to the actual source making identifying just how bad the source in unnecessarily cumbersome but anyone that spends more than 5 minutes studying it ought to come to the conclusion that dogsbite.org is shockingly not even trying to do an unbiased analysis. It's a hit piece serving the interests of a lobbying group of dog haters who in many cases want to steal people's family pets and kill them to address a problem that kills about the same number of people annually as drowning in bath tubs.
Usually only having one biased source of truth is an indication that you are hanging out with the flat earth society. I invite you to join the rest of us on the round earth.
Sure, doesn't detract from my point at all. Nitpicking numbers is not a good use of anyone's time.
Your entire argument seems to rely solely on attacking the source. Everything I google turns up similar numbers
https://www.caninejournal.com/dog-bite-statistics/ https://www.dogsbite.org/dog-bite-statistics-studies.php
If you are going to grab your tin foil hat and claim an internet-wide conspiracy against your dog of choice, fine. I don't see any reason to participate.