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Comment by wolfhumble | Hacker News Reader

Without knowing anything about the owner and the dog, I would rather meet an unleashed Golden Retriever than unleashed Pitbull. Am I wrong thinking like that?

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Of course not, and this age-old argument in defence of pit-bulls comes up again and again, with the same point being missed.

Pitbulls could be the sweetest breed in the world, the point is that "when" they attack, it ends up much much worse than your super aggressive chihuaha. And in some cases 1 to 1 a man can not win the fight.

There a few breeds like that (e.g. mastiffs) but pitbulls are one of the most popularly owned dogs in this category.

I will agree with this. I don’t think Pit Bull types are inherently more likely to bite. I just think that they cause a lot more damage when they do bite. Most minor bites are probably unreported. House cats bite and claw all the time and no one reports it because the damage is minor.

> House cats bite and claw all the time and no one reports it because the damage is minor.

Just jumping in here to say that if your house cat bites you and draws blood you should absolutely go to a doctor ASAP because cat mouths are nasty and cat bites often get very seriously infected (like, "lose your hand" infected) very quickly.

I have been around house cats for almost my entire life and have been bit and scratched countless times and I never have had any wound that has had an infection as a result. So would like to see the actual statistics on how often people lose their hands from their pet cat biting them.

Not that I am saying one shouldn't use applicable wound care but find it difficult to believe that you must visit a doctor right away or else you will get a bad infection and lose a limb.

cf. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15456433/

"Appropriate early treatment of cat bites of the hand is the key to success. Treatment with antibiotics, surgical drainage, debridement and copious irrigation, and use of corticosteroids in some cases, proved to be effective. Hand elevation and intensive physiotherapy after a short period of immobilization is critical. We believe that prophylactic antibiotics should be given even in case of a minor infection following cat bites of the hand. Clear guidelines for clinical recognition of infection, hospital admission and management are provided in our study."

That's a study of people already visiting the hospital for a cat bite, which implies they were fairly serious wounds. Of course if you have a serious enough wound to go to the hospital over and possibly get plastic surgery to repair, yes there is a serious risk of infection obviously. The OP was implying that ANY cat bite that breaks the skin means you should rush to the doctor which that paper does not prove.

Furthermore, I already acknowledge that proper wound care should not be ignored.

+1. One of my clients got scratched on her wrist by a house cat she had nurtured for years. She ended up spending a significant amount of time in the hospital with a serious infection that nearly resulted in amputation.

I have been attacked by 2 packs of dogs...neither were wild, just dogs that were not leashed up and formed a pack in the neighborhoods.

One pack was formed of smaller dogs, mostly of the puntable size. The other more medium size, family friendly dogs.

Neither packs contained pit-bulls. It does not matter about the breeds in the pack, just the size and number. 5-10 Jack Russel terriers can mess you up just as easily as 3-4 Labradors.

I notice that the discussion of dangerous dogs now is focused on pit-bulls, I remember as a kid that the German Shepherd and Rottweiler always seemed scary.

At first I was completely agreeing with you and found parent's sentiment misguided. But, then I thought what if we took this to an extreme and generalized about humans? Human violence isn't always uniformly distributed amongst the races, but we try not to jump to conclusions about supposed racial genetic predispositions. I think the dog deserves the benefit of the doubt is what I'm saying. But that's also not accounting that some dogs have been bred for violence. So I guess you are right in some ways and wrong in others.

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