Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0x737368 | Hacker News Reader

> There is no evidence that genetics is a direct cause of dangerous behaviour.

Haha, I'm sorry but this is hilariously false. All other working-dog breeds have genetically ingrained behaviours that no one teachers them - retrievers retrieve without anyone teaching them, border collies corral ducks and children without anyone teaching them, pointers point without anyone teaching them.

However pitbulls are always the odd one out in the apologists' eyes - somehow them being purposefully bred for fighting bulls, rats and dogs and having behaviour and features that would make them successful in these pursuits is nothing to do with genetics and everything to do with their owners. Despite there being many cases of pits being adopted by very kind and caring owners and the dog still mauling them.

View on HN

Kind and caring != understands dog behaviour. 99.999% of agonistic behaviour is driven by fear. What a normal person thinks is a kind & caring behaviour can be terrifying for a dog.

Non-pointers point. Some pointer don't.

Non-retreivers retrieve. Some retreivers don't.

Non-herding dogs herd. Some herders don't.

Most dogs play-fight. "Fighting dogs" have to be trained to fight to kill.

Breeding is clearly a fantastic determinant of physical characteristics which pair well with the desired behaviour, and does contribute a little bit towards behavioural instinct, but (as per the *peer-reviewed long term study* in question) isn't on its own a good predictor of behaviour.

The ~.001%, by the way, is termed idiopathic aggression (sometimes called cocker rage, but again is NOT actually well-correlated with cocker spaniels). Idiopathic means of unknown cause.

"peer-reviewed long term study"

This is not a silver bullet, even for recently published Nature/Science papers. You need to convince 3-4 people to get your paper published in the end. For many controversial papers, there is a lot of back and forth about the validity of the results (e.g., "Matters Arising" in Nature).

The biggest flaw of this study is relying on subjective reports by the owners. Almost all dog owners I know are used to playing down the severity of their dog's aggressiveness.

I was going to write up a lengthy reply arguing each of your points and then I realised your argument is just sophisms and nitpicking.

If you have to argue that:

- you actually need a PhD in dog psychology(or whatever "understanding dog behaviour" means) to have this specific breed

- that pretty much "yes breed determines traits and behaviours but also doesn't!"

- conflating play fighting with very pit bull specific action of biting down and shaking(a technique bred into them for bloodsports) to prove that no, pit bulls are actually not so dangerous and just like any other breed

...to prove that pitbulls aren't potentially inherently dangerous then I can't take your argument seriously.

Just the fact that pitbulls being a minority of the dog population in the US and UK and still causing the majority of maulings and dog attack fatalities should be evidence enough that something's fishy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com