A historical view of dangerous dogs in the United States

Karen Delise has a great new post over at the NCRC about the history of dog attacks in this country, the breeds of  dogs involved, and how the media reported the attacks.  The post is essentially an overview of her book, the Pit Bull Placebo, but is a great shortened version of the book for people without the dedication to read the book.

In the article, Karen notes that the late 1880s, the most feared type of dog was the bloodhound. Similar to pit bulls now, bloodhounds represented a large grouping of multiple breeds of dogs -- and their "ferocity" was played out by the media to creat the certain fears. Stage productions such as the The Tom Shows, and in books like Sherlock Holmes' Hound of the Baskervilles, showed the dogs in a negative light and led to their being feared.

Over time, order was restored, and people began focusing more on what caused attacks vs breeds of dogs that were responsible. Several different examples were given.

Meanwhile, during the time from1959 to 1979, none of the dog bite or fatal dog attack studies make any mention of either pit bulls or rottweilers. Neither of these breeds were popular in the use of guarding or for negative functions at the time, and the breeds most often used for these functions were German Shepherds, Great Danes and Dobermans. And in fact, during this period, these were the breeds often feared -- with misinformation abounding about them (remember the ridiculous myth that because Doberman's had smallish heads, as they matured and their brains grew their brains would press against their skull and eventually cause them to "snap" without cause?  Sound at all familiar to anyone?)

In the decade of 1965-1975, less than 2% of all fatal dog attacks in the United States were attributed to either a  pit bul, a pit bull type dog or a Rottweiler. 

Then in the late 1980s, media hysteria grew about a type of dog that was used by a small, violent sub-culture who were using for dogfighting purposes -- that came to a head mediawise in July 1987 when four major magazines contained articles about 'pit bulls'.  Some of the stories contained some innaccurate information in them abot the dogs -- and many of the myths from these stories still exist today, in spite of so much information available that proves it to be false.

The publicity, and the fear surrounding these dogs then created demand for them among people who wanted dogs for negative functions and for guarding....and with that, their involvement in more major attacks.

And so we have the cycle that we are in right now -- where the people who want dogs for guarding or negative functions are gravitating toward a few particular types of dog. And now, the public fears these breeds of dogs - -not much different than Bloodhounds in the 1880s.  So these are the stories picked up by the media.  The difference now is the wide availability of information with the internet where every story written in a local newspaper anywhere is available almost instantly to any person anywhere in the world.  And so the hysteria continues.

But let's make no mistake. There is nothing crazy-different about these dogs. There is no dangerous DNA in them, or certainly we would not have gone through several decades of dog bite studies with them barely represented.  They are just merely a breed of dog that due to the cycle of human emotions and hysteria that has become the victim of our irrational fears.  And this is why attempts to ban the breeds has not been met with success -- because it was never the dog's breed in the first place.  It was the owners -- and how they intended to use the dogs that was. And unless we focus on dog ownership issues, the cycle will continue, but in 30 years we'll be talking about entirely different breeds of dogs that need to be banned becaus of their supposed genetic predisposition to attack.

None of which will be true...just like it isn't now.

Comments

[Julie]

Absolutely.

[Julie]

Also, currently reading "Monkeyluv" by Robert Sapolsky and am seriously enjoying his scientific, yet readable, essays on the myth of genes as inescapable and somehow inextricable from environment. Sure, he's talking monkeys, but the same holds for canines...

[Lisa]

I finally got around to checking out Redemption from the library (apologies to Winograd, but I'm kind of poor right now), and I was really surprised to see that spitz dogs were once demonized for being overly susceptible to rabies.

I don't know if it's comforting or terrifying to see that this silly crap has been around for so long, and has been used to target so many different types of dog.

But the more of them you pile up, the more ridiculous the current myths start to look.

PS: Most Pomeranians do have rabies, though. Fact!