The promise of a puppy

Who doesn't love pit bull puppies? 

It's easy to be convinced, when you're looking at your cute 6 week old puppy, that everything's going to be OK, because you're going to raise him right. What could possibly go wrong? But what you don't know is that hundreds of years of genetic selection and fine tuning for all-out aggression for no particular reason will eventually make itself known.

Around age 2, on average, comes the magical mauling age, and you've got a ticking bomb. A sweet, well-behaved pit bull that's never shown any sign of aggression can be triggered, the primal drives manifest, and then there's no stopping it without blood.

This story plays out time and again, while the pit bull advocacy continues to deceive, claiming "it's all how you raise them". The dangerous misinformation spread by these pit bull advocacy groups is directly responsible for many human deaths and many times more animal deaths.

Pit bulls are not protection dogs. They are purpose-bred bloodsport dogs. 

Crime scene images from pit bull attacks below.

Ten best personal protection dog breeds

Found this discussion of 10 best personal protection dogs, and felt it was worth passing along.

Not a lot of surprises, and lots of meaningful discussion of the reasons for inclusion in the list.

For those who are pressed for time, the list is covered during the first 20 minutes or so, and the rest of the video contains practical advice, and comments & questions from callers.

LET'S TALK: JOHN ANTHONY'S TOP 10 PERSONAL PROTECTION DOGS

The Akita experiment so far

Our Akita just turned 3 years old. 

She came from a line bred "for mass and temperament", and she is calm and good natured. I've been told that she's "really nice for an Akita". She's a big baby with the family, and fairly tolerant of people in general. She's good with dogs she knows well, and although strange dogs need to be on their best behavior when meeting her, she's never seriously hurt another dog, though she obviously could.

She does seem to view cats, squirrels, rabbits etc as prey, and so she never leaves the property without being under my control. If she'd been raised with cats, she might view them differently, as others who raised Akitas in a household with cats have reported peaceful coexistence.

I can't stress strongly enough that a dog like her is not for everyone. She's incredibly strong, and cat quick, and I credit her for getting me back into somewhat reasonable shape, as she simply must have our walk/run daily, regardless of weather or temperature.

She's not an easy dog, she's not like a lab, a golden or a poodle. But for those who can love primitive beauties like her, they make a very stout and faithful companion.

Voices of the victims - one family's story

About three years after being attacked by a pit bull, our Poodle died. After the attack, she was never the same. She experienced seizures and never jumped or ran and played again.

The night of the attack, after coming home from the Vet, I woke up at 3 am-ish to find her seemingly frozen solid. I put my hand on her body and did not feel a heartbeat or a breath. I panicked thinking she was dead and was dreading waking my wife to tell her. Instead, she opened her eyes, took a breathe and came back to life.

She never played, or ran, or jumped again. It felt like she had aged 10 years in one night.

My wife is heartbroken but I know we did everything we could to make her ending great.

I beat that pitbull in the head with a brick and I saved m dog's life and I am now a strong believer in the Pit Bull abolishment movement.

In happier times

Protect and love your babies. Their lives are short and should be amazing.

Canine genetics are real

When we brought home our 8 week old Akita puppy, a meek little 16 pound ball of fur, our senior chihuahua mixes ran out, barking, to investigate. The Akita pup hid under the car from them.

For her first 6 months, if anyone spoke to her, she would pee. She was subservient and mild mannered. We raised her with love and care, socializing her daily, meeting new people and new dogs every day under safe and pleasant circumstances. In other words, she was raised in a way that will surely result in a docile, friendly dog, according to the current fur-mom theories.

Fast forward 2 years - our now 100 pound Akita has become a strong, calm, confident dog.

While still very sweet towards her human pack, she's not so sweet when meeting a new dog. It's always a question - will she like the other dog, or not?  If she doesn't like them, that other dog is on very thin ice.

Just to be clear, she's fine with dogs that she grew up with.

But now we have to be very careful with introductions. I've seen her not liking a dog and it can be kind of a big deal - and beyond that, anything else that moves really brings out her prey drive. So, despite all our careful socialization, she has turned into this hard edgy primitive canine, at least when it comes to other animals - or strangers.

None of this comes as a surprise to those knowledgeable of the breed. It's standard behavior. Nothing in how we raised her has anything to do with these breed specific behaviors.

In other words, the old "it's all in how you raise them" turns out to be a myth. The genetic aspect turns out to be a far more important factor.

Of course, this is nothing new - pointers point, retrievers retrieve, shepherds herd, guardians guard, hunters hunt...

And bloodsport dogs do bloodsport:

Innocence lost: before and after encounter with pit bull

Dog fighters have selectively bred generations of pit bulls to view dogs as targets, to give no signal of their intent to attack, to launch a sustained, relentless attack, despite injury suffered, and to continue the attack regardless of whether the victim fights back, submits, cries, or tries to run away.

True to their genetic heritage, loose "family pit bulls" kill tens of thousands of pets and farm animals every year, and many of those pets were killed in their own yards, or even in their own houses, where they should have been safe.

Innocent dog savaged in a pit bull home invasion. She did not survive

While pit bulls are known for their animal aggression, it's worth noting that pit bulls have also killed more Americans than any other breed, in every single decade since 1851. In recent years, pit bulls have been killing vulnerable humans at 3-4 times the rate of all other  breeds combined. None of these facts have anything whatsoever to do with how the pit bulls were raised, or treated.

Another unusual pit bull characteristic is the penchant for maiming, disfiguring or killing their human companions. About half of all fatal pit bull attacks target their owners or other family members - something that would be unthinkable for any dog breed that wasn't created specifically for cruelty and violence.

Given these facts, how can anyone insist with a straight face that "it's all in how you raise them" - that they could literally love away, or train away, the very stubborn genetic imperatives of a type of dog which is the product of centuries of careful selective breeding to enjoy torturing and killing animals for sport?

Pit bull, happy and relaxed after doing what it was bred to do.

I'm looking at you, pit bull activists.

Yet another pit activist gets an education

The pain, terror and suffering inflicted by pit bull activists continues to escalate, as they ramp up their activism in denial of history and genetic science.

Inevitably, a number of these pit activists will have a rude awakening, in the form of an ugly confrontation  with reality. Sadly, it is often other innocent parties who pay the price for these costly life lessons.

Our focus today is a recent Facebook post, from the group "Our Pets Were Attacked By Pit Bulls" which we highly recommend for anyone wanting to know what's going on in our communities.

So, a pit bull activist posted video of their newly adopted pit bull "smashing stereotypes" by sitting next to a kitten without killing it. She smugly declared "This is so funny! This is exactly how it is with Maggie and Max vs my pit bull Kali (laugh emojis) Pits aren't as scary as their rep"

A few weeks later, the inevitable happened: a type of dog which was the result of centuries of careful selective breeding to enjoy bloodsport, did what it's genetic blueprint dictated, and innocent blood was shed for fun:

Having seen what pit bulls were bred to do and to be, what action does this pit activist take? Does she have the killer put down, to avoid any further horror?

No, she simply laughs off the purpose-bred cruelty of the pit bull as "some quirks", and tries to make the "quirky" pibble someone else's problem.

This is the sort of deadly imbecility we as a society are facing.

References -

The Facebook Link
The Reddit Link

Pit bull activism - unpacking the lies

Unraveling a typical example of the deception peddled by pit bull activists

My attention was recently directed to a study from a site called pitbullinfo.org which claimed that pit bulls were much less dangerous than some other breeds.

At first glance, it might seem to the typical man in the street that their allegations are legitimate. But if we begin to look a little closer, it all falls apart rather quickly, and you find yourself asking, "If pit bulls really are all that safe, why do they have to resort to lies to try to convince us of that?"

Their presentation is indeed long on propaganda and when closely examined, falls apart. Let's visit the propaganda page:

Couched in the veneer of pseudo scientific lingo, the site attempts to make the case that pit bulls are one of the least dangerous dog breeds of all. The reader is expected to believe that Malamutes are the most dangerous breed of all, and that Chows, Saint Bernards, Huskies, Great Danes, Rottweilers, Dobermans and Mastiffs are all more dangerous than pit bulls.

How can we square that with known facts about serious and fatal dog attacks?
For example, refer to this list of of attacks by breed over a recent 7 year period in North America, for which there have been fatalities:

We see that pit bulls account for over 3 times as many deaths as all other breeds combined, and nearly 5 times as many maiming or disfiguring attacks as all other breeds combined.

So how did the pit activists come up with such wacky numbers? Well, they employed a number of dishonest tricks here, all the while pretending to be unbiased statisticians.

For instance, when counting attacks, they used the time period from 1979 to 1998, when pit bulls were rare. But then when counting pit bulls, they used the a very optimistic estimate of the most recent pit bull ownership figures.

The effect is to produce an artificially low number of pit bull attacks per capita. Obviously this is dishonest. Instead of cherry picking variable for their equation from two different eras, they should have taken both variable from the same time period.

Note what they did with Chows - they inexplicably reduced them from 1% of the dog population (per animals24-7) to 0.1%, which made Chows appear 100 times more dangerous than they are.

As you can see, their goal here is not to inform, but to hoodwink. We leave the discovery of additional deceptions as an exercise for the reader.

"There are lies, damned lies, and statistics" -- Mark Twain

References -
pitbullinfo.org - statistics
animals24-7.org
fatalpitbullattacks.com
dogsbite.org
cravendesires.blogspot.com
thetruthaboutpitbulls.blogspot.com
americasdog.blogspot.com