Good on you Twaddle for being honorable.
E-Kul, would you rather ban Pitbulls or Guns if you had a choice?
Also, how did you get attacked and if you were able to carry a gun, would that have saved you? I don`t think guns or Pitbulls (also known as Nanny Dogs in History due to their gentle nature with children) should be banned in any way but am curious to know your answers to these questions.
The Nanny Dog myth is probably the most perverse of all the propaganda put forward by Pitbull Apologists, As if a breed of dog that regularly maims, mauls and kills children could be considered an ideal babysitter. The truth behind the myth and how it got started can be found here
http://thetruthaboutpitbulls.blogspot.com.au/2010/08/nanny-dog-myth-revealed.html. I have asked myself many times if a gun would have helped, it may well have. But in my case, I am just not a gun guy, and even if Australia had very liberal gun laws and they were easy to get, I wouldn't buy one, let alone take the time to become proficient with one. I simply see gun ownership as a burden. It is just one more thing I would have to clean, maintain, safely store and worry about.
Ideally, I think Pitbulls should banned, the current generation should be sterilised and then grandfathered out of existence. It is not that I hate the breed, I have even owned one and have a tattoo of one on my right shoulder. They just aren't suitable pets for civilised societies.
Ironically, everyone was safer when just the DOGMEN bred them for fighting, firstly they culled the dogs that weren't game and they also hid their secret passion from the publics gaze, so because of this, it was easy to identify a game pitbull, they all were, and because they didn't want the public to know, they kept the dogs well away from society. (this wasn't foolproof, family members were still vulnerable, and a famous dog fighter and breeder by the name of John P. Colby, owned the pitbull that killed his 2 year old nephew at his Newburyport home in 1909.) Even the dogmen weren't silly enough to keep a pitbull as a housepet. The problem has arisen because of the do-gooders, their are breeders out there who think they are doing the right thing by breeding the game out of the breed, but all this does now is create confusion, because now it has become impossible to tell which Pitbull is game and which isn't. And because you have two types of breeder involved with these dogs, you have one breeding for game, and the other trying to breed it out, it has made the situation even more dangerous than when the dogmen were the only ones who kept these dogs.
People like to downplay the importance of genetics in the dog, and place more emphasis on the environment, this is a mistake, studies on both wolves and foxes have demonstrated the importance of genes and proper artificial selection. Studies with wolves have shown that no amount of love and nurturing when rearing a wolf pup can make it domesticated, one study attempted to rear wolves from pups and after three months had to return them to the wild, as they remained wild and unaffected by the nurturing environment. Another study on foxes demonstrated that with careful artificial selection you can within three to four generations have an almost domesticated fox. You have to select the least aggressive from each litter and mate them with each other. At the moment you reintroduce an aggressive bloodline again, you end up with a more wild unpredictable dog.
And this is the scenario that Pitbulls face at the moment, too many people breeding to keep the game in the dog, and this will never change. if you actually eventually breed out the aggression, the breed will slowly evolve into a new type of breed that actually has different physical characteristics. This is what they found with the fox study (See Silver Foxes), that as they created more passive foxes through careful artificial selection, they actually changed their physical appearance, colour and markings.
And although legislation can be helpful, I actually think the best bet is too recondition people to look at things from a different perspective. People have to want to do things because they see the benefit to it, not just for themselves, but for everyone. Like you have in the USA at the moment, even if they bring in severe restrictions and penalties for Gun Control purposes, already you have Police Chiefs coming forward and saying they wont enforce it, no good having laws that Police won't enforce. Same goes with Pitbulls, even Countries, like Australia that create legislation have the issue of those paid to enforce the laws not doing so because they don't believe in it. Also, Pitbull owners have just found ways around the legislation.
Let me ask you, if someone near and dear to you, say a child or a parent or perhaps your wife, I don't know, let's say, was killed in a mass shooting or by a Pitbull, would you take time out to reconsider your views, or are you confident that you wouldn't change your mind?I don't mind what other people indulge in, as long as I or other innocent people don't have to pay the price for their indulgences.
