Ignoring the previous discussion and talking about those new screenshots, the third looks very untrustworthy at first glance.
Emotional images, pitbulls named by name in the header navigation, sounds like a single-purpose activist page. It’s like going to peta expecting honest information about changing to a vegan diet or smthn.
The second image (srsly you could have put links below ffs) I dug up and it’s some kind of property developer, could well be they profit off of fear of dogs or smthn, and going to the actual page they just quote other articles incorrectly anyway. They also misleadingly throw rottweilers into it for some reason, while in the linked article it’s 60% with at least partial pitbull bloodline (note this being incorrectly simplified to “pitbulls”, which is at best sloppy), and 7% rottweiler bloodline, which is just misleading throwing those together without further comment. That also ofc fits the idea that the page just wants to stir up fear for whatever reason.
Both of these pages are, frankly, trash. Do yourself a favor and remove them as arguments. If your point is correct, those would still make you look so dishonest in arguing it, it makes it look wrong; they are worse than not citing anything.
Now painfully scraping out the wiki article (Fatal dog attacks in the United States) -fucking link your shit man-, that article seems unproblematic at first glance.
Going into the actual sources now, the 60% thing linked earlier refers to “fuicelle & lee” which is not a paper to the best of my search ability, and is only ever mentioned on other pages copying the exact same paragraph around, … so yeah that’s sketchy.
The wikipedia thing I just hope is accurate (I’ll take lt as accurate without checking here), but you gotta note it is a low sample size, half the percentage your other stuff claims (28%), and from seemingly only 2 specific locations.
I’d sure be interested if you can find any other statistics that don’t just evaporate when you look for a source tho.
Starting another topic, what if you had clear statistics that a lot of dog damage is done by pitbulls? That doesn’t instantly get you to proving the issue is with pitbulls. It’s ye olde correlation isn’t causation problem.
One example: Imagine insecure people compensating with pitbulls due to their brand image. Then those people tend to suck as dog owners so you get cases of horrible mistraining. Now if you were to ban pitbulls, or make their ownership “non-badass” via say cage or muzzle requirements, the badass dog brand would shift and those people would mistrain other dogs, the statistics would change to a new breed and the deaths would not decrease. Because in that chain of causation the core issue is the group of owners, and you merely measure the average type of dog those problematic owners get.
This is a hypothetical naturally, but that’s why a simple “x % of deaths are caused by y dogs” isn’t enough.
Before you argue allegiances, I don’t like dogs, especially not ones with jumpy or agressive character. I also don’t have experience with dogs.
Your arguments and my checking of them was the first actual argument on favor of pitbulls I have seen in a long time, I could still be convinced pretty easily that there is some issue with the breed.
I should be the prime target audience for you to convince. Uninformed, heard anecdotes about pitbulls bad, absolutely no inherent favor or attachment to the breed (they just don’t look good sorry dog people). I should be trivially easy to convince, so please work on your argument.
That’s better.
Your first source is good, no issues there.
The second one is a law review, which is not a relevant paper (and I think not a paper at all but I’m not a law student). So it’d only be worth anything if a witness had suffient credentials, and no alternate motive, and then it’d still lack peer review, academic oversight, …
The paper needs to be on-topic, I can’t expect a biology paper to get art history right. Usually papers constrain themselves to topics they know for that reason, but for a law review I can see why that isn’t possible.
Papers also make their statements more directly, so you would find a more clear statement about breeds and attacks. The fact this is missing should give you some warning signs.
You did well then digging out the third source, which is fine again. You should have just skipped the second one entirely, since it’s not primary anyway, just citing.
This third might be what wikipedia was using, numbers look familiar.
Fourth source looks fine.
It is about a different topic, agression not violence, but you use it relevantly.
While checking the first source I saw the full results section, containing “Prior to 1980, the majority of dog bites reported in peer-reviewed literature were attributed to the German Shepherd breed (68.4%). From 1981–2000 German Shepherds still accounted for the largest minority of breeds identified (20.1%), with mixed breeds (19.6%) and Pit Bull type breeds (14.1%) accounting for the 2nd and 3rd largest minorities. Since 2001, Pit Bull type breeds have accounted for the largest subset of dog bites reported in the medical literature (37.5%) […]” continuing with your quote.
It is interesting to note that German Shepherds apparently used to take the same statistical position you are arguing pitbulls hold in the present.
Ok now. You mentioned “Notably you’ll notice that a ban […] was the result of an ~89.5% reduction in pitbull attacks (1-(5.7/54.4)).”.
That is mostly meaningless for our purposes, i.e. determining what factor dog breed plays in dog-human harm.
Firstly, it’s a ratio, so speaking of reduction is incorrect. Reduction refers to numbers, so you need to consider the total amount. If the total number of dog attacks remained stable, then this would be accurate.
analogy
A simple example for this problem: If most people were driving small cars, most pedestrian deaths would be caused by small cars. If you then ban small cars, the pedestrian fatalities caused by small cars should go down. As both a ratio and in absolute terms. However the total number of pedestrian fatalities by all cars should go up, since people would mostly be pushed into large cars, that kill more people per driving hour, while hours driven by car shouldn’t be overly affected.
This here isn’t even considering driver mentality, it’s merely a consequence of not factoring in usage rates (or breed populations for dogs).
analogy 2
Now for the other effect, take suicides. If you consider suicides per rail mile, you could find train infrastructure particularly prone to suicides. But if you then ban trains you will see a decrease in rails suicides but a corresponding increase in say bridge suicides, so all of a sudden a different infrastructure becomes equally problematic, because the ground cause here is mental health of people, not suicide-enabling infrastructure.
This would be the analog to problematic owners finding a different breed or animal to make problematic, making breed bans a hopeless case of whack-amole.
If that were the case though, it would be precisely not the point you wanted, since it would mean banning pitbulls did nothing for the underlying problem: dog-human harm (not pitbull-human harm).
I saw the third article have a discussion on more useful metrics for judging pitbulls, but ima just roll my own rq:
As mentioned above the next step would be seeing if limiting pitbulls reduces dog attacks in total, not just pitbull attacks. That would cover cases like problematic owners shifting breeds.
An even more general one, one the article makes, is factoring in total dog ownership. That also checks if maybe reduczions are just people having less dogs in general.
Basically you’d want the same you have for for example large medical studies, factoring in many quantities and doing a multi-variable correlation analysis to hopefully determine all the various independent correlations and have a better chance at establishing causes.
After that you could see further. You may for example reach the conclusion that the only way is either adressing owners, or banning all large dogs, which if the case should change your strategy for action. If in that case you had already banned pitbulls you’d have shot yourself in the foot, since them people would be sick of it, the motivation would be used up, and you’d have to more than start over for the next breed or the actual wider methods.
On the other hand if it is indeed mostly a breed issue you would have far better arguments for getting breed-specific regulations.
The 4th source is a good start for establishing hypotheses if pitbulls are shown to be a problematic breed. You would need another metric like harm potential for the strenth, bit damage, etc. of dogs, since an agression rating led by chihuahuas is perhaps not the most useful here. Then you can multiply agression and harm potential for an estimate of natural inclination to endanger humans.
I haven’t looked deeper into the paper as to how “aggression” was measured, that method would also have to be airtight against training, so probably measured for dogs trained in a controlled environment etc…
If you do find a controlled link between such a harm potential rating and actual human harm using the methods of the last section, then that would immediately show both problem and solution. You would have a method by which to rate any new breeds or vatiations and could write regulations to target that. So even if someone creates new breeds to target the aggressive dog market, the regulations would cover that without any new changes. And similarly you could breed pitbulls to be more passive and get that variation exempt from limitations. That should probably cover most peoples interests in this debate.