Dangerous Dogs.
- Thread starter Da[]San
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While I don't take responsibility away from the owners in most cases you can't ignore the breeding/type of a dog.
Most of the problems with Alsatians are dogs that have been trained for agressive roles i.e. police dogs and then taken in by someone who doesn't know how to handle them, the underlying breed itself is fairly well tempered.
Rottweilers are another breed that are essentially fairly well tempered, but their natural physical properties make them dangerous (more dangerous than many other breeds) if they do attack, most of the issues with them are down to being badly handled by their owners.
Staffies and pitbulls are another story because their breeding originates in a dog that was good for hunting, later on for fighting and many of the blood lines have around 100 years of breeding to encourage agressive tendancies, tenacity, etc. while some especially staffies were bred to combine these lines with intelligence or as a range companion/guard dog - a good owner can mitigate this a lot, some have enough mixed breeding that ill natured attributes are more watered down but at the end of the day they tend to have years and years of breeding in attributes that can't simply be trained away entirely and as a gross generalisation most breeds of dogs haven't been bred this selectively for such dangerous attributes. You really can't ignore this and just clump them in with any other dog type.
Soldato
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The little ***** wont bite your face off though.
I don't know what the rules are these days, but you weren't able to re-home police / military dogs that had been trained for front line and attack roles. Any that you see on the street with people claiming they were trained for that are either lying, or it has been done by a cowboy with no formal police / military dog handling training.
Source: Dad was a police and military dog handler and used to home his old working dogs when they hit retirement age.
Edit: It is possible to get a personal protection dog that has been trained by a former / retired police or military handler. But these dogs can cost thousands, if not tens of thousand of pounds, depending on the levels it has been trained to.
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This applies to any and all dogs, though.
They will if they get to a baby or toddler, even the smallest dog can do serious damage to one so young.
"Dangerous Dog" is a term that annoys me. It's a media attention grabber to back up their normally one sided articles.
The breeds that people conceive as being dangerous dogs are labelled that because of their image. They attract the wrong sort of people, they treat them badly and teach them to be aggressive because they see as an extension of themselves.
Any dogs has the ability to be aggressive, however, 99.9% of those in loving and caring packs (families) won't be.
There's no such thing as "dangerous dogs", just dangerous owners.
It was an example but from what I remember thats why those dogs got a bad rep in the first place and why those rules were put into place.
Sorry thats rubbish - there are breeds that have been bred for 100 odd years for temperate mentalities and there are other breeds that have been bred just as long to selectively produce more dominant agressive traits. Obviously you have cross breeding, variations in the manifestation of traits and so on and then the physical nature, designed or natural that also make some dogs more dangerous than others even ignoring temperment.
Then you have training and how responsible the owner is but that can't entirely 100% over-ride the instincts of a breed.
EDIT: I'm not saying all <insert breed> are bad. But that some breeds have a higher chance of showing agressive behavior, will do more damage if they do become unstable, than other breeds. Sure most types of dog will do a lot of damage to a child/baby if they decide to attack it but training or not theres a huge variation breed on breed as to how likely they are to attack a child/baby at all.
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Think you're onto something here. My uncles has been aggressive since being a pup. If you didn't show it any attention every few minutes it would snap at you. He tried training it out of the dog but it's still aggressive to this day and it's fairly old.
Associate
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All the wasters and chavs round here seem to have those small pitbull-looking dogs. I keep thinking there should be some sort of test if one wants to own such an animal.
yes and how is that dogs fault? a kid can be trained to kill is it kids fault ?
In what way does that question my post where I advocated micro-chipping dogs and licensing breeders?
Associate
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Most likely owned by some chav on benifits!
Basically a wolf. Instincts remain strong. Beautiful dog though.
Indeed but you have to remember that bull breeds were selectively bred for animal aggression not human aggression. See how far you get trying to fight dogs, wound up and injured, if they're more interested in biting the handlers than the opponent... Think about it...
Greyhounds have been bred for millennia to kill things, so have Beagles (a breed so 'soft' it's regrettably used in the lab), so have many others. None are known as people aggressive as animal aggression != people aggression.
Other breeds such as GSDs, Rottweilers, Bullmastiffs, Mastiffs, CAOs and other LGDs etc have been selectively bred for people aggression. I'd be more worried by one of those than a bull-breed - if I were to be worried by any dog (which I'm not, as it's deed not breed).
This is coming from someone who used to train police dogs, and has owned bull breeds AND mastiff/shepherd dogs from an early age, so there's no inherent breed bias in what I say.
EDIT to answer your own: In my experience smaller breeds (especially toy dogs) are much more prone to be confused/jealous/overly-stimulated by babies and small children. In fact there's verified records of Pekingese savaging and killing babies more than once. Ditto other dogs. It's far too rash a generalisation to say breed x is more predicated to attacking children, it's simply nonsense. By the very nature of their size and strength, bull, mastiff and related 'strong' breeds are harshly bred for good human-friendly temperaments and high stimulus thresholds (most important). Toy and small breeds on the other hand, not so much... for the exact same unfortunate generalisation you demonstrated in your post.
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I mostly glossed over it as it makes an already complicated arguement even more so...
Even tho bull breeds are trained for animal agression its fairly well known that once their blood is up often they go for anything people or otherwise quite often even their handlers.
Also gets a bit complicated with those others you listed i.e. while Bullmastiffs have been long bred for people aggression Rottweilers are mostly trained for people agression by their owners individually and breeding for such isn't as common (AFAIK isn't part of their "pedigree"), likewise I believe GSDs.
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