At the end of the day there will inevitably be culling.
Idiots took on dogs in lockdown without thinking about post lockdown. It's pathetic really.
Koda is a lucky boy. He's not going anywhere. He deserves it from his previous life.
Does something need to be done about dogs?
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At the end of the day there will inevitably be culling.
Idiots took on dogs in lockdown without thinking about post lockdown. It's pathetic really.
Koda is a lucky boy. He's not going anywhere. He deserves it from his previous life.
No one disputed that genes play a big role in behaviour. I'm disputing your claim that breed has very little impact on behaviour, which is backed up by the study already linked to as dogs of the same breed are genetically similar.
What you've linked to doesn't negate that breed plats a role, and what I showed you demonstrates that it is relevant and that within-breed variation is much smaller than variation in those heritable traits between breeds.
Why do you keep on denying that?
Saying "breed does not define behaviour" feels like a nonsense statement, nobody ever claimed it in the first place.
Breeds are more likely to behave in a certain way, as influenced by their genes.
Take the American Akita breed - it comes out of the womb naturally aggressive towards other dogs of the same sex, you won't ever train it out - it's a well known problem with the breed, and they aren't recommended for inexperienced owners, for this reasson.
Soldato
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Breed has about 9% impact, so hardly the defining element.
Being "genetically similar" does not mean that their breed has a strong impact on their behaviour.
Breed plays a small role in behaviour. It does not define it.
I don't.
I challenge the degree of relevance, the context, and especially your understanding of it.
And yet you do exactly this when you use breed to predict or stereotype behaviour, or advocate for breed-specific legislation.
More likely, yes, but no behaviour or any other trait is guaranteed, and many breeders are sorely disappointed when it doesn't work out as intended.
Dowie, of course, has read all the studies and understands heritability like no-one else on the planet, but I'll explain the basics of it for you - Heritability is the likelihood of a child inheriting a specific trait from its parents. It's nothing to do with how strong that trait will be and has nothing to do with breed, which is why dogs from wildly different breeds can be so genetically similar and exhibit many similar traits or behaviours. For example, a St Bernard and a Pug have strong genetic similarity, far more than an Australian Shepherd does to a GSD.
But more than that, heritability is a measure of genetic versus environmental influence. Unless a trait has a heritability value of 1.0, there will be environmental influences.
So while the Akita breed may be generally be considered genetically predisposed toward a certain behaviour, how each individual dog was raised and how it is treated can have a massive impact. This is also why you get so many failed sheepdogs.
So yes, it is relatively possible to train a breed-typical Akita out of aggression toward other dogs of the same sex. It's perhaps not as easy as people would like and it takes an experienced handler with rock-solid consistency in their authority, but certainly not impossible.
Can’t you understand that your entire argument is lost, right there?
The entire point from the start is that it’s more likely, and that’s enough to make the point.
This is why the insurance companies haven’t all got PHDs in evolutionary biology - they don’t need it, a basic understanding of risk and statistics is enough.
Another dog of peace. No problem though folks.
And this is the crux of the argument mentioned earlier, you just get muddled/confused by the presence of some uncertainty. No one is arguing that this is monocausal, pointing out that breed is a factor doesn't negate other aspects like the owners etc. aren't a factor.
Nor is it a claim that all dogs of the same breed are genetic clones of each other and will have exactly the same genetic disposition towards certain behaviours.
Well, that's false, dogs of the same breed are close to each other genetically which is why between-breed variance for these inherited behavior traits is much larger than within-breed variance as already pointed out, there's a paper that explains all this and which has been linked to a few times now.
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https://twitter.com/i/status/1700688415380193486
Maybe we should have strength and agility tests along with a written exam to allow owners to get a dog license with then classifications of dog category against the owners own strength and agility to what dogs they should be allowed to buy, based on insurance premiums.... A lot to police, yeah I know wouldnt work without controlled breeding and selling programs/companies, but then again maybe thats what we do need as an additional measure to ensure owners are getting a suitable dog and one they could physically control/restrain in the event of violence.
Least thats all I can think of after seeing that linked video above.
Maybe we should have strength and agility tests along with a written exam to allow owners to get a dog license with then classifications of dog category against the owners own strength and agility to what dogs they should be allowed to buy, based on insurance premiums.... A lot to police, yeah I know wouldnt work without controlled breeding and selling programs/companies, but then again maybe thats what we do need as an additional measure to ensure owners are getting a suitable dog and one they could physically control/restrain in the event of violence.
Least thats all I can think of after seeing that linked video above.
The owner/s should be charged as if they committed the attack in person.
It's a relatively rare breed still yet it's responsible for half the deaths from dogs in the UK... we can quite easily infer from that that it's also responsible for a disproportionate number of the serious injuries that don't result in deaths too (and there will inevitably be many more of those). Something ttaskmaster was trying to dismiss earlier.
It's not about which dog is the most aggressive, Chihuahuas are typically pretty aggressive for example, or which dog is the biggest, Grate Danes are massive but don't seem to pose this problem.
It's the combination of its behavioural traits and aspects about its physique (inc a large head and jaw) that have resulted in this... and after all it should hardly be surprising that a dog literally bred for fighting is particularly dangerous. Bull terriers have been used for bull and bear baiting in the past, then pit bulls were bred for dog fighting, the XL Bully is just another iteration and is basically a big pitbull, starting to increase in popularity now in the UK as it bypasses the pit bull ban.
Treating all breeds as presenting the same risk or trying to pretend that breed isn't a significant factor here is just denying reality, breed is clearly a factor here both in terms of physique and behaviour.
We should ban this dog before it becomes more popular, the legislation is already in place to simply do that, just add it to the list. If the government did that then existing XL bullys would need to be neutered and only walked with a leash and muzzle and people couldn't legally breed them.
It's not about which dog is the most aggressive, Chihuahuas are typically pretty aggressive for example, or which dog is the biggest, Grate Danes are massive but don't seem to pose this problem.
It's the combination of its behavioural traits and aspects about its physique (inc a large head and jaw) that have resulted in this... and after all it should hardly be surprising that a dog literally bred for fighting is particularly dangerous. Bull terriers have been used for bull and bear baiting in the past, then pit bulls were bred for dog fighting, the XL Bully is just another iteration and is basically a big pitbull, starting to increase in popularity now in the UK as it bypasses the pit bull ban.
Treating all breeds as presenting the same risk or trying to pretend that breed isn't a significant factor here is just denying reality, breed is clearly a factor here both in terms of physique and behaviour.
We should ban this dog before it becomes more popular, the legislation is already in place to simply do that, just add it to the list. If the government did that then existing XL bullys would need to be neutered and only walked with a leash and muzzle and people couldn't legally breed them.
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Now I' quite like that idea, extend it to cover parents whilst their kids are under the age of 18 too.
Soldato
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'More likely' doesn't mean ****, though, unless you quantify how much more likely.
+0.0000005% is "more likely"... And neither likelihood is any guarantee.
Certain types of people are "more likely" to commit a crime, but we don't lock them up unless they actually do commit a crime, and we (in the UK, at least) certainly don't lock up entire types of people based on a few statistics.
The aforementioned Prius had very high safety ratings and should have been a very low risk for car accidents. You might say it is genetically predisposed to being a very safe car... and yet environmental and external influences instead led to it having one of the statistically highest accident rates.
Genetics are not a guarantee, and not even especially useful without knowing the environmental factors against which heritability measures them.
If genetics were even a little bit better than currently, we'd be far more accurate in predicting which people will get which diseases rather than merely guessing that they are 'at risk'.
As mentioned already, it's the factors that have the greater influence on outcome which matter most. Genetics, while much more important than breed, are still far less influential than environmental factors, particularly in dogs that have a high environmental maleability.
Breed-specific legislation hinges upon that very presumption that all dogs of the same breed will have the same genetic disposition toward certain behaviours.
Nope - Breed-typical dogs show far less variance within breed than breed-typical dogs across-breed. The study you posted specifically looked at dogs that were considered typical and representative of their breed, so of course you'd see a high level of conformity to breed-standard. You're essentially looking just at dogs that would make good Crufts candidates, rather than examples representative of their breeds as a whole.
A wider study including both dogs that are not typical of their breed, despite genetically conforming to their breed, and of crossbred dogs shows far greater variance within breed and stronger inter-breed relationship than that by the narrower-focus on breed-typical dogs. This study has also been posted several times, now.
It still did not identify any behaviour which was considered breed-specific. Rather, it identified a number of different breeds that all share the same high heritability for certain traits... noting, as you will of course know, that heritabale traits are not the same as inherited traits.
You can try and infer whatever you like... and yet there are breeds of large, powerful dogs that rank high for attacks but have virtually no kills, so it doesn't necessarily follow.
I expect if you did investigate, you'd find it's less rare than you expected, but primarily unregistered, and has a fairly low ratio of attacks:kills compared to similarly built dogs.
Genetics is the factor, not the breed.
The problem is, and has always been, the breeders who breed from undesirable bloodlines to promote undesirable traits (regardless of breed), and then put the dogs in environments which exacerbate the undesirable traits.
We'd only be having this thread again every few years, as people would each time cross-breed something else to get around the new bans.
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Different IMO A teenager has more freedom, intelligence and ability than a dog. The dog is reliant on the owner entirely for the most part.
The owner has also taken the risk of buying a very dangerous dog. If I drive at 200mph in a 30mph zone I'm probably definitely getting manslaughter charges when I kill someone. Why should it be different when you buy a dog that is bred to kill humans and animals?
Law and Order is also in place to at least deter people from doing these things.
Soldato
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That's horrendous
Ah.. he's finally accepting the evidence but a new excuse has dropped, breed does matter but he's only accepting it for breed-typical dogs.
Couldn't possibly be the case that XL Bullys, a breed artificially created for fighting/aggression might have a combo of negative traits in terms of public safety?
That would tally with the data too... is the penny dropping yet? A relatively rare breed causing half of the dog-related deaths this year? Hmmm
Actually screw it, lets address some of the other silly points:
That's basically the entire breed! You're saying that the problem is the breeders who breed from undesirable bloodlines but that's how XL Bullys were created in the first place. So you actually do acknowledge that is a problem, you know, that the breed is a factor here and there's an easy solution to that problem; ban them!
It's been over 30 years since the pitbull ban so that's quite a leap.
Those things are not mutually exclusive, dogs of the same breed are genetically close. Come on, this isn't hard to understand.
That's basically the entire breed! You're saying that the problem is the breeders who breed from undesirable bloodlines but that's how XL Bullys were created in the first place. So you actually do acknowledge that is a problem, you know, that the breed is a factor here and there's an easy solution to that problem; ban them!
It's been over 30 years since the pitbull ban so that's quite a leap.
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100%, that's basically been the line of argument from the start.
It's a problem caused by humans, artificially selecting and combining the most dangerous/largest/most powerful breeds, to create a breed which is essentially a horrible monsterous thing.
They shouldn't exist.
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