ATTS official breed statistics

[Donald Ian Rankin]

17. I'm afraid I think this is an attempt to mislead rather than to inform.

The vital fact to keep focussed on when discussing dangerous dogs is the extraordinarily high proportion of fatal attacks perpetrated by a single breed group - pit bulls and pit-bull derived dogs - which make up only a tiny fraction of total owned dogs.

So we don't need proxy measures like this to answer the question "are pit bulls more dangerous than other dogs"; we *know* that the answer is "yes, much".

We can debate *why* that is - to what extent it's because they're more likely to attack people as opposed to to what extend it's because those attacks are more likely to be dangerous, and to what extent it's because of inherent characteristics of the breed as opposed to to what extent it's due to the type of people who buy pit bulls.

But there's no room for debate about the fact that it *is* true.

I'm afraid that I think that selective quoting of statistics to try and trick people into believing that pit bulls are not more dangerous than other breeds of dog, while not a lie per se, is a deliberate attempt to mislead.

There's also the issue that extrapolating from a self-selected and hence non-representative sample to a population at a whole is nonsense.

And the fact that these statistics represent three unrelated things, only one of which is closely relevant to a dog being dangerous, rolled into one.