LogFAQs > #967417204

FatalAccident posted...

This sounds totally made up

Saying 3-4 times is a rough estimate on my part that that wasn't based on having the numbers in front of me, but I actually gathered the stats and did the math myself for an old topic on the matter. That was in the context of arguing whether banning dog breeds was comparable to racism and a number of people (I replied specifically to Jen, in this instance) expressed some concern about the notion of comparing violent animals to minorities. I took that a step further and compared violent animals to people of all races:

Jen0125 posted...
And you believe it appropriate to compare the movement to try to ban violent dogs to.. Minorities? Okay. Lol surprising but okay.

adjl posted...
More accurately, to compare a movement to try to ban certain dog breeds to a hypothetical movement to try to ban certain minorities. That does not rely on comparing minorities to violent dogs, only on comparing the rationale behind it.

However, since you seem to want to make the comparison between dogs and people, let's try it on for size:

Pit bulls in the US - ~4.5 million
Deaths by pit bulls in the US - ~27 per year (65% of 40 overall dog deaths)
Deaths per million pit bulls per year - 6.0 (I'm unreasonably happy this ended up being an integer >.>)

White people in the US - ~234.3 million (in 2017)
Murders by white people in US - 3011 (in 2018)
Murders per million white people in 2018 - 12.9

Black people in the US - 40.6 million (in 2017)
Murders by black people in the US - 3177 (in 2018)
Murders per million black people in 2018 - 775.3

People of other races in the US - 35.9 million
Murders by Other - 207
Murders per million Other in 2018 - 5.8

It would appear that, if we accept the premise that there should be a ban on breeding pit bulls because of how dangerous they are, it would be logically consistent to also have ban on breeding white and black humans, as any given member of either race is significantly more likely to kill somebody than any given pit bull. The "Other" category could stand to be broken down further, but given that its average is so close to that of the pit bulls', I expect this logic would also support banning several of them.

Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#Race_and_ethnicity
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-2018/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-6.xls
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_dog_attacks_in_the_United_States
https://dogbitelaw.com/vicious-dogs/pit-bulls-facts-and-figures

I didn't calculate an overall figure, but it's easy enough to do that now and arrive at 6395/310.8M=20.6 murders per million humans in the US. 20.6/6.0 is 3.43, conveniently in the middle of the range that I stated. While it was at least partially made up, it seems I got lucky and my rough recollection of the actual numbers was good enough for my estimate to be accurate. Go me, I guess.

BigOlePappy posted...

But they kill other people's pets...

Also, you don't have to be killed to be life-alteringly maimed

I have indeed not done the same analysis for injuries or pet deaths. Just to vaguely intuit it instead of collecting real data, I expect human injuries would work out pretty similarly, operating under the assumption that roughly as many dog attacks end up being fatal as assaults end up turning into murder. Pet deaths are probably higher, though.

Personally, I just think the owner of any given pet (as well as whoever's supposed to be in control of them at the time) should be held liable for any crimes committed by their pet. Your dog kills someone? You're up for murder 2 (first-degree would be almost impossible to prove). Your dog injures someone? Assault causing bodily harm. Your dog kills someone's pet? Also murder 2. Some degree of exception would need to be made for trained rescuers who did their due diligence to prevent those outcomes and it just wasn't enough, but passing those charges on to whoever trained the dog to misbehave like that in the first place might be reasonable. That would at least act as a deterrent against training aggression into dogs and against people who don't know what they're doing trying to adopt a rescue that has the potential to turn dangerous if mishandled, without needing to go so far as to outright ban them.