Pit Bulls
Thoughts in response to stories like these: Three pit bulls that slaughtered 42 goats captured.
Can someone help me understand the pit bull debate? From my (admittedly-limited) perspective, pit bulls are inherently aggressive and dangerous animals. Nature has endowed them with fierce physical properties that make them mauling and killing machines, and these fierce physical properties seem to be combined with an innate aggressiveness and tendency to "snap" and attack humans, resulting in serious bodily harm and injury.
The proponents of pit bulls seem to say that they do not have an innate tendency to snap and they're not aggressive. Their reasoning seems to go like this: "Pit bulls are not endowed by nature with this tendency to snap, and they are not by nature aggressive. The problem is, people over the years have bred aggressiveness into the breed in order to create better fighting dogs. It's humans' fault."
Is that a fair characterization of the pro-pit bull argument? If so, I readily concede it (largely because I know nothing about the history of dog-fighting and the eugenics around it, so I'm in no position to gainsay their theory). But my response is, "So what? At this stage of the game, pit bulls are temperamentally aggressive. Quite frankly, I don't care if they're aggressive because God made them that way, or because the Michael Vicks of the world bred them that way, or because an evil demiurge on Neptune is controlling them through Chinese satellite signals. I honestly couldn't care less about the reasons. I honestly don't think they belong in any civilized society."
I would also add: Let's say that the tests and statistics are questionable, that maybe, just maybe, pit bulls are being unfairly maligned, but it'll take many more years and studies to sort it out. Why take the chance? We have evidence that they're dangerous. What countervailing consideration says we need to keep them around? Automobiles kill far more people than pit bulls, but the automobile is kinda crucial to the American way of living, so we accept the trade-off. What, exactly, is the public policy behind private pit bull ownership? They're so cutesy-wootsy and cuddle-able? It's a status symbol among the white trash? I'm sorry, that doesn't cut it. If law enforcement and military bases keep them to enhance security, I see a public policy argument in favor of government ownership, but for every meth dealer this side of the Pecos to have one as a status symbol? I don't see it.
Please weigh in. I readily admit that I'm no expert. If my reasoning or my facts are wrong, please correct me.
Addendum:
While surfing for information regarding pit bulls, I ran across this funny anecdote at Wikipedia: "The fighting reputation of pit bull-type dogs led the San Francisco Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1996 to relabel pit bull terriers as "St. Francis terriers" (not associated with the "terrier" mascot of St. Francis College in New York) so that they might be more readily adopted; 60 temperament-screened dogs were adopted until the program was halted after several of the newly adopted dogs killed cats."
Great Quote
"Defending the continued existence of the state, despite having absolute certainty of a corresponding continuation of its intrinsic engagement in robbery, destruction, murder, and countless other crimes, requires that one imagine nonstate chaos, disorder, and death on a scale that nonstate actors seem incapable of causing. Nor, to my knowledge, does any historical example attest to such large-scale nonstate mayhem. With regard to large-scale death and destruction, no person, group, or private organization can even begin to compare to the state, which is easily the greatest instrument of destruction known to man."
Robert Higgs
