MNN - Mother Nature Network

and they still retain this characteristic. Inbreeding can create unstable temperaments, and hormones can contribute to aggressive tendencies in intact male dogs, females in heat or in a false pregnancy, and females nursing puppies. Environment -- living conditions, lack of socialization, excessive punishment, being attacked or frightened by an aggressive dog, being spoiled or given too much unwarranted praise by owners, being isolated from human contact or being exposed to frequent teasing by children or aggravation by joggers --can also influence aggression. Obviously, dogs are not people. They have a pack order that determines their social rank, a pack order that is established and maintained by body language. Some dogs occupy dominant or alpha status, and some have low rank or omega status. When dogs live with people, they look at humans as members of the pack and try to establish their place in the social order by challenging the more submissive family members, particularly the children. If dogs display a dominant gesture such as growling while guarding the food dish, and they are not corrected for this behavior, they have established a bit of dominance to build on with any or all family members. If these dominant gestures remain uncorrected, the dog slowly but surely gains in status over one or all family members. The subtle signs of dominance usually go unnoticed or are explained away until the dog bites the human for infringement on his alpha position. The owner misunderstands the progression of behaviors and blames the dog for biting "for no reason." These dogs frequently end up at animal shelters and are destroyed because their owners misunderstood the development of aggressive behavior." There is more but if you want to read it you will have to go to the article I found it in. The url is http://www.canismajor.com/dog/aggres1.html I am not sure what all the possible signs of inbreeding are, I only know one and that is noticeable overbite or underbite.

case. When you hear a story on the news about a dog biting someone, if it's a Pit Bull, the headline is always "PIT BULL ATTACKS" if it's any other breed of dog the headline is just simply "Dog bite". Which makes the public believe that all pit bulls are dangerous. No matter what breed of dog you own, if you are a responsible dog owner, you will pay attention to your dog's habits and disposition and take the necessary precautions to keep your dog safe and from injuring anyone. Stereotyping and/or banning a specific breed of dog as "viscious", is no different than racism in humans...you can not judge all for the actions of a few.

a PLASTIC SURGEON and deal with SERIOUS injury. The reason pit bulls would seem more aggressive from these statistics is because they are powerful dogs and CAPABLE of this sort of damage. It is a proven fact that small dogs like schit zhus are more aggressive but that wouldn't be recorded in your statistics because their size renders them incapable of this sort of damage. In addition the statistics only show a correlation, not a causal effect. If you don't know what that means, look it up. It is simple errors like this that entirely misconstrue information provided and that people are more likely to misjudge innocent dogs. By no means am I saying you should trust all pit bulls, but that goes for ANY dog you meet. You have no idea how they were brought up or what their temperament is. You can't just assume because a stereotype says a breed is violent or well behaved that a specific dog is going to behave in that manner. Animals break stereotypes just as frequently as humans do.