The cultural aspect is 90% of it. If you look at the statistics over longer periods of time (eg several decades), you can tell when a specific dog breed becomes the “fashion choice” for irresponsible owners. Those dog breeds suddenly become “more dangerous” than other breeds.
Great Danes, Labradors, many breeds were considered the most dangerous in the past before Pitbulls were. In some countries you also get different “most dangerous” dog breeds than other countries.
And there’s quite a bit of research suggesting that although some bites are obviously more physically dangerous than others (a Chihuahua doesn’t cause injuries as severe as a Pitbull could cause), the dog’s aggressiveness or personality is actually not that genetically predetermined. Sure, there’s a bit that is, but it’s nowhere near enough to explain the dog bite statistics with purely the dog breed as the cause.
We compared behavioural tendencies between 8 breeds that are subject to legislation in at least one country and 17 breeds that are not subject to legislation using two validated psychometric tools: the Dog Impulsivity Assessment Scale (DIAS), which scores elements of impulsivity, including a tendency for aggressive behaviour, and Positive and Negative Activation Scale (PANAS), which scores sensitivity to positive and negative stimuli (which may trigger aggressive responses). We found that the two groups of breeds do not differ significantly in the specific DIAS factor relating to aggressive behaviour, “Aggression Threshold and Response to Novelty”, or any other DIAS and PANAS factors. We found large variations in all behavioural tendencies measured by both psychometric scales within both groups and within each breed studied. Taken together, our findings indicate that breed alone is not a reliable predictor of individual behavioural tendencies, including those related to aggression, and therefore breed‐specific legislation is unlikely to be an effective instrument for reducing risk.
Accordingly, a recent genomic study showed that although most canine behavioural traits have relatively high heritability (h2 > 0.25), breed explained only 9% of behavioural variation among individuals (Morrill et al., 2022).
Breed‐specific legislation has been heavily criticised for its poor scientific basis (Mills & Levine, 2006; Ott et al., 2008) and lack of demonstrable effectiveness, e.g. hospital admissions for dog bite incidents have continued to rise since legislation was introduced (Creedon & Ó’Súilleabháin, 2017).
For example, Creedon and Ó’Súilleabháin (2017) found no significant differences between legislated and non‐legislated groups of breeds with regard to either the type of bite inflicted or whether medical intervention was required, indicating no difference in the nature of bites received from the two classes of dog. Other studies have found that behavioural responses of dogs from legislated breeds during a temperament test were classified as appropriate in 95% of individuals tested (Schalke et al., 2008) and did not differ significantly from the behavioural responses of Golden Retrievers (Ott et al., 2008), who are widely considered good family pets.
The cultural aspect is 90% of it. If you look at the statistics over longer periods of time (eg several decades), you can tell when a specific dog breed becomes the “fashion choice” for irresponsible owners. Those dog breeds suddenly become “more dangerous” than other breeds.
Great Danes, Labradors, many breeds were considered the most dangerous in the past before Pitbulls were. In some countries you also get different “most dangerous” dog breeds than other countries.
And there’s quite a bit of research suggesting that although some bites are obviously more physically dangerous than others (a Chihuahua doesn’t cause injuries as severe as a Pitbull could cause), the dog’s aggressiveness or personality is actually not that genetically predetermined. Sure, there’s a bit that is, but it’s nowhere near enough to explain the dog bite statistics with purely the dog breed as the cause.
The data do not support this comment.
It does. See https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9679229/