A comment from Tom Scott just caused me to write a long and rambling comment that wants to be a post, so rather than expect people to read comments (a process many reasonable people avoid) I guess I should just let the comment become this post.

Replying to my earlier comment that I had "seen many dogs (especially pit bulls) which have simply wanted to fight without any training," Tom says:

this reportfrom Tacoma would seem to confirm your point. However, there is no evidence that the dogs were not trained to be aggressive or violent.

NIGHTMARE: Pit Bulls Break Into Home, Maul Woman...

...Gorman [the victim] and neighbors say Wilson's pit bulls have long terrorized the area.

Brad King said his five-pound papillon, Toby, was attacked inside his home when the two dogs entered through his open back door last summer. "They had Toby in their mouths," King said.

King was able to stop the attack, but Toby suffered a broken jaw.

Neal Fortner, who lives two houses down from Gorman, said the pit bulls came toward him snarling one morning as he tried to get into his car. He threw rocks to shoo them away.

"I can't believe she made it out her back door," he said of Gorman. "I'm just glad she made it with her life."

Gorman said she has called 911 previously when Betty charged her and Misty. She said the animals should be shot.

"A lot of pit bulls are very sweet, but she's not at all," she said of Betty. "She's got a real mean streak in her."

"I can just say I'm sorry because I can't take it back," said Zack Martin, one of the dogs' owners. He says the other dog belongs to a friend. Martin says one of the dogs chewed on a rope holding up the fence to his backyard, and that's how the dogs escaped.

"I would never think my dog would do something like that," said Martin.

The supposedly troublesome characteristics of the pit-bull type--its gameness, its determination, its insensitivity to pain--are chiefly directed toward other dogs. Pit bulls were not bred to fight humans. On the contrary: a dog that went after spectators, or its handler, or the trainer, or any of the other people involved in making a dogfighting dog a good dogfighter was usually put down. (The rule in the pit-bull world was "Man-eaters die.")

A Georgia-based group called the American Temperament Test Society has put twenty-five thousand dogs through a ten-part standardized drill designed to assess a dog's stability, shyness, aggressiveness, and friendliness in the company of people. A handler takes a dog on a six-foot lead and judges its reaction to stimuli such as gunshots, an umbrella opening, and a weirdly dressed stranger approaching in a threatening way. Eighty-four per cent of the pit bulls that have been given the test have passed, which ranks pit bulls ahead of beagles, Airedales, bearded collies, and all but one variety of dachshund. "We have tested somewhere around a thousand pit-bull-type dogs," Carl Herkstroeter, the president of the A.T.T.S., says. "I've tested half of them. And of the number I've tested I have disqualified one pit bull because of aggressive tendencies. They have done extremely well. They have a good temperament. They are very good with children." It can even be argued that the same traits that make the pit bull so aggressive toward other dogs are what make it so nice to humans. "There are a lot of pit bulls these days who are licensed therapy dogs," the writer Vicki Hearne points out. "Their stability and resoluteness make them excellent for work with people who might not like a more bouncy, flibbertigibbet sort of dog. When pit bulls set out to provide comfort, they are as resolute as they are when they fight, but what they are resolute about is being gentle. And, because they are fearless, they can be gentle with anybody."

My worry with the pit bull is that its amiable nature (which once went with the fighting genes) is being screwed with by psychopathic criminal breeders who do not seek the same characteristics as the original Victorian gamblers who bred them to be pitted for money. I have seen very friendly pit bulls owned by young thugs who were angered to see their dogs wag their tails and lick me when I pet them. A lot of these kids would do better with a Rottweiler or a Dobie, but they want the muscle-bound look that the pit bull has. (Unfortunately, I suspect that what they want is a pit bull that acts like a Doberman, and I hope such an animal is never created. In my view, such an aberrant variety would constitute a different breed.)

Sorry to ramble, but I am often concerned. I worry that what is going on in the streets is not in the best interests of a wonderful but misunderstood breed.

It often reminds me of the gun issue.

Problem is, there's no Second Amendment for dogs. Which sets this thing up as a debate between loyal and responsible dog owners (accompanied by the usual libertarian hard core) versus concerned communitarians who want to hold everyone to the lowest common denominator.

The latter mindset means that social policy tends to be written by street scum.

(Why does that seem fine with the bureaucrats?)