Quote:
Originally Posted by OMG!WTF!
If your goal is to decrease serious bites by pit bulls then banning pit bulls does have the desired effect.
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Should the goal not be the reduction of serious dog bites overall? A very narrowly focused ban is the easy route, you can get a bunch of people on board because it won't affect them and it's great for optics. Toronto managed to cut bites by pit bulls; great, so the ban mostly worked. Now, what it Toronto's plan to deal with the overall increase in bites? Is there evidence that if they had taken a different approach, that same decrease would not have happened? The ban did result in scores of needless euthanizations though.
Somehow in Calgary, we saw an overall reduction with no breed ban.
The other issue is that the data is generated when treatment is sought, there doesn't seem to be a distinction made, or a definition for, a serious bite. So right off the bat, the stats are flawed.