Just Euthanize the Pitbulls
This Isn't about the Dogs
Welcome back, and thank you for reading! Because I am travelling for New Year’s, I do not have access to my microphone; audio quality is poor at best when I don’t use it and rely on the computer mic, so I will record this article and send out the audio version when I get back home next week. I apologize for the delay, and hope you had a nice Christmas and will have a fun NYE. As always, please tap the heart to “like” this article if you get something out of it, as that is how Substack knows to promote it!
If you were given the option of keeping a land mine in your house that would do nothing for months, or perhaps even years, other than looking somewhat out of place on your bookshelf, but would one day almost certainly explode and either badly wound you, kill your child, or both, would you accept the offer and keep it around? Or would you simply reject the land mine and stay away from all those who keep such things in their homes?
Would your “no” answer change to “yes” if I told you the land mine costs hundreds or thousands of dollars a year to maintain, has absolutely no benefits whatsoever to its existence, and accounts for 70% of home decor-related deaths?
Hopefully not.
Yet such is the decision made by the millions of Americans who own pit bulls, the worst of all dog breeds…and somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of the dogs in America.
It is a dog with no redeeming characteristics. However many pictures of pitbulls with (photoshopped) flower halos are posted to Facebook, the truth is that they are extremely and irrationally violent by their very nature. As Alexander Cortes put it on X, “Pitbulls were bred to be satanic killdozers for dog fighting, the puppies will cannibalize each other. They are a selective breeding mistake.”1
As such, they can’t be trusted to do anything, and are impossible to train; even professional dog trainers find them impossible to train satisfactorily, and most who own them aren’t exactly professional dog trainers.2
At least the other somewhat violent and dangerous breeds, such as German Shepherds, can be trained to behave properly and not explode into an orgy of violence for no reason whatsoever. Rhodesian Ridgebacks are tough as nails and vicious enough to take down healthy, adult lions, but they can also be trained to play well with kids; they aren’t just heat-seeking missiles with teeth that’ll switch on without rhyme or reason. Foxhounds will revel in tearing a fox to pieces, but can also trot around a hunt ball without turning it into a bloodbath. German Shepherds can rip up drug dealers for the cops, or play tug of war in your den. While capable of immense violence, other breeds, like the warhorses of old, can be trained to act as directed rather than in an unexpected explosion of instinctual violence.
Pitbulls lack that redeeming characteristic. They cannot be trained or trusted. They are instead, by their very nature, loose cannons characterized by their being extremely and irrationally violent.
Yet still pitbulls have their vociferous defenders who claim there is nothing wrong with the breed. “Pitbulls account for 70% of dog attack deaths despite composing just 10% of the dog population,” they exclaim, “not because of any problems inherent with their breeding, but purely because of socio-economic factors!” Hence posts like this one:
Much as when we’re given much the same refrain about the cannibals from the Congo or pirates from Somalia imported by the tenderhearted, it rarely goes well. Instead, the loose cannons bred to cause immense carnage at the drop of a hat act exactly as they were bred to.
And so posts about why we shouldn’t demonize the pit bull breed are almost inevitably followed by those like the one below. The irrationally violent, heat-seeking missile with teeth, will turn on without rhyme or reason and maul its loving owner, no matter how stridently its owners defend it online.
Thus, the 10=70 calculation holds true, and the inevitable staccato drumbeat of deadly attacks continues for no good reason.
Of course, there is an easy solution to this. Ownership of pit bulls could require special permitting, be burdened with onerous insurance rates commensurate with the costs such creatures are likely to impose on society, or just be banned outright. Breeding of them could be similarly banned/made effectively impossible. The dogs themselves could be euthanized or sterilized. As the dogs have no redeeming characteristics, doing so would bring only benefits.
Any combination of such policies would mostly work, and at least make pitbull ownership a rarity rather than a lurking problem that afflicts every public place. We’d no longer be burdened with these creatures chomping at the bit on hiking trails, walking paths, and grocery stores, fearing a life-or-death encounter if the breeze blows the wrong way and its distracted-looking owner lets the leash slip.
Yet such easy solutions aren’t enacted. We lack the will to terminate the massive net negatives that lack any redeeming characteristics, and so they continue afflicting us with their presence.
The Fix Everything Easily Button
To summarize, there is a major problem we face, and it imposes only net negatives on society. Yet further, the solution would require the mere imposition of will, rather than any real effort, still less an exotic or esoteric problem-solving.
It’s a classic case of the “Fix Everything Easily Switch”. We could just press the button, solve the problem, and move on without the cost formerly imposed by the problem continuing to afflict us; doing so would bring only benefits.
This is the same sort of situation that President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador faced: his country had been overtaken by a collection of murderous Barrio 18 and MS-13 gangsters who imposed only costs on it, wreaking havoc and making legitimate economic activity all but impossible. Yet worse, the country’s judiciary was entirely corrupt and acted mainly to protect the gangsters from aggrieved citizens and law enforcement. So, he pressed the “Fix Everything Easily Switch”.
First, the scoundrel judges were arrested and replaced by ones who weren’t corrupt. Then the gangsters were rounded up in their thousands, with what amounted to the entire criminal underclass finding itself in crowded prisons that could be best classified as hell on Earth. There, they pay for their sins daily in sweltering pens surrounded by baton-wielding officers. Meanwhile, El Salvador thrives, with the economy booming as the crime rate of what was once the most dangerous nation on Earth falls below that of Canada.
Turns out, all it takes to stop gangsters in the criminal underclass from ruining everything is, well, stopping them. Even if the gallows works better, vast prison warehouses still work. Crime is a policy choice, not an immutable fact of life.
There are countless such problems we face, all of which have similarly simple solutions.
Our cities are more violent than active warzones and overrun with drug dealers, drug users, vagrants, gangsters, and the like. Most of the crime and problems are committed by a relative handful of people, the “Pitbull Americans” who are just as irrationally violent and apt to go berserk without rhyme or reason as the dogs they love owning.
In New York City, for example, Mayor Adams revealed that just 38 transit system criminals were responsible for another 1,126 crimes across the city, and 542 shoplifters were linked to 7,600 other crimes.3 The problem could be solved immediately by hanging or imprisoning them. There is nothing positive they contribute to that city or America. They only impose negative costs, and those costs are massive. They make life worse in every way they touch. Pressing the fix everything button would solve all of the countless problems to which they are connected, and take nothing more than a relative thimbleful of effort. Chances are, it would even be quite popular.
The same sort of thing is true of most other issues. Take, for example, the Somalis in Minnesota. They’ve been connected to at least $18 billion in fraud, and likely much more; the amount of money that has probably been stolen from Minnesota taxpayers is larger than Somalia’s entire GDP. What is the purpose of keeping them in America? They have a huge net negative cost to the treasury, contribute nothing net positive to the country, don’t assimilate, aren’t patriotic, uniformly support the race communist left, and are otherwise terrible. Like pitbulls, their presence is always a worst-case scenario rather than ever being for the best. They could be simply deported back to the hellhole from whence they came. There are only ~260,000 or so of them, they aren’t hidden all over the country like other invader groups, and they stick out like sore thumbs. Someone like Erik Prince could round them up and deport them in the space of a week, and nothing but positives would come from that.
But instead of flipping the switch, we are instead told we must import millions more pitbulls from Pitbull Land, which is a violent hellhole because pitbulls are extremely and irrationally violent.
Just think of what issues make your life worse. Vagrants fouling up public places, repeat offenders making public transportation unusable, foreign fraudsters draining the treasury and forcing you to pay onerous taxes to subsidize their lifestyles, illegal alien truckers making the highway unsafe, illegal aliens committing immense amounts of crime, food prices driven ever higher by SNAP handouts, or perhaps pitbulls plaguing hiking trails. There’s a “fix everything easily switch” that can just be pressed. It should just be pressed. Someone like Bukele or Lee Kuan Yew would press it. In fact, it is the very switch our ancestors pressed when they used hangings to build European civilization.
What we need is a leader who will press it. We need the Trump of the left’s fever dreams to exist and do what they fear. We need a leader with the harshness of Sulla, the longevity of Augustus, and the competence of Lee Kuan Yew. Yes, some problems are complex and don’t have a “fix everything easily switch.” Trade and redomesticating industry is one such example; tariffs help, but aren’t an easy or simple fix.
But there are other problems that, like the pitbull problem, are easily solvable. All they require is the level of will necessary to inflict the harsh but simple solution for which the situation calls. It’s time to do that, to follow in the footsteps of Bukele and flip the switch to fix the problem.
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I often use this metaphor to describe why I, for example, cross the street when seeing a pack of young pitbulls on the sidewalk ahead of me. "Not every pitbull!" they say, but, as statistics (and personal experience) amply show, enough.
The issue of course is that the suicidal empathy (of those who encourage pitbull migration and native breeding programs) isn't restricted to their own self-destruction, it affects the entire country.
One statistic you left out - most dog bites happen to children, and most dog bites are to the face and head.
When I walked my dachshund in parks I had my hands full keeping children from running up to him to hug him as if he were a stuffed animal on a leash. Moms got mad at me for telling their kids to stay away. He never bit a kid but he could have easily bit many children had I not been a knowledgable and responsible dog owner. When kids asked me "Does he bite?" I answered, "All dogs bite."
I fed my 18-lb doxie raw chicken legs, which he bit into pieces before swallowing, bones and all. He could eat the raw bone out of a T-bone steak. A dachshund's teeth and jaw strength can easily do this. People are woefully uneducated about dogs, dog bites and the number of children maimed by dogs each year. Pit Bulls should be banned - no question.