Tom’s Wordpress Blog

A pit bull can tear the living shit out of you.

That’s bad, right? Well, yes and no, at least according to gladwell.com: The PitBull Paradox . You don’t want to get attacked, but when you see a pit bull, you know it’s an aggressive dog in times of stress, so you probably give it a wide berth. The dog’s demeanor and behavior meets your expectations, and you can act accordingly. And safely.

You probably won’t go out of your way for a dachshund or chihuahua. Maybe you should, at least according to an emergency vet quoted in the post:

As an emergency vet in Las Vegas, I see lots of pit bulls. I would rather work on a pit bull than any other breed as they are very sincere and don’t change their temperament 1/2 way through the exam. They let me know up front -” I’m going to kill you if I get the chance”, and they get muzzled and drugged. Many german shepard dogs, american eskimos and some retrievers will decide that they want to eat my jugular veins as I listen their heart after giving no indication of aggression up to that point. They are very dangerous. I think the most vicious breeds are daschunds and chihuahuas.

Gladwell uses the quote as an example of one type of the paradox in a non-intuitive sort of statistics. That is, the reasons bad stuff happens are not always as they might seem, and they’re probably predictable if you just stop and thing about it.

If, for example, a drug company company came up with the best anti-depressant in the world–something twice as good as Prozac–we would EXPECT that drug to be associated with, say, more reports of suicide ideation. Why? Because it would be prescribed overwhelmingly to the hardest cases, to the most depressed and suicide-prone sector of the psychiatric population.

As for me, I’m sticking with cats.