Shelter Workers and Veterinarians Not Reliable at Identifying ‘Pit Bulls’

University of Florida study also finds visual breed ID flunks the DNA test.

Pit bulls: Laws are passed banning them. Landlords and HOAs frequently prohibit them. Many shelters refuse to adopt them out. Individuals often fear them. But can anyone accurately identify them?

In a University of Florida study conducted at four different animal shelters and published in the November 2015 issue of The Veterinary Journal, researchers looked at visual identification of dogs as being of the “pit bull” type by shelter veterinarians and staff members.

Agreement on breed among different assessors was only moderate, while accuracy compared with DNA profiles ranged from moderate to poor.

These results raise difficult questions, because shelter workers and veterinarians are expected to determine the breed(s) of dogs in their facilities on a daily basis. Additionally, they are often called on as experts as to whether a dog’s breed will trigger seizure or regulatory action. The stakes for these dogs and their owners are in many cases very high.

Study Details

The study was conducted at four different Florida animal shelters with dog intake ranging from 2,520 to 10,154.

Managers at each shelter assigned one veterinarian and three other staff members who regularly decided what breed(s) to use in describing dogs in the facility to serve as assessors for the study.

In a protocol approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee at the University of Florida, 30 unrelated dogs, all healthy and at least two months old, were chosen for assessment. The dogs represented a wide range of body type, size, coat length, and color.

The assessors were allowed to designate the dogs as being of any breed or mix of breeds they wished, and weren’t given a list of breeds from which to select. They weren’t able to consult records, discuss the ID with each other, or view references, cage cards, intake forms, etc. until the assessment was complete.

Because “pit bull” is not a breed of dog but a type of dog, a number of breed terms and their mixes were included as “pit bull types” for purposes of the study. These included American pit bull terrier, American Staffordshire terrier, Staffordshire bull terrier, pit bull, and mixes containing at least one of those. If none of those terms was used by the assessors, that dog was coded as not being of the “pit bull type.”

Outcome

Different shelter staffers who evaluated the same dogs at the same time had only a moderate level of agreement. This lack of consistency renders their visual identification of a dog’s breed inherently unreliable.

Limitations in available DNA profiles make absolute breed identification problematic. However, when visual ID was compared with DNA test results, the assessors fared even worse. Dogs with pit bull heritage breed DNA were identified only 33 to 75 percent of the time, depending on which of the staff members was judging them. Conversely, dogs lacking any genetic evidence of relevant breeds were labelled as pit bull type dogs from 0 to 48 percent of the time, the researchers reported.

One in five dogs genetically identified with pit bull breeds were missed, and one in three dogs lacking DNA for pit bull breeds were labeled pit bulls by at least one staff member.

Veterinarians didn’t perform any better than other assessors when comparing DNA profiles to their visual identification of the dogs’ breeds.

Background

Previous studies have also found multiple observers who consider themselves “experts” or who are dog professionals have low rates of agreement in their visual assessment of dog breed. The same has held true in other studies of DNA breed profiles; one such study found visual breed ID matched DNA results less than half the time.

Part of the problem with visual breed identification is, as the study authors commented, “Mixing breeds is not like mixing paint.” Dog breeds contain many genetic traits and variants, and individual dogs don’t contain some idealized one-to-one matching of them.

This holds true for behavior as well as appearance. A dog’s appearance cannot tell observers anything about their behavior; even dogs of identical appearance and the same breed often have very different behavioral traits. Most importantly when examining the type of public policy most often based on purported dog breed, two very large studies found no relationship between dog breed and aggressive behavior.

In these studies, behavior, including aggression, tended to be associated with a single context, such as a stranger entering the dog’s territory. They also found very little correlation between a dog being aggressive with other dogs and with humans. All this combines to suggest that using breed as a surrogate for determining whether a dog is safe or dangerous will fail at both.

Conclusion

Unlike many other things people can’t quite define but “know when they see it,” identification of dogs as pit bulls can trigger an array of negative consequences, from the loss of housing, to being seized by animal control, to the taking of the dog’s life.

If the very people most frequently called on to identify breed are unable to do so consistently or accurately, then IDs by newspaper reporters, HOA board members, or members of the public should be considered even less reliable. Despite the frequency with which such identifications are made, this study suggests visual breed ID, even by presumed experts, should never be relied on as the basis of public policy.

Learn More

• Read the full paper
• Meet the study dogs
• UF Health News, 2/17/2016: “DNA studies reveal that shelter workers often mislabel dogs as ‘pit bulls’”

http://sheltermedicine.vetmed.ufl.edu/2016/02/16/shelters-and-veterinarians-not-reliable-at-identifying-pit-bulls/

Debunking Dogsbite.org

Folks who read this blog may be wondering why we have seldom mentioned dogsbite.org, a blog dedicated to fostering hysteria about “pit bulls.”  We have little mentioned the now infamous dogsbite.org because we didn’t think we had to.  Honestly, we couldn’t conceive of anyone taking them or their witch hunt seriously.  Their website is so poorly written and their “evidence” so spotty, we honestly didn’t think any elected official would actually stoop to cite their laughable “evidence” as reason to pass breed-specific legislation (BSL).  Well, we were wrong, but luckily not terribly wrong since many politicos and the mainstream media appear to have wisely steered clear of dogsbite.org.  Still, the fact that any municipal government — and there have been a few — or the media would cite dogsbite.org with a straight face is a little alarming.  So, let’s endeavor to do what has long been overdue: debunkdogsbite.org.

Forget for a moment that many court venues have ruled breed-specific legislation (BSL) unconstitutional or otherwise unlawful.  What about all the worldwide evidence that BSL doesn’t work?  For instance, Italy (article 1 and article 2) and theNetherlands both repealed their BSL within the last couple of years citing its ineffectiveness.  It has also been widely reported in the BBC that the UK’s 1991 Dangerous Dog Act has been a phenomenal failure since there has been a huge rise in banned breeds in the UK.  And in 2010, the Toronto Humane Society, in a survey of cities, released statistics revealing that “Ontario’s 2005 ban on “pit bull” breeds or dogs that resemble pit bulls has not made any difference in the number of dog bites.”

Now I would call the Toronto Humane Society’s findings a pretty good indicator that Toronto’s “pit bull” ban is ineffective since the ban didn’t accomplish what it set out to do: reduce dog bites.  Yet dogsbite.org appears to see it differently based on their inclusion of Toronto in a list of supposedly successful BSL cities (this from their rather vague June 21 “press release“):

On June 18, DogsBite.org, a national dog bite victims’ group dedicated to reducing serious dog attacks, released data of municipalities across the country, and one instance in Canada [meaning Toronto], that showed the successful results a municipality experiences after adopting a breed-specific pit bull law. The data was gathered over a two-year period when instances appeared in news alerts designed to capture U.S. media reported pit bull attacks.

Just to follow through with the Toronto findings, does dogsbite.org mean to say that Toronto’s breed ban has been successful even though the Toronto Humane Society has shown that there are no fewer dog bites???

Dogsbite.org does not explain the discrepancy between their “data” and the Toronto Humane Society’s survey, at least, not in their June 21, 2010 “press release.”  Still, we can completely debunk their “data” right out of the gate simply by noting that their “data” got its source from “news alerts” of “pit bull” attacks.  Google Alerts can be a nifty tool, but it’s not prudent to base life-altering legislation on it.  Indeed, as the widely debunked report Breeds of dogs involved in fatal human attacks in the United States between 1979 and 1998 based on CDC bite data revealed,

…to the extent that attacks by 1 breed are more newsworthy than those by other breeds, our methods may have resulted in differential ascertainment of fatalities by breed. (JAVMA, Vol 217, No. 6, September 15, 2000, p. 838).

In other words, and as the CDC itself acknowledges, media reports are skewed and therefore meaningless because “pit bull” attacks are more “newsworthy.”

Additionally, it has always seemingly escaped dogsbite.org‘s attention that “pit bull” is not a breed but a slang term describing countless breeds, their mixes, and those dogs resembling those breeds and their mixes; dogs that are merely “guilty” of fitting a type. (Even dogsbite.org refers to them as “pit bull type dogs” meaning the term “pit bull” does not comprise one breed even by their own assessment!) I say countless breeds have been fingered as “pit bulls” because to some even Chihuahuas look like “pit bulls,” so who knows how many breeds, their mixes, and those dogs sharing an unfortunate resemblance to those breeds and mixes, fall under the category “pit bull”?

And does it not follow that if you have a conglomeration of breeds and mixes that you erroneously designate as one breed — the “pit bull” — that it would appear, though falsely, that this “breed” “pit bull” were more inclined to attack?  However, parse out actual breeds from those bite statistics and based on population size, what you would find is that no one breed is more inclined to bite or kill than another.  This is why we say there is no such thing as an inherently vicious or dangerous breed of dog.  Yet still, these unfortunate, innocent dogs are marked for death when “pit bull” grim reapers like dogsbite.org crusade for their slaughter using incredibly flawed data-gathering methods.

As the CDC itself noted of its own statistics, 1) the media is notorious for reporting almost exclusively on so-called “pit bull” attacks, 2) the media is notorious for getting the breed wrong, which they always will if they refer to the dog in question as a “pit bull,” 3) the statistics do not take into consideration mitigating factors like owner irresponsibility, abuse or neglect, lack of socialization, etc. and 4) CDC statistics are inconclusive because they are not based on what the CDC calls “reliable breed-specific population data.”  Breed-specific population data is just that: accurate numbers of the population of dogs by breed.  Therefore, if “pit bull” is not a breed but a type, which the CDC itself acknowledges, then accurate population data for “pit bulls” would be impossible to determine, which is why the CDC’s own findings were rendered meaningless, again as the CDC itself acknowledged.

One must conclude from the CDC study that in order to take dog-bite data seriously, one must be able to discern the proper breed based on more than mere media reports, one must factor in mitigating circumstances like owner abuse and neglect, one must know at least an approximate population size of specific, actual breeds, and one must be objective. (Objectivity as pertains to statistics would mean not setting out to acquire only data that on the surface appears to fulfill one’s agenda.)  These are the elements necessary for properly-gleaned scientific data as concerns dog bites.  The CDC itself could not even fulfill these requirements which may be why they stopped tracking dog-bite/fatality statistics.

Yes, and what was the CDC’s conclusion based on their own faulty statistics?:

Breed-specific legislation does not address the fact that a dog of any breed can become dangerous when bred or trained to be aggressive. From a scientific point of view, we are unaware of any formal evaluation of the effectiveness of breed-specific legislation in preventing fatal or nonfatal dog bites. An alternative to breed-specific legislation is to regulate individual dogs and owners on the basis of their behavior (JAVMA, Vol 217, No. 6, September 15, 2000 Vet Med Today: Special Report 839-840).

That bears repeating.  The CDC is “unaware of any formal evaluation of theeffectiveness of breed-specific legislation in preventing fatal or nonfatal dog bites,” at least not from a “scientific point of view,” and dogsbite.org‘s data gathering isanything but scientific or a use of proper scientific methodology.

We now know what proper data gathering and evaluation of dog-bite statistics would, at the very least, include: proper breed determinations, only citations of incidents involving dog bites or fatalities investigated by impartial experts (of which Animal Control, elected officials, the media, animal rights groups, and Certainly dogsbite.org are not), the factoring in of mitigating circumstances, and reliable dog breed population data.  

As such, the CDC was correct to conclude that breed-specific legislation should not be passed based on dog-bite statistics because proper data gathering and an attending formal scientific evaluation would be almost impossible to accomplish.  And, for all these reasons, nobody should give dogsbite.org or their “data” any credence since in no way is their “data” accurate, scientific, or even defensible.

So, by “dedicated to reducing serious dog attacks” does dogsbite.org mean that killing a myriad of dogs erroneously fingered as “pit bulls” will reduce dog bites simply because the dog population has been reduced en masse?  That seems to be their objective since a lot of dead dogs is certainly the result of breed-specific legislation.  And yet, as the Toronto Humane Society’s survey shows, dog biteshaven’t been reduced in the five years since Toronto’s breed ban was passed, so it looks like BSL just ends up killing a lot of innocent dogs for no reason. Indeed, the question remains: Will any dog survive this doggy death crusade?

Read more about it:

KC Dog Blog’s Truth, deceit, & why Breed Specific Legislation fails regardless of what some might say is an excellent evaluation of dogsbite.org‘s “data” as well.

No Pit Bull Bans

Legislation to prevent dog bites and to manage aggressive dogs should focus on the individual dog and the owner not the breed. Breed-specific legislation for dog bite prevention has failed to reduce the frequency of dog bites both in Australia and overseas.

Any dog of any size, breed or mix of breeds has the potential to be aggressive and to be declared dangerous so dogs should not be declared dangerous on the basis of breed or appearance. Each individual dog should be assessed based on its behavior. The role of the dog owner is a critical factor with respect to the animal’s behavior.

Veterinarians share community concerns about aggressive dogs, but banning particular breeds is not the solution. In 2012 the Australian Veterinary Association (AVA) commissioned a report into the causes behind aggressive dogs and an alternative approach to address the issue. The report found that there was little evidence to support banning particular dog breeds as a way of addressing canine aggression in the community. Instead, education of the public and legislative tools that equip animal management authorities to identify potentially dangerous individual dogs offer the best results in reducing incidents with aggressive dogs.1.

The facts about dog bites
Genetic predispositions are an important factor in animal behaviour, however the impact of the environment and learning are also critical. The tendency of a dog to bite is dependent on at least five interacting factors 1,2,3.
•    heredity (genes, breed)
•    early experience
•    socialization and training
•    health (physical and psychological) and
•    victim behavior.

Dog bite incidents generally occur either in domestic settings where the animal is known to the victim, or by dogs at large unknown to the victim 5. While dogs at large are responsible for a minority of dog bites,6,7 they attract disproportionate media and political interest. They are the public face of the dog bite problem, and most legislation is designed to control this part of the problem. However, most bites occur in the dog’s own home and involve victims bitten by their own dog.6 Further, most scientific studies report that children rather than adults are more likely to be bitten by dogs. 6,7

Breed-specific legislation

Breed-specific legislation generally refers to laws that target specific breeds of dogs. In Australia there are currently two types of breed-specific legislation:

1.  Under the Commonwealth customs legislation there is a ban on the importation of several specific breeds of dogs; Japanese Tosa, fila Brasiliero, dogo Argentino, perrode presa Canario, and American Pit Bull Terrier. Importantly, this is a ban on importation and not a prohibition on ownership.
2.  Most state and territory jurisdictions have placed restrictions upon the ownership of these breeds such as muzzling in public, desexing, and fence and enclosure requirements. Some states and even some local councils have taken the further step of banning the prescribed breeds of dogs completely.

The failure of breed-specific legislation to prevent dog attacks is due to a number of factors:
•    Breed on its own is not an effective indicator or predictor of aggression in dogs. 4,5,6
• It is not possible to determine precisely the breed of the types of dogs targeted by breed-specific legislation by appearance or by DNA analysis.4,5
• The number of animals that would need to be removed from a community to have a meaningful impact on hospital admissions is so high that the removal of any one breed would have negligible impact.4
• Breed-specific legislation ignores the human element whereby dog owners who desire this kind of dog will simply substitute another breed of dog of similar size, strength and perception of aggressive tendencies.4,5,6

References
1. Australian Veterinary Association 2012 Dangerous Dogs – A sensible solution. http://www.ava.com.au/newsarticle/dangerous-dogs-%E2%80%93-sensible-solu...
2. Beaver et al 2001 “A community approach to dog bite prevention – AVMA Task Force on
Canine Aggression and Human–Canine interactions” JAVMA 281 (11) 1732 – 1749.
3. Seksel K 2002 “Report to the NSW Department of Local Government on Breed Specific
Legislation issues relating to control of dangerous dogs”.
4. Snyder J 2005 “Dangerous Dog Management” National Urban Animal management
Conference, Canberra; Australian Veterinary Association.
5. Kixer KW 1979 “Epidemiologic and clinical aspects of animal bite injuries” JACEP 8:134-
141.
6. Overall KL and Love M 2001 “Dog bites to humans-demography, epidemiology, injury and risk” JAVMA 218 (12)1923-1934.
Other relevant policies or position statements
6.16  Importing dogs
6.13   Aggression in dogs

Date of ratification by AVA Board: 4 December 2014

http://www.ava.com.au/policy/614-breed-specific-legislation