… show them this post from a Facebook breed group:
I am extremely allergic to my golden too. Three or four times a year I was getting sinus infections that turned into pneumonia and kept me sick for MONTHS. We made these changes:
We bought a dyson vacuum and religiously vacuum every other day.
I pull the bed out and vacuum under and behind it because I found her fur actually quickly builds up in those areas “hides” behind places like that and the sofa.
I use a swifter wet jet under the bed and under other surfaces help a LOT because it picks up those micro dust hair particles which affects allergies.
We deep brush her twice a week.
We change the AC filters monthly to the strongest allergic kind.
I’ve not been sick for over a year since we started this routine. (I do still take singulair, levocetrizine and Flonase daily). But this has all really worked. Good luck.
(The gal who posted the above followed up with “I absolutely love love love my dog so much. She’s worth every minute.”)
I feel that this is a contender in the topping competition that one sees regarding coronaplague masks. “Our First Responders do X, Y, and Z, and you can’t simply wear a mask all day?”
Readers: Agree?
Also from this golden retriever group, an owner with a 6-month-old golden and a 2-month old Chihuahua asked how to prevent the two from breeding. I responded
Every Chihuahua should be neutered! No dog should be smaller than a big rat.
The comment attracted 10 positive reactions (like/laugh). I dug into these. All but one reaction was from a Facebook user with a female-associated first name.
It’s always been fascinating to me that people will jeopardize their own health and welfare – and that of their families – for the love of their pets. You can read all you want about Attachment Theory, but I don’t think it fully explains it. It’s primordial. I know a woman who was mauled and disfigured by her pit bull, resulting in medical bills in the tens of thousands of dollars and lifelong scarring – but she wouldn’t euthanize the dog! In my own family, I have a relative who had a heart attack because he had to basically carry around a rather heavy dog that had palsy, so it could urinate and defecate. For months afterward as the palsy got worse – even after the heart attack! – they would not euthanize the dog. Finally, when they were persuaded to do it (the dog was falling apart at this point), they were furious at those of us who begged them to do it: “You made me kill my dog!”
I don’t know where to put it in the universe of human behavior.
Pitbull murder solved by DNA testing: the Elisa Pilarski story over in France… https://www.courthousenews.com/dna-tests-solve-mystery-of-frenchwoman-killed-by-dog/
@Philg: It makes sense to me. Hunting dogs are not trained – nor are they bred – to attack humans. Pitbulls are.
List of fatal dog attacks in the United States. Most of them are pitbulls or “unspecified”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_dog_attacks_in_the_United_States
Hunting dog training tips. They’re an expensive proposition and people do a lot of work with them:
https://www.outdoorlife.com/story/hunting/top-hunting-dog-training-tips-from-world-class-experts/
Alex,
Nature versus nurture.
Pitbulls are an absolutely lovely breed that are meek and mild if properly brought up. So are Rottweilers and German Shepherds. These are also very physically powerful breeds, so if they have the potential to do great harm if badly trained. German Shepherds will naturally herd young children. I suspect you could train a golden retriever to be a nasty killer in ways beyond the constant shedding.
Also, dogs are stupid and cats are better but you cannot fight the obvious species-ist and breed-ist bigotry of this web log. End Golden Retriever Privilege! Defund the murderous ASPCA!
I don’t even want to get into the cult of minivan-ism that gets perpetrated in some of the posts here.
At least we have seen a decline in the disparagement of video gaming, since most science nowadays is just running computer simulations and internet polling.
@Mememe: Nope. Don’t believe you at all, and I have friends who raise dogs for a living and know it very well. The behavior cannot be eradicated. They’re bred to kill. I’ll never get within 100 yards of a pitbull, much less allow one into my home. And you shouldn’t either.
@Mememe: People in my family have owned four Golden Retrievers, two of them rescued. The last one was rescued from a home run by an Argentinian expat who tried to turn the Golden into a fighting dog. Abused the dog, broke its nose, kept it locked up inside a chicken pen and beat the shit out of it. When he opened the cage, that dog ran 100 yards and LEAPT into the back of my family’s minivan – badly injured. That dog would rather have died than stay where he was. So please, don’t give the rest of us any of your horseshit.
https://www.ygrr.org/
@Mememe: Pitbulls are bred, then trained on top of the breeding, and moved around the world illegally, to KILL people. That’s why they’re “beloved.” You’re not getting anywhere with me, bro. Rottweilers aren’t as bad, but close. I’ve known (a different) woman who used to have a pitbull in Chicagoland, and I told her: “You better keep that fucking dog away from me, or I’ll shoot it myself.”
@Mememe: And by the way, I think Heinlein was an idiotic assjack. It would have been better if he had died from his pulmonary tuberculosis. Domesticated cats are degenerate creatures.
Alex,
By your own admittance, your conclusions are not based on personal observation.
There are plenty of pitbulls that go through life without harming anyone. Pitbulls are working dogs, so they have to be properly exercised. I can only speak from personal experience, so I cannot categorically state that ALL pitbulls are always well-behaved, but I can attest that I know of one pitbull that was always very well-behaved, and I have met other pitbulls that were sweethearts. Bad press has done the pitbull an extraordinary disservice. Petey from the Little Rascals was no killer.
Dogs, like humans, may have dispositions, mental and physical, to certain behaviours, but training is essential. Any dog person can tell you that. And I am sure there are inherently violent dogs out there, just like there are inherently violent people, just not uniformly through a breed.
You can feel safe accepting an invitation to dinner with
a Papua New Guinea aborigine in Boston. I would hesitate to do so in his native land. And we all have cannibalistic ancestors. Two hundred years ago, any native Hawaiian looked at a fat man with the same longing as you and I now look at a filet mignon of beef.
You can train dogs. Cats, on the other hand, train you.
I absolutely can and did speak from personal experience talking to people who have intimate and professional knowledge of the breed as well as my own experience and I will never allow one of them near me. They are bred to kill. They are not watchdogs, they are not defensive or service dogs, and their behavior is ineradicable.
https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/dog-bite-laws-in-texas-why-pit-bulls-need-regulation-29388#:~:text=Pit%20Bulls%20are%20banned%20in,breeds%20is%20disheartening%20and%20disturbing.
“Even more disturbing of these dog bite statistics is the dominance of pit bull breeds. According to a study highlighted by the website Dogsbite, 59% of dogs that bite humans are pit bulls or pit bull mixes. Even more disturbing still, is the fact that pit bull breeds attack adults and children in equal numbers, a phenomenon never observed among other breeds.”
“Pit Bulls are banned in 12 countries around the world: New Zealand, Brazil, Belgium, Canada, France, Finland, Denmark, Poland, Norway, and the U. S. territory of Puerto Rico. The lack of U. S. government’s concern regarding the danger of pit bull breeds is disheartening and disturbing.”
If you want your bring your pitbull over to meet my family, bring a gun with you.
I believe that behavior is 100 percent nurture and has no genetic basis. That’s why we have a female golden retriever as an aggressive attack dog. It is just as simple as training to get a female golden to guard the house, attack any stranger who comes near, start fights with other dogs, etc.!
(Also trivial to get her to ignore a rolling ball, not bring anything back, etc. In fact, genetics plays so little role in determining behavior that our next dog may be a cat or a chicken. We will simply train dog-style behavior.)
It’s just incredible, isn’t it? The evidence is so overwhelming. Lol.
And apropos of nothing, I just can’t help myself with this scene. It has nothing to do with pitbulls, Golden Retrievers, the Media, the Establishment, Andrea Merkel or Trump, except in the extremely abstract:
Alex,
What you are describing as personal experience would be considered hearsay in any court of law.
Why are so many pitbulls involved in attacks? Because they are favoured by people who *train* dogs to fight. Pitbulls are the Cubans of the dog world — we need a selection of bad apples so we can feel better about those beloved blonde (allergy-inducing) dogs.
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Philg,
You cannot train a cat in obedience but they can learn when it suits their purposes. If it is a female cat, you will find that puberty can be rough, but once they get into adulthood their libido moderates just like people. Mutilating sexual organs will necessarily mutilate the psyche, just like people.
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Time to go watch the New York lose to Boston. Tonight’s defeat will go a long way in securing the first pick of next year’s draft. The great thing about being a Jets fan is that it offers you hopelessness without any real consequences.