Hot take (I'll accept my downward facing arrows, thank you), but people regularly vastly overestimate the safety and docility of "regular" dogs too
You're absolutely correct. Any dog over about 10kg has the power to cause serious injury, especially to a child or other dog/pet. Greyhounds have a horrendous prey drive and will eat your cat in 2 seconds flat
I tried to rehabilitate a dangerous dog and failed and now find myself with another one (thankfully MUCH less prone to biting). "regular" dogs are one abusive/neglectful adolescence away from being unsafe
Pitbulls also have the issue of being abused at higher rates then other breeds. It's not all genetic
It's not all genetic, just largely so.
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/legal/dog-attack-statistics-breed/#sources
You're half correct.
Pitbulls, Staffordshire terriers, Bullies etc, are all variations of same or similar breeds. These breeds are viewed as 'tough' and are treated and trained as such by their owners. They also aren't treated like family dogs by these people who buy them for their tough image either.
You get a few generations like this, a couple idiots who don't desex or seperate their dogs on heat and you've got the beginning of a problem.
I'm Australian and in animal control, bull breeds are always number 1 for attacks every year but working breeds are VERY close behind, think Cattledog, Kelpie, German Shepherd etc.
If you look at the skewed breed ownership statistics, there Staffys and Bull breeds get a bad wrap from being incredibly popular and very poorly taken care of.
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Gotta love when they don't bother to normalize their statistics so it's basically just a question of human population density.
Pitbulls, bull terriers, Staffordshire terriers etc are no worse than other dogs. I work in animal control, it's a big misconception.
No. They just often have shit owners who either want them to be aggressive or habe no ideas about dogs but think pitbulls are cool
If only regular people could id pitbulls. No really it hard for average people to do that. Really compromises all our data.
And the media and courts will ruin the next 20 years of your life as we harass you over your dead baby.
Meanwhile dipshits on the Internet laugh about your dead baby 30 years later.
Have you ever considered people make the joke because of Seinfeld and no inherent knowledge of the actual situation that took place in Australia?
I came to the comments expecting Seinfeld references and am only just now learning it was a real thing.
As do most people. Deceptichum is just unable to grasp a concept like time. Or that not everyone who lived in that era even knows it’s a real thing.
And a lot of us who were around in the 90s also used "gay" as a casual pejorative without really understanding it. It wasn't right then and it's not right now and most of us grew up and realized that.
The key is thinking, "dang, that's messed up actually" and changing. Not "it's just a joke, geez people are so sensitive."
You joked about how half of US states outside of the cities aren’t worth visiting. You joked about how everyone in Florida is crazy. Is that not messed up, generalizing whole groups of people like that? Or are the jokes about people you disagree with ok?
Using Gay as a negative is bad… because it impacts a whole group of people. We aren’t directly making fun of the kid specifically, but joking about the situation. Making a joke about the kid, wrong. Obviously. Joking about a dingo eating a baby? Funny. Because it’s not about a person or who they were, but about a shitty situation.
Get off your high horse. Take a joke.
I said "Florida is looking sketch lately", which anybody paying attention to DeSantis should recognize, and I stand by that most US states outside of cities and parks are largly undifferentiated swaths of farm and suburb with no unique reason to pick one over another. Neither is a joke, nor are they about whole groups of people.
You aren't joking about the situation, you're parroting a joke written after Lindy was pardoned. It's a tired Australian go-to reference like "throw a shrimp on the barbie" but instead of just being inaccurate and a stereotype it's also rooted in a specific and very personal tragedy.
Have you ever considered, even without contemporary context, you’re still making a joke about a real life baby being killed?
I never understand this argument. How does humor come before empathy to some people? How could having a giggle ever overrule a tragedy? There's coping with pain through humor, but if it's not your pain, it just seems juvenile and insensitive.
Because Humor can be coping mechanism also for stuff there are not involved with. Some people need to laugh at tragedy.
Edit: you are saying "not your pain" as if empathy does not exist. We sometimes need to distance ourselves from tragedy and some do this with humor.
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I’m not downvoting you because that’s a valid question I don’t have an answer for. All I know is, I stand by my statement, because it’s been proven to me time and time again.
You realize humans have made jokes about terrible things, pretty much since language was invented? And that making light of horrible situations is a coping mechanism?
Woah, sorry Mr. Sensitive pants. How do people know it’s a real life baby?
Care to write out a list of all the things society can’t joke about?
Needing a list of things to treat with care and not joke about is a new level of lack of social awareness.
Oi, you fukn wot m8?
I work in tech sales. If I didn’t have “social awareness” I’d be terrible at my job. Joking about shit that’s dark is a human response to things we sometimes view as uncomfortable. It sucks that a kid died from being attacked by dingos. It probably wasn’t the first time it happened, and probably won’t be the last. 9/11 was a national tragedy, but we still joke about that too. Far more than dingo ate your baby jokes. Do the deaths of 3000 people not equal one baby? Or is there some strange math problem where 1 baby, but only when eaten by a dingo, is somehow more sad (and less jokey) than all those deaths?
In the year 2033
Ain't gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lie
Everything you think, do and say is in the pill you took today
I see it as the same as the saying "If it's brown, lay down. If it's black, fight back. If it's white, goodnight" when referring to what to do when around bears. Yes it is comedic and yes it is referring to being mauled to death by a polar bear. Sure there's an argument to be made about being insensitive to the victims of polar bear maulings but that's not the purpose of the statement. "dingo ate my baby" is pretty clear cut on the meaning. Don't leave your baby alone where it can be eaten by a dingo, some people will find that funny because it kind of is ridiculous and horrific that this actually happened.
Nobody has been thrown in jail and dragged through a media circus over a polar bear mauling. Lindy and Michael Chamberlain had their lives ruined after a traumatic loss. It's not the same.
And then you’re vilified only to be proven right. What a horrific thing that poor family went through
You know that's a true story, right?
Lady lost a kid.
Tropic Thunder may have taught me that, but I'll never not picture RDJ disguised as a dude playing another dude when I hear it.
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This is actually something being debated in Australia. Until a few years ago, Dingoes were considered the same species as the regular dog Canis familiaris. Recent DNA studies have shown them to be distinct, however. So now there's Canis dingo. Only, Dingoes can interbreed with the regular dog, which normally is the test for them being the same species. Maybe that makes them a subspecies?
So, yeah - even we don't know what they are. If they were raised by humans, they are happy friendly doggos. If in the wild, then they're dingoes.
It depends if their progeny can reproduce. A male donkey and a female horse can make a mule but mules are sterile.
Not that simple. Brown bears and polar bears produce fertile offspring, as do bison and cattle, and the false killer whale with a bottlenose dolphin. (Far from an exhaustive list)
It's generally a useful definition but it isn't a "rule".
They are not, it's just some breed representation thing, and they certainly look more dingoey than a Jack Russel, but at least in the United States, it's likely to be trace amounts. Source, I own two, but admittedly neither have had any sort of genetic test so I guess my hearsay is as good as yours....I should find out, I honestly wouldn't be surprised if they had up to a quarter dingo somehow.
They actually are a dingo cross breed. The Blue Heeler and The Red Australian Cattle Dog are both mixed with dingo. English breeds were not able to handle Australia and were bred with captured dingos for toughness.
There seems to be some confusion with how a hybrid could breed in this chain.
Cell Division is what causes problems for Hybrid animals reproducing.
If the cell begins dividing and the chromosomes within can not find like pairs the cell stops dividing and will not become an animal.
Dogs and Dingos are close enough that even though not all chromosomes are paired correctly, they can still create a viable animal.
Dingos are wild dogs, they're descendants of Dogs brought to Australia about 4,000 years ago.
No disagreement on viability of the offspring and their subsequent ability to mate further down, only a disagreement about percentage between single digit up to "half" in the current breed (as it exists in the USA). I believe it's notably diluted from the original cross for reasons I stated in my other reply, but I'm curious about my red since she's considerably more dingo-esque than my blue.
Anecdotal evidence is the best evidence, right?
No I just mean in general, the Australian cattle dog was originally created by crossing herding breeds (mostly speckled collies) with the native dingo. The collies couldn't handle the heat so they introduced a breed that was capable of doing so.
If you do a genetics test it'll just show them as being "Australian cattle dog" cause that's what the genetic markers are identified as now.
Right, but they're no longer half dingo after the multitude of generations has passed in whichever pedigree, because for whichever innate temperament traits you might desire, along with the inability to selectively breed for physical ones with a wild dog, you wouldn't take a second generation heeler and cross a dingo back in just to keep the percentage up. I don't honestly know the whole history but it's conceivable that enough of the original breed starters contained sufficient "dingo" to keep the content up.
I thought I had read that one of the various tests...wisdom panel maybe...was providing results indicating wild crosses, including dingo. My thinking was that any significant percentage would show, but time will tell, since we have whichever brand that was, and just need to collect and run the sample.
Canis Lupus and Canis Latrans also can and do breed with Canis Familiaris. The ability to interbreed is one test for being the same species but not the only test. Libraries worth of books are out there on the subject and there are lively debate as to where animals fit in the taxonomy.
Canis familiaris is a subspecies of C. lupus as of 2005. There is a push to distinguish it as a distinct species but that is not the current consensus.
"Testing" for speciation is pretty silly, tbh, because it's an arbitrary distinction no matter what. Our placement of rigid definitions onto the constant gradual process of evolution is always going to have edge cases and outliers. So we give things useful labels and move on until we have better tools (DNA analysis has been great) or have need of better definitions.
Does dogs being wolves do anything for the general public? No, but that's what common names are for. Does the distinction of Canis lupus familiaris help scientists right now? Probably. If not there'd be a stronger push to change it.
In the scale of human lives, no. In the scale of human history, yeah. In the scale of planetary or universal history... it was a few seconds ago.
So Australia just had evil stray dogs that adapted to the extreme Australian environment like every other evil thing in Australia, meanwhile in Russia you got stray dogs riding public transportation and learning to scavenge and beg. It's all the environment.
Don't go to Tasmania either.
Look at this cute guy!
I want to hold him and pet him and love him and- OH FUCK!
Do you pet random dogs on the street? No? Then you won't have any problems with Dingoes. Drop Bears on the other hand...
There are countries where all dogs have owners (mostly on the other side of the leach) and you are always supposed to ask the owners before you pet them.
And then there are countries blessed with really cute street dogs that tend to turn tummy up when you're passing them. You're supposed to pet those randomly.
The kind with the cute doggies that let you pet them all the time?
Don't ruin my hopes and dreams.
Communal care of stray dogs. Everybody is supposed to feed and pet them, and usually they crash at any random place.
My country was the type with packs of street dogs that you had to keep your distance from and that you saw on the news from time to time for mauling another passerby
Umbrellas do nothing, I really wish they'd stop teaching that in schools, it's why we have so many drop bear casualties every year.
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Depends on the umbrella https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-true-history-of-the-umbrella-gun-a-surprisingly-serious-weapon
The umbrella part still does fuck all and you'd wanna hope you're a good shot, they go feral when wounded.
They have razor sharp claws that can rip through denim like it's butter.
This reminds me, I was once walking into a Melbourne Metro station, and the Aussie mate I was with had been spinning me some web of shit for a while, I finally lost it and loudly announced "LOOK, mate, I'm not gonna believe any of the SHIT that comes out of YOUR MOUTH ever since you tried to sell me on FUCKIN HOOP SNAKES" and a random commuter woman in earshot literally doubled over laughing.
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The drop bears are really getting out of hand. Fuck the Emu war, we need a drop bear war. Drop bears aren't a joke, millions of families suffer from drop bears every year.
A jackalope got my uncle-daddy Bubbafred, and a skunk ape chased my cousin Darlene. She had the ugliest baby later that year.
One of my saddest days was waiting to cross a road and a car stopped Infront of me with it's passenger window open and a big Labrador hopped up and was face to face with me.
I excitedly asked the owner if I could pet the dog, as it was literally delivered to my face and she said no like it was a weird request. Thats stuck with me for half a decade already.
What? Of course I pet random dogs on the street. You don't?
I mean, I ask first, if they're with a human.. if not, well...
Any wild creature bigger than a rat is an animal you should be cautious of. I mean, I wouldn't pet a wild rat, either, but I'm also not afraid one will attack and kill me.
Wild dog packs roam lots of countries in south-east Asia. Don't fucking go near them. They will try to seperate you from other humans and take you down for a snack.
So weird though when you see, like, a golden retriever in their ranks. The urge to go pet them is too strong. I did a lot of catching myself walking towards them when I was in thailand.
The first half of your comment was good and then it devolved into nonsense. Thai street dogs don't eat people, the amount of fucking rubbish strewn everywhere keeps them fed.
Now will they bite you? Of course, it's a dog.
they're*
Edit: I took another look at the above comment and I think "there" or "their" both work here. I don't ever recall seeing a sentence where that was true and my mind is a little blown.
Say /s right now
(i had to look at it twice but I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be their, not they're lol)
Yes that's correct. Not saying /s because I don't think it's needed here.
Edit: see my edit in my previous comment
Fair enough, that was supposed to be a meme opener just so I could comment, but I deleted the /s right before the opening parentheses, and now I'm worried I came off like a complete asshole to you! My apologies! I meant that in a joking meme tone, not in a tell you what to do way! Sorry about that!
Ohh! I see what you did there. I don't think tone is conveyed well through text, especially to me lol. I appreciate the clarification.
You should be. They may not be able to mortally wound you but they'll definitely give you rabies.
A raccoon can absolutely mortally wound you. We’re just fleshy bags of blood and they have nasty sharp claws. A slash in the right spot could be fatal
Well, if we're considering "right-spot" scenarios then basically anything can kill you.
I'd heard that one day he almost walked into a room full of them. But it turns out he dingo in there.
I did not know that. Dang that was a messed up read. https://www.snopes.com/articles/366073/dingo-ate-my-baby-quote/
Also, the Snopes article doesn't mention it, but indigenous tribes had know dingos could and would take human babies, but mainstream media/authorities ignored them.
Yet, the false story will remained in the public consciousness thanks to totally not hack comedy writers.
Speak for yourself, homie. I'm a dingo IRL and it took 10 minutes for me to type this with my fat-ass plappers.
Friendly, though, I'm inclined to agree.
Ive got a pariah dog too but not dingo. Incredibly prey driven. Does not bark much unless she has a reason. Very bad with other dogs, tests their reflexes if given the chance. Used to be bad with people and food possessive but she's good now after years of training and socialization.
Also is an escape artist. Climbed a nine foot chain link fence and chewed through stucco.
Had a friend whose Australian Shepherd learned to climb a chain link fence. Her stupid brother would sit there and watch her do it, but never attempted to do it himself.
I always wondered if Portuguese Podengos were brought back by explorers.
They aren't, but I like my story better