Science Vs - Pit Bulls: Bad to the Bone?

Episode Date: April 20, 2023

Pit bulls have a dark reputation. And some people say the science backs this up: that they bite people more often and do more damage when they chomp down. But other people say, no way — these dogs don’t deserve their bad rap. And if a dog has a problem, it’s really the owner’s fault. So who’s right? To find out, we talk to animal behavior expert Anna MacNeil, statistician Dr. Isain Zapata, and researcher Dr. Anthony Herrel.  Find our transcript here: https://bit.ly/ScienceVsPitbulls  In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Intro: The pit bull controversy (05:55) Chapter 1: Do pit bulls bite more than other dogs? (11:00) Chapter 2: Which dogs are most aggressive? (19:53) Chapter 3: Do pit bulls bite harder than other dogs? (28:08) Chapter 4: Are dog owners the problem? (29:50) Chapter 5: Signs that a dog might bite This episode was produced by Meryl Horn, with help from Wendy Zukerman, R.E. Natowicz, Joel Werner, Rose Rimler, and Michelle Dang. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Gimlet’s managing director is Nicole Beemsterboer. Fact checking by Diane Kelly. Mix and sound design by Catherine Anderson. Music written by Bobby Lord, Peter Leonard, and Bumi Hidaka. Thanks to all the researchers we spoke to including Lawrence Grandpre, Dr. Carlos Alvarez, Dr. Elaine Ostrander, Dr. Elinor Karlsson, Professor James Serpell, and Dr. Kathryn Lord. And a big thanks to everyone who shared their stories about pit bulls - we really appreciate it. Special thanks to Chris Suter, Penelope Epsilon Suter, Mathilde Urfalino, Talia Rochmann, Pierce Singgih, the Zukerman Family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson.  Science Vs is a Spotify Original Podcast and a Gimlet production. Follow Science Vs on Spotify, and if you want to get notifications every time we put out a new episode, tap the bell icon in your app. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus from Gimlet. Today on the show, we're pitting facts against ferocious dogs. As we ask, are some dog breeds, like pit bulls, inherently dangerous? Several weeks ago, our senior producer Meryl Horne and her husband Chris Suter got a DNA test for their dog Penny. Come here. Penny. So they could find out Penny's breed. They thought she was a black lab mix

but wondered what else might be lurking under the surface here. So they basically got her a 23andMe, but for dogs. Meryl and Chris had to swab Penny's cheek. She's a little nervous. Which was a little tricky. We're going to do science. Come here, Penny. You're going to get a treat soon. But they got it.

She got a little treat. Penny, not Meryl. Good girl, Penny. They sent it off and a few weeks later got an email. And Meryl couldn't wait for the reveal. Alright, I'm going to click the results. I guess there's a little video that we can watch. It says, a perfect mix of five breeds.

This is the breed reveal. Whoa, American Pit Bull Terrier was the first hit. German Shepherd. Chow Chow. What? Boxer. Boxer. And one more Rottweiler.

Oh, she's like a combination of all the worst dogs. Except for bad things about Rottweilers. Pitbulls, of course. And Chow Chows are supposedly one of the more aggressive ones. Chows are really aggressive. Yeah, her biggest one is definitely Pitbull, 40%. As you can hear, Meryl is a bit taken aback, seeing that her dog was a mix of all these breeds.

I talked to her about it. What was so worrying to you? I mean, I think I've always just had this idea that there are some dogs out there that are scarier than others. And it felt like this is what you would get if somebody intentionally tried to create a dog from all the scariest breeds. You'd end up with Penny. It did make me think about all these little like signs that she might have aggression problems. Like the first time I met her, she snapped at me. And she did bite somebody once.

Whoa. Like, maybe she does have this darker side to her. And it's scary. Like, now we have a toddler. Oh. And the part of Penny that freaked Meryl out the most was the fact that a big chunk of her DNA was pitbull. Pitbulls are one of the most controversial dog breeds around.

In the news, there are these terrifying stories of people being mauled to death by these dogs. Tragic death in San Bernardino County tonight involving a Pitbull. The 44-year-old mauled to death, killed by her 8-year-old Pitbull. We went to go and play with him and something in him just switched. Don't trust them. Don't trust pit bulls because they could change at any moment. And dog bites are a big deal.

More than 300,000 people go to the ER for dog bites in the US each year. 300,000. And a lot of the victims tend to be little kids. And some say that the dogs most often to blame here are pit bulls. Yeah, there's this whole anti-pit bull movement that have, let's say, no pity for the pity. They say these dogs are inherently dangerous, that it's like their whole body is designed as a weapon. You'll find articles and forums saying that pit bulls have a terrifying bite force that can crush a child's skull. And because of all this, several places like the UK and Denmark

have basically banned these dogs. But then there is another side to all this. You've got the pit bull lovers, the pity posse, and they reckon we've got it all wrong. Pit bulls are loving, wonderful pets, they say. And if there's some bad apples, some dogs that bit some people, well, then it's the owner's fault. And this debate has gotten so nasty that several years ago,

BuzzFeed called it the most vicious conflict on the internet. This is quite a story. You have some people, they are inherently loving. The other side, they are inherently dangerous. Yeah, it's like people are living into alternate universes. And both sides say they have the data. Yeah, this is the kind of science versus story I love, when everyone thinks the science is on their side. Yeah. So today on the show, are pit bulls truly bad to the bone? Forget the dogma, because when it comes to pit bulls... We're going to do science.

Science Versus will be right back after the break. So stay. Sit. Stay. Good listener. Hey there. Still no. What about hello, handsome? Who knew you could give yourself the ick? That's why Bumble is changing how you start conversations. You can now make the first move or not. With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches.

Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. It's season three of The Joy of Why, and I still have a lot of questions. Like, what is this thing we call time? Why does altruism exist? And where is Jan 11? I'm here, astrophysicist and co-host, ready for anything. That's right, I'm bringing in the A-team. So brace yourselves. Get ready to learn. I'm Jana Levin. I'm Steve Strogatz. And this is... Quantum Magazine's podcast, The Joy of Why.

New episodes drop every other Thursday, starting February 1st. Welcome back. Today, we're looking at dog breeds and asking whether some dogs, like pit bulls, really are just inherently more aggressive and dangerous. So after Meryl Horne, our senior producer, realised that she was basically the owner of a pit bull, she dove into the research on this. And Meryl is going to tell us what she found.

Hi. So where did you start? Step one. I mean, I think I just started Googling, like, are pit bulls bad? That PhD counting for something, Meryl. Yes, I use my research skills to Google. And one thing that came up right away to explain why pit bulls might be dangerous is that they have this kind of dodgy breeding history. Where do they come from? Well, if you go back far enough, the ancestors of pit bulls were these dogs that were bred to fight bulls. Oh, my gosh.

Oh, hence pit bull. Yeah. And then generations down the line, these dogs were used to fight other dogs so it's just kind of a lot of blood and violence throughout pit bull breeding history um but the truth is that we bred a lot of dogs for violent purposes like beagles are used to hunt rabbits and rhodesian ridgebacks um were bred to hunt lions. What? The first Akitas were hunting wild boars and bears and packs.

So you can make this argument like that they were bred for violence about a lot of dog breeds. Okay. Okay. But still, I'm still scared of pit bulls at this point. And all these other dogs now. Right. The Rhodesian Ridgebacks, you don't want to with those either 100 no and so then fast forward to today and one of the big things that you read about on these anti-pitbull websites is this idea that pitbulls are more likely to bite people

they'll point to like all of these studies that seem to back this up. So like one of these studies is literally called Mortality, Mauling and Maiming by Vicious Dogs. That's some alliteration. And what did, what does this study do? So they looked at people who were brought into their, it was like a trauma center in Texas. And they looked at what kind of dogs bit these people. And they found that pipples were the dogs that were most likely to bite people. And their takeaway is that pipples

are inherently dangerous, and that we should be regulating them like we do with wild animals, like leopards. Wow. Yeah. And there are dozens of studies like this that show that pit bulls are more likely to attack people and have all these statistics, you know, backing that up. So case anti-pit bull is looking strong. Yeah. But then I kept digging into these studies. Digging. Nice. Huh?

Isn't that what dogs do? Dig. Yeah. Like a dog after a bone. I dug and dug. And it turns out these studies are kind of a mess. So they've gotten lots of criticism from other scientists. One big reason is that we just don't have any way of controlling for the like total number of dogs that are out there like we know lots of people own pit bulls and so it could just be that if you've got a lot of pit bulls you have a lot of bites from them too like it's just math right we have to know what the denominator

is basically yeah exactly oh so yeah okay so in that, yeah, maulers, mutilators. Mortality mauling and maiming. Yes, study. If, for example, in Texas, there is a lot of pit bulls, then you would have a lot of people at that hospital with pit bull bites, and that doesn't necessarily mean that they are more aggressive dogs. Yeah, like one study found that the most common dog to kill someone in Canada is a sled dog. Is that because sled dogs are actually the most vicious dog?

Or is it just because there's a lot of sled dogs in Canada? And we don't know how many pit bulls there are in America versus other kinds of dogs? No, we don't. We just don't have these stats. And like, there is also like no real precise definition for what a pit bull even is. Really? Yeah. Like there are a few different breeds that are lumped into this category of pit bull,

but sometimes people get it wrong. So you got to be careful about which studies you trust. But bottom line, as for those dog bite studies, the American Veterinary Medical Association has said, quote, dog bite statistics are not really statistics and do not give an accurate picture of dogs that bite, unquote. Ooh, that's some rough talk. Yeah. But this does then leave us back where we started. So where do we go next? Yeah.

I mean, all this just made me want to find better studies that I could actually trust. And you have the same number of dogs to start with. Yeah. Yeah, good denominators. Yes, love a good denominator. And I talked to someone who did a study like that. Her name is Anna McNeil and she was also fed up with these crappy denominators,

so first we kind of nerd-hated over that for a while. You have to go by the population, what's the probability that any, you know, the more... Yes, one of our own. Yeah. And so, you know, after looking at all the studies, I realized what we're missing. And I thought, I guess that's one thing that I can contribute to the scientific research is doing a study with the proper methodology.

And then we got to talking about her study. So she started it when she was working on a master's for animal welfare at the University of British Columbia in Canada. And she hooked up with the British Columbia SPCA, an animal shelter, to try to track what happened when people adopted pit bulls. Like how many of them became beloved family dogs and how many of them got returned for things like aggression. Okay, so what did Anna do? So the first step was to get some dogs for this study. Anna started categorizing the dogs that came into the shelter

as either a pit bull or a non-pit bull for the control group. There was a Catahoula. I think there might have been a Chow mix. Catahoula. One Catahoula. That sounds like a made-up dog. No, Catahoula. I think there might have been a Chow mix. Catahoula. One Catahoula. That sounds like a made-up dog. No, Catahoula leopard dog. And so Anna got about 40 pit bulls and 40 of these other dogs for the study,

and she looked to see what happened. And so right off the bat, they had to euthanize five dogs because they were aggressive towards the animal shelter staff. So three pit bulls and two of the other dogs got euthanized then. Okay, so three and two, sounding pretty equal. Yeah, there wasn't a difference statistically. And then she looked to see what happened after all those other dogs got adopted. So within a couple months, 11 of the dogs were returned for aggression.

And so Anna looked, were more of the dogs that were returned pit bulls? One of them was a pit bull and 10 of them was the non-pit bulls. Whoa. So only one was a pit bull. Only one of those 11 dogs. One of those 11 dogs was returned. Yeah. Pit bulls were much less likely to be returned for aggression by the owners. So far, so good. So far, so good. So far, so good. Then she looked to see for all of the dogs that were kept, were there any other differences in aggression when these dogs were kind of settling in?

And she didn't see any differences in aggression towards, you know, strangers, towards kids, towards the owners, between these two different groups. And in fact, the only difference in behavior between these two groups of dogs that she found had to do with something else. So they were more likely to sleep on the bed, and they're more likely to cuddle, which is basically considered like touching, leaning, yeah, always being in touch with their owner physically. So the pit bulls were more likely to cuddle with their owners and sleep on their beds. More likely to cuddle and sleep in the bed. Don't stop it, you two. You're such a hater.

It's adorable. It's an adorable finding to a study. Come on. But it was only 80 dogs. That right that's right that feels very small are there any bigger studies yeah um there are so like we have a study that surveyed thousands of dog owners and people did say that their pit bulls were more aggressive towards other dogs but pit bulls weren't more aggressive towards people, according to the owners. Oh, which kind of makes sense with the breeding history, right? Because part of their breeding was to fight other dogs, not people. Yeah, exactly. It makes sense. There's also a survey of a couple thousand veterinarians who, you know, presumably don't have a dog in this fight. And according to to them the dogs with the highest risk of giving people severe bites were chow chows not pit bulls chow chows okay penny had a bit of chow chow in it right yeah thanks for bringing that up by the way this is this is not particularly good news

for penny but it is quite good news for the reputation of pit bulls. Okay, this does make me wonder, though, are there other dogs that we should be looking at in this whole debate? Like, while all this attention is on pit bulls and how nasty they are, are researchers actually saying, no, no, no, no, no, look over here, this other dog is the one we should be focusing on? Yeah, so I actually did find a lot of studies that look at aggression overall in dogs and do find that certain dogs are more aggressive

than others towards people. Oh. One guy who's looking into this is Isai Nzapata, assistant professor at Rocky Vista University in Colorado. And he did the best study I could find on this. He started with this huge database of dog owner surveys. Sakevista University in Colorado. And he did the best study I could find on this. He started with this huge database of dog owner surveys. So they have like 60, 70,000 participants in that one.

60 or 70,000 dogs? Yeah. So we use all that data to try to kind of classify, you know, what is the differences across breeds? So they asked the owners all sorts of questions about aggression and then ran the numbers. And? What we saw is that the most aggressive dogs are the small ones. The small ones. The small ones.

Yes. And that is consistent with many other findings from other people. The size matters a lot. So like what types of dogs? Small breeds, chihuahuas, they're mean. They're cute, but they're mean. So Isayin and a bunch of other papers often find that small dogs are on average more aggressive. Dachshunds, miniature schnauzers also pop up a lot. But one thing to note here is that the differences weren't that big. In average, they're more likely to be crazy, but it is not like for sure it is going to be crazy.

But Isayin was curious, like what was making some of these tiny dogs more aggressive? Maybe he could see something in their genes. So Isayin looked at a bunch of doggy DNA, and he told me about this one gene that he found in dachshunds. And what does a dachshund look like? Remind me. So tiny. They're the wiener dogs. So it's kind of like a short little hot dog on legs. Oh, yeah. In Australia, we call them the sausage dogs. And what he found was that the gene that makes them have those short little legs is right near this other gene that makes toxins kind of mean. And exemplifies how when we select for something that we want,

we can also bring stuff we don't want. Oh, that's really interesting. So the gene for cute little legs or whatever is sitting very close on the string of DNA to a gene that ups their chance of being a little rat bitch. And so where you copy one, you'll often copy the other. Yeah, yeah, kind of. And I mean, it's not like there's just one gene that determines whether or not you're

a little rat bitch. A lot of things could contribute to that, like your environment. So if you're a very small dog, everything is giant around you. You go to the doggy part and you're going to be playing with giants. Yeah. Your entire experience is molded differently. And do we have any evidence from other studies that there may be some aggression gene in pit bulls

that we accidentally bred for? Yeah, I actually wanted to know that too. So I asked Isain that. We cannot detect it, and we haven't seen it so far. So you didn't find any smoking gun here of an aggression gene in pit bulls? No, we looked specifically for that within the ones that we evaluated and we couldn't find it. Okay.

Okay. Okay. So chihuahuas, dachshunds, the little ones, the little rat ones, they're the more aggressive. So are pit bulls off the hook completely? No, no. So, so far, all we've been talking about is whether or not they're more aggressive than other dogs. But there's something else that you should know about pit bulls before you cast your judgment. Okay.

And this is coming up after the break? Yep. And we're going to have to use some crystals and dog cadavers. Oh, jeepers. Okay. Welcome back. Today, Meryl is telling me all about pit bulls. We just found out that when you look at the best science, it doesn't look like pit bulls are more aggressive towards people. Is that fair, Meryl? Yeah, we don't have great evidence for that. Excellent.

But the next thing that I want to tell you about is this idea that it's not that pit bulls are more likely to bite you, but that when they do bite, they're more likely to cause a lot of damage. You hear this in news reports that make it sound like pit bulls have these ultra-powerful jaws. Police say the dog latched onto the 75-year-old victim's arm and refused to release. Animal control staff tried to intervene, but couldn't get the dog to stop. And I've seen a bunch of stories like this. They'll talk about how pit bulls will latch onto someone and won't let go. People in these situations will sometimes like stab the pit bulls to try to get them off because they can't figure out any other way to stop the attack. Well, tonight, one family member stabbed the pit bull to death right here in their front yard after a vicious attack.

That is terrifying. Yeah. Okay, so is there any evidence that a pit bull's jaw is any stronger or bite is any nastier than other dogs? Yeah, I wanted to know this too. So I talked to Anthony Harrell. He's a researcher at the National History Museum in Paris. Could you like list off all the animals that you've measured bite force in? I've measured bite forces in over 500 species of animals. Oh my god. So it's

kind of hard to list them all. But we've worked on fish, we've worked on birds, turtles, lizards, snakes, mammals, obviously. Oh, I am so excited about this. I love a good bite force study. And yeah, this is what he does. He makes these bite force measurements. He has been bit himself a ton of times by all sorts of animals. What do you think was the animal that gave him the worst bite? Oh, gosh.

He said 500 that he'd studied i bet it's something weird like a turtle or something yeah actually that's pretty close he said it was a horned frog just because it was so surprising he didn't see it coming um but back to the dogs so anthony wanted to see whether some dogs have a stronger bite force than others. So he got 47 dog cadavers from vets, where the owners agreed to donate their dogs' bodies. And for Anthony, this was pretty exciting. I mean, as an anatomist, I really enjoy doing the sections because you can really get to the nuts and bolts of how the system works. We take out muscle by muscle.

We weigh the muscles. We measure their lengths. So they dissected all sorts of dogs, like a Doberman, a Husky, a Toy Spaniel, and a Pitbull. And then they measured a bunch of stuff like the muscles around their jaws and the shape of their skulls. They threw all of this data into a model to predict bite force. But to see if that model was accurate, they needed to get some dogs that were alive.

So they got some dogs that were trained to bite on command. Where do you find dogs that can bite on command? Is that a thing dogs can do? Some of them, yeah. So there's actually this whole competition where people train their dogs to be really good guard dogs. And so as part of that, they have to bite people. And so Anthony basically borrowed some of these dogs to measure their bite force. If you want to see what the study looks like, just click on this link.

Ooh, Anthony's the one in the back. One more. Oh, Anthony is the one in the back. Oh, nice. So they just like bite, go bite. Yeah, they're saying, here you go, in French. What's that thing the dog's biting? So they have the dog bite this thing that sort of looks like an oven mitt to me. But inside of that oven mitt thing is a special device that can actually measure how strongly the dog is biting. It uses a crystal.

Oh, fancy. Yeah. It's called a piezoelectric crystal. And so this crystal has a unique opportunity that if you deform it, so if you push on it, it sends out a current. And the more you deform it, the higher the current. So they combined the data from those dissections with the data from the live dogs to find out which dogs have the strongest bites. Aha! So what did they find? Let's start at the bottom with the dogs that have the weakest bites.

So the two dogs in Anthony's study with the weakest bites were a chihuahua and a toy spaniel. Obviously, like the bigger the dog, the harder it's going to bite. It makes a lot of sense. A bigger animal will have more muscle. As you have more muscle, you can bite harder. Yeah. So that was one big pattern. The smaller the dog, the weaker the bite. They're meaner, but they nibble on you. It's not a big deal if they bite. Yeah. It kind of balances out nicely that way, right? Okay, okay, all right. And then, so that was one pattern. Another pattern that he found had to do with the shape of the head. So the dogs with the long skinny heads, like greyhounds, had weaker bites. And so what were the dogs with the strongest bites then? And so the dogs with the strongest

bites are typically these breeds that you can think of that have these really wide, bulky heads. This provides lots of space for the jaw muscles. And those are the dogs that actually can bite quite hard. So basically, you can think of Rottweilers. You can think of like pit bulls. You can think of all of these kind of breeds, mastiffs, that are bred for actually fighting for biting for defense. Yep. The pit bull that they looked at was at the top of the charts. Along with some of these big fat-headed dogs, like the Rottweilers and a Mastiff.

Okay. So this is very much a point, a science point in favor of those who think pit bulls are inherently more dangerous. Yeah, totally. And this might explain why if you look at people who need to go to the hospital from dog bites, the people who got bit by pit bulls often have worse injuries compared to people who got bit by other dogs.

This feels like a very big point in the favor of the no pity for the pity party yeah pit bulls can give some nasty bites along with a bunch of other fat-headed dogs yes that don't have such terrible reputations yeah yeah like they're part of this kind of group of dogs that are capable of inflicting a lot of damage um but the science doesn't back up all of those stereotypes about pit bulls, like that idea that they can latch on to their victims for a lot longer than other dogs. I asked Anthony about that idea. There is no data out there in the literature where people have tested the amount of time a dog can hold on and produce a certain amount of bite force. And I would expect that dogs like fox terriers and these kind of breeds, that they would also be just as good at holding on to an object. And Anthony doesn't buy that pit bulls deserve this reputation that they have when a lot of other dogs have strong bites too. Pit bulls don't really stand out relative to other wide-headed dogs.

Some are bigger than others. So the bigger they are, the harder they bite. So in absolute terms, a Rottweiler will bite harder than a pit bull because it's a bigger dog. And I think the biggest misunderstanding is that just because a dog can bite hard, that is going to be aggressive. Absolutely not true. So intrinsically, a pit bull can be just as sweet as any other dogs. Right. We tend to think of aggression in a dog and its bite force as the same thing.

But he's saying they're actually separate traits. Yeah. And Anthony thinks that when it comes to dog bites, it's not actually about the dog breeds at all. It's not the dogs that are the problem, it's the dog owners that really are the problem. Okay, this is something we haven't talked about yet. This idea that it's not the dog, it's the dog owner. Yeah, and there is some evidence for this. So like one study looked at over 200 dog bite fatalities from across 10 years, and they found that 76% of the time,

the dogs that killed someone were, quote, kept isolated from regular positive human interactions, unquote. I talked to Anna McNeil about this, and she said to picture a dog that's like always tied up outside. They've perhaps spent their life in a yard or on a chain. They spend a lot of time barking at fences. They're not properly socialized. But, you know, a lot of this could also just be miscommunication. Like we're two different species and sometimes it's not always intuitive to read what a dog is feeling right and experts think that one thing that could help all this is if we got better at reading dog behavior okay so in a lot of the news stories about dog attacks the owners will say like

oh my dog bit someone and it was completely out of nowhere um but anna's skeptical about this because what she's seen a lot of the time is that people just don't know what the warning signs look like that come out like before the dog actually bites. Owners don't always notice the signs that you need to be noticing. So they might say this was completely unprovoked. This dog has never acted like this before. But to anyone who really knows dog behavior, the dog had been warning for a long time and was giving fair warnings. So yeah, experts told me that often, like if a dog is feeling threatened, it'll give like a hard

stare or growl or it'll like show its teeth a little before actually biting someone. And it's like our job as dog owners to pay attention and then intervene before that leads to a bite. But one group of people that's really bad at looking for these warning signs is kids. Like not by their own fault, like they're just like kind of young and stupid, but like a lot of kids do get bit by dogs. Researchers think that maybe a lot of these bites are preventable if we teach kids better like how to behave around dogs um like don't pull on dog's ears don't run up to a dog you don't know and stare at it in the eyes don't stare at it in the eyes i didn't know oh okay yeah i mean some of

its common sense um to some people and other things but no but even for me, I didn't know some of these things. Like I, so I mentioned. What are the other things? So like if a dog chases you, what would you do? Like a scary dog is running after you. Stop, right? I think I would stop. That's right.

Yeah. Is that right? Are you supposed to stop? But that feels stupid. It feels kind of counterintuitive. Like I think I might want to run away as fast as I can but no apparently the answer is don't run away don't scream just be quiet and stay still and usually the dogs go away and so the science shows that teaching all this stuff to kids can change their behavior when they're around dogs awesome yeah and not just

what did you call them? Stupid little kids, but stupid little adults too. Yeah. Can help us all. So to bring this back to Penny, your genetically designed monster. Monster, yeah. Your genetically designed monster. How are you feeling about Penny now?

On the one hand, I'm not worried about her like breed mixture being this big red flag that makes her more dangerous than other dog breeds um but it's also true that like technically any dog could snap at any moment and she's a large dog with a big strong jaw and now like i'm more on the lookout for like those warning signs and really reading her behavior so that I can step in as soon as there's like any little sign that she might be feeling threatened well Meryl you uh worked like a dog on this episode You hounded the research. You powered at it like a Rhodesian Ridgeback after a lion. And now you get a treat. I get my treat now.

Thanks, Meryl. Thanks, Wendy. That's Science Versus. And how many citations in this week's episode? Oh, citations. There are 80 citations in this week's episode? Oh, citations. There are 80 citations in this week's episode. 80 citations. Excellent. And if people want to find them, where should they go?

They can go to our show notes and then follow the links to the transcripts. Next week on the show is ketamine. It feels like it's this like magical new drug for depression, but I'm still wondering if it's like legit, if it's real or not. Yes, that's yeah, exactly.

That's exactly what we're looking into. Thanks Meryl. Thanks Wendy. This episode was produced by Meryl Horne, with help from me, Wendy Zuckerman, Ari Natavich, Joel Werner, Rose Rimler and Michelle Dang. We're edited by Blythe Terrell. Gimlet's Managing Director is Nicole Beamstier-Bohr.

Fact-checking by Diane Kelly. Mix and sound design by Catherine Anderson. Music written by Bobby Lord, Peter Leonard and Bumi Hidaka. Thanks to all the researchers we spoke to for this episode, including Lawrence Grandpre, Dr. Carlos Alvarez, Dr. Elaine Ostrander, Dr. Eleanor Carlson, Professor James Serpel, and Dr. Catherine Lord. And a huge thanks to everyone who shared their stories about pitbulls with us. We really appreciate it. A special thanks to Chris Suter, Penelope Epsilon Suter, Matilde Erfolino, Talia Rockman,

Piers Singhi, the Zuckerman family, and Joseph LaBelle Wilson. Science Versus is a Spotify original podcast and a Gimlet production. Follow Science Versus on Spotify, and if you want to get notifications every time we put out a new episode, you know, turn on your phone and say, new episode, Science Versus on Spotify and if you want to get notifications every time we put out a new episode, you know turn on your phone and say new episode Science Versus, if you want that on Spotify there's this bell icon and you just have to press it, that's it

Alright, I'm Wendy Zuckerman back to you next time Thank you.