.pits/ Malcolm Gladwell Settles the Pit Bull Question on his New Blog

Well, maybe not the Pit Bull question, but one of them:

Dogs Bite: But Balloons and Slippers Are More Dangerous
by Janis Bradley

gladwell.com: Pit Bulls...: A number of readers wondered what happened to the little boy attacked by a Pit Bull whose story I told in “Troublemakers.” The answer is that he had a bite on his cheek. Dog bites are graded one through six---with six as the most serious--and his bite was a one.... The attack was horrifying, even if no one was seriously hurt, and dogs should not be permitted to run free and bite people.

On the other hand, part of the rhetorical arsenal of those who get hysterical about Pit Bulls is to pretend that every dog bite is a medical catastrophe. And that just isn't true. If you look, in fact, at emergency room statistics, you'll see that more people are admitted every year for non-dog bites than dog-bites--which is to say that when you see a Pit Bull, you should worry as much about being bitten by the person holding the leash than the dog on the other end.
Yep. Worry more about your neighbor biting you than your neighbor's dog. Because maybe your neighbor doesn't lick his own backside, but he's probably not as well behaved as the dog either. I'm listening to “Theologians” by Wilco from the album A Ghost Is Born on iTunes.

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