The study author does not explain how breeds are identified, but the reader supposes that the breed is taken off either license or citation paperwork. This means that, in the case of a license, the owner decides what a dog’s breed is. In the case of a citation, an animal control officer probably decides what a dog’s breed is.
This naturally leads to a serious question about identification accuracy, especially since most dogs are not purebred. For instance, animal control officers may have been inclined to over-identify troublesome dogs as “pit bulls” because the category is broad and vaguely defined, and because Ohio’s state law at the time gave animal control more tools to deal with problematic “pit bulls” than with other types of problematic dogs, thus encouraging them to declare dogs “pit bulls.”
Barnes also observes that “some owners license a HR [high risk] dog such as a Pit Bull as another breed, such as Boxer” to avoid the automatic designation of “vicious” that Ohio placed on pit bulls. Obviously, this suggests that Barnes’s population may be skewed due to the effects of BSL; some dog owners were intentionally misidentifying their dog’s breed, and Barnes has no ability to correct for this problem. This means that data for the other breeds tallied by Barnes may actually have been data for pit bull mixes that were intentionally recorded by the owners as a different breed.
Barnes also includes two “breeds” that aren’t recognized by any reputable kennel club—the “Ahra” and the “Terripoo.” It is not clear what an Ahra is, but Terripoo might be a mix of poodle and terrier, so the latter, at least, should have been included as a “mixed breed.”
No comments:
Post a Comment
join the discussion