#human aggression

It's Throwback Thursday! Today, here is a picture from five years ago of Badger's mean mug. Badger has been with us for almost eight years now. She was picked up by animal control as a borderline-feral stray living under a condemned trailer, and was heavily pregnant. She dug a burrow at the Bibb County Pound to have her puppies in, and when I saw a post from the pound reaching out for a rescue offer before she whelped, I felt a connection and busted my butt finding her a rescue placement. She had her puppies the day after I pulled her from the pound.

I did not anticipate that Badger would ever become my dog. However, she quickly demonstrated some severe and ultimately dangerous behavioral issues, starting with biting the ACO who removed her from the burrow. What we hoped was a fluke from stress and fear unfortunately turned out to be a temperament issue. She racked up a serious bite history in foster care, and also demonstrated extremely severe resource guarding, as well as dog reactivity. The rescue's last straw was when she mauled one of her own weanling puppies for attempting to eat from the same tray; they told me if I did not want her, they would euthanize.

If I did not have the means to safely work with, contain, and manage this dog, euthanasia would have been the correct choice. At ACS, we recognize that behavior euthanasia, while deeply tragic, is sometimes the only way to give a dog peace and protect others from harm when a dog can not function safely or happily in the human world. Badger is inarguably a dangerous dog, and I go to great lengths to balance keeping her happy with keeping myself and others safe. The good news is, she has not had a single bite incident under my care, she has come a LONG way with resource guarding, and while she still dislikes most dogs, she does like Bolt. She is generally a happy, silly dog, but she will never be a trustworthy one, and having a constant awareness of and respect for that is how we ensure she is safely managed.

Elizabeth Fisher, the late author of Woman's Creation, is a strong exponent of the original harmony thesis.

...Humanity, being based on co-operation, has its origins in primitive egalitarianism and... this egalitarianism may even apply to the sexes... The earliest humans shared tasks... Dominance is inherent neither in the animal world nor in humanity.

Dominance, after all, is a laboratory concept. It simply means that when a piece of food is thrown before two animals, one of them often defers to the other...

Fisher says the men in the family did not become oppressive until the state was created and became a model for oppression. Fisher sees the patriarchal family as the authoritarian state in microcosm rather than its model. The state developed in Sumer around 6,000 years ago.

The authoritarian state was the model from which individual fathers derived power.

Integral to the success of the first organized bureaucracies was the distortion of human sexuality into actual and symbolic production, the repression of female sexuality, and the linkage of war and sex for men. With the worship of material accumulation, people were reified to be used as tools and frequently were treated as possessions themselves.

Fisher suggests that even rape was not practiced until after men became herdsmen. She says introducing forced coitus in animal breeding may have given men the idea of rape. She ignores anthropological studies describing rape in hunter/ gatherer societies, such as those cited in works like Gayle Rubin's article, "The Traffic in Women."

Fisher suggests that worshipping fertility did not mean worshipping women, but was anti-woman.

Fertility worship led to the forced breeding of women; more important, it signified the perversion of sex from pleasure to procreation.

Fisher does not believe that women and men are inherently different. She suggests that any sex hormones can increase the amount of aggression in an animal or person.

What is clear is that sex is energizing, be it testosterone or estrogen. When that energy finds no outlet, it gets displaced into irritability and, on occasion and in some species, into fighting behavior.

She adds,

We are told that ingesting testosterone makes a female more aggressive; we are not told that ingesting estrogen is also likely to make her more aggressive.

Directed aggression is considered to be the important component in mammal species specific behavior, the expression of this behavior reveals the variability of both - genetic and environmental origin. Animal aggression is studied not only for elucidating its biological roots but also for creating the adequate models which would help to investigate the mechanisms of human aggression which is inherent in many psychiatric disorders. Read More

This is a very dangerous way of thinking. While the term “vicious” is a bit extreme, some breeds are predisposed to dog aggression and/or small animal aggression (HA, too, but OP was speaking about an animal).

There are too many wonderful people who believe they’ve failed as an owner because of sayings like this. Animal aggression at its core has nothing to do with training/socializing or how the dog was raised and it’s time to stop perpetuating these myths.

The American Pit Bull Terrier and Human Aggression Many people seem to think that this breed is a danger to humans. While this is completely untrue; you can’t really blame them. After all, international media has given the general public a quite distorted and misinformed image of what kind of dog the “pitbull” (APBT) was bred to be.

The stories on the news and in the Sunday paper rage about child-eating monsters and dogs that will always bite the hand that feeds have caused a very negative stereotype to be pinned to this breed by rampant ignorance and misinformation. Thus giving the public a rather twisted view of the APBT temperament. With all these common myths and rumors surrounding the breed, how is one supposed to decipher between fact and fiction? While it is true the APBT was bred to have aggressive tendencies as many ill-informed people will tell you, but never were these instincts aimed toward humans. When the APBT was being created, the goal they were trying to reach was to create a dog that a living incarnation of gameness and bursting with the ability to do whatever job they were given to. Which, back then, meant matching. The same method that was used to amplify dog aggression in this breed was also used to weed out human aggression. Through generations of selective breeding - sifting through a variety of dogs to find a pair with matching ideal qualities - resulting in offspring that exceed (or at least match) their parents in terms of quality – breeders were able to control the results of the dogs they produced. In layman’s terms, they would choose dogs that were proven (through themselves and their ancestry) to have certain physical and temperamental qualities and combine them to produce dogs that had a combination of the qualities that they desired, so on and so forth. When breeding the APBT, the goal of most dog men was to obtain a set of specific traits; these traits were most commonly valued in a particular order: Gameness, Ability, and docility toward man, which created ease of handling.

Many dogs will bite anything that comes near them when they are in fight mode. This was not accepted by dog men, as it would indeed complicate the sport to have dogs attacking handlers and referees during a match. Dogs that showed any indication of aggression toward humans were most often culled (put to sleep or otherwise removed from the genepool) without hesitation, as were dogs that failed to prove their gameness or ability in the pit. The only dogs that would be bred were dogs that could prove they were up to code.

Over generations, the result was a breed of extremely game dogs with an immense desire to please humans, an amazing ability to fight, comical and loyal, with a history of solid temperament. In conclusion, if you are looking for a guard dog, the APBT is definitely not the dog for you.

If you are looking for a family dog that will be loyal, energetic, and entertaining, you may want to look into them.

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