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Crémieux

@cremieuxrecueil

Jan 7

The host of NPR's This American Life once tried to raise a pit bull with his now ex-wife.

He let the dog ruin his life🧵

He ended up getting it on Prozac and Valium, feeding it kangaroo and ostrich, and making excuses for the many times it would attack people.

Ira Glass' wife had a dog before they got married, but it died right before the ceremony.

That dog was a pit bull and it was a rescue, so they decided it would be good to rescue another one.

Per him, it originally came with the "slave name" Marley, which he changed to Piney.

Shortly after taking him home, Piney seemingly developed severe allergies to whatever he was eating.

So, Ira and his wife got him set up with a doctor. In fact, they got him set up with four doctors.

And they started spending more time cooking for the dog than for themselves.

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Crémieux

@cremieuxrecueil

Jan 5

https://twitter.com/contiarchive/status/2006861245631312133

Pit bulls were bred to fight.

Animals in nature are not like that. Tigers and lions? They don't seek out combat. Nature doesn't seem to want to breed them into unrelenting killers.

This is why Britain banned the sport of "lion baiting"🧵

https://twitter.com/contiarchive/status/2006861245631312133

The nature of "baiting" is torment.

The idea is to put large, powerful animals like bulls or lions in the ring with several dogs, and the winner lives.

The sport has existed for thousands of years. One of our first records is of Indians showing it to Alexander the Great.

The first record in England comes from 1610 and features King James I requesting the Master of the Beargarden—a bear training facility—to provide him with three dogs to fight a lion.

Two of the dogs died and the last escaped because the lion did not wish to fight and retreated.

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Crémieux

@cremieuxrecueil

Jan 4

https://twitter.com/goblinodds/status/2007701065651892435

There are ZERO rich countries that haven't embraced markets.

https://twitter.com/goblinodds/status/2007701065651892435

You could say something like 'Ah, but this is just because the economic freedom index is constructed that way.'

No, it's not. We can all go and read how it's made. It's detailed every year. Failed excuse. Moreover, this has unintended predictive power:

fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/…

You could say 'Ah, but this is about sanctions.'

That makes no sense.

For one, there's no supportive pattern of sanctions. For two, you can develop in near-autarky, and before post-WW2, that was comparatively what the most developed countries were dealing with.

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Crémieux

@cremieuxrecueil

Jan 4

How risky is it to own a pit bull?

I'm not talking fatalities, but bites, because bites are still a bad outcome and any dog who bites should be put down.

If we take the annual risk a dog bites its owner, scale it for pit bulls and Golden Retrievers, and extrapolate 30 years...

How do you calculate this?

Simple.

First, we need estimates of the portion of the U.S. population bitten by dogs per year. Next, to adjust that, we need the portion of those bites that are to owners. So, for overall dogs, we get about 1.5% and roughly ~25% of that.

Then, to obtain lifetime risk figures, we need to pick a length for a 'lifetime'. I picked thirty years because that's what I picked. Sue me. It's about three dog lifetimes.

P(>=1 bite) = 1-(1-p)^t
It's pure probability math. To rescale for the breed, we need estimates of the relative risk of different dog being the perpetrators of bites. We'll use the NYC DOHMH's 2015-22 figures to get the risk for a Golden Retriever (breed = "Retriever" in the dataset) relative to all other dogs, and Lee et al. 2021's figures to get the risk for a pit bull. The results don't change much just using the NYC figures, they just became significantly higher risk for the pit bulls.

To rescale 'p' for b reed, it's just p_{breed} = p_{baseline} \times RR_{breed}.

Then you plug it back into the probability of a bite within thirty years. If you think, say, pit bulls are undercounted for the denominator for their RR, OK! Then let's take that to the limit and say that every 'Black' neighborhood in New York has one, halve the risk noticed for them, and bam, you still get 1-in-5 to 1-in-2.5 owners getting bit in the time they own pit bulls (30 years).

And mind you, bites are not nips. As Ira Glass had to be informed when he was talking about his notorious pit bull, it did not just "nip" two children, it drew blood, and that makes it a bite.

Final method note: the lower-bound for Golden Retriever risk was calculated out as 0.00131%, but that rounded down to 0. Over a typical pet dog lifespan of 10-13 years, an individual Golden Retriever will almost-certainly not bite its owner even once, whereas a given pit that lives 11.5 years will have an 18-33% chance of biting, and if we use the DOHMH RRs, it's much higher. If we use the DOHMH RR and double their population, that still holds.

The very high risk of a bite associated with a pit bull is highly robust and defies the notion that '99.XXXX% won't ever hurt anyone.' The idea that almost no pit bulls are bad is based on total fatality risk and it is a farcical argument on par with claiming that Great White Sharks shouldn't be avoided because they kill so few people.

Frankly, if we throw in non-owner risk, the typical pit bull *will* hurt some human or some animal over a typical pet dog's lifespan. And because pit bulls live a little bit shorter, you can adjust that down, but the result will still directionally hold because they are just that god-awful of a breed.

Final note:

Any dog that attacks a human or another dog that wasn't actively attacking them first should be put down. That is a big part of why this matters. These attacks indicate that the dogs in question must die.

Sources:

injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/14/5/2…

veterinaryworld.org/Vol.13/March-2…

escholarship.org/uc/item/103520…, x.com/cremieuxrecuei…

cremieux.xyz/p/the-dogs-of-…

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Crémieux

@cremieuxrecueil

Dec 31, 2025

https://twitter.com/RatOrthodox/status/2006201294416179619

The male advantage in strength is insanely large.

Even when men and women are matched on muscle, men tend to be far stronger.

Add in that men tend to be to women like what linebackers are to normal men, and you might wonder how more women aren't constantly in fear.

https://twitter.com/RatOrthodox/status/2006201294416179619

This logic applies very strongly.

Consider this: female athletes are generally weaker than average men!

Sex differences in strength are profound.

Sources:

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/aj…

link.springer.com/article/10.100…

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Crémieux

@cremieuxrecueil

Dec 31, 2025

Let us never forget:

The Father of the American pit bull, one John P. Colby, didn't stop breeding them even after they

KILLED HIS NEPHEW and MAULED HIS SISTER

This breed has been malign since its creation.

Pit bulls were also killing disabled people shortly after their invention.

This headline is from 1901.

Basically, what happened is that this woman had an epileptic fit, so her pit bull, being the nanny dog it is, decided to eat through her neck.

Helpful!

Even a single year after they were recognized in 1896, they had begun hurting people.

In this instance, one mutilated a woman in front of her four-year-old grandchild.

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