So there’s this new piece of writing coming from a South African citizen that the pro-BSL crowd is super into right about now. I swear, they find “logic” in the weirdest of ways. Anyways, it was published a few days ago by someone named Hauke Liefferink and is now being spread around by Pit Bull hatemongers as a retort to anyone who says that dogs are individuals or that 99.9% of whatever the breakdown of dog breed/type is actually innocent. These are both facts, by the way, and they are reality-based facts that will continue to be impossible to retort. Sure, they can be ignored by someone with a crackpot agenda, but they can’t be repudiated at any level.
Liefferink begins by referencing Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book, The Black Swan, as a way to align this theory written about in the book to Pit Bulls and Pit Bull owners.
So first, to explain what a “Black Swan” event is… The book’s author uses the example of turkeys, and how from their vantage point they live rather happy and content lives for 364 days out of the year. Each day goes by, they know their routine, they have come to trust the person that feeds them, and they have no reason to think that this will ever change. Then comes a day prior to the Thanksgiving holiday where they are all basically slaughtered in mass, turning their world upside down. To the turkey, they never saw this coming nor expected it. To the butcher, he knew that this was always going to be the case eventually. This is an example of what’s been coined by Taleb as a “Black Swan” event. Okay, that makes sense.
Now Hauke Liefferink comes along, grabs this concept, and starts to blatantly bastardize it. Right out of the gate he claims:
It is in this little fraction of time (0.001%), that Pit Bull owners and turkeys get it very, very wrong, with death being the penalty paid.
Okay, first of all, that sentence alone makes no rational sense. In the example of the turkeys being raised for food, they all die. They all die each and every year. Every single one of them. How in God’s name does this in any way apply to Pit Bulls? It doesn’t. Unless this man can show that every single Pit Bull eventually kills someone, his point falls flat on its face. Reality is almost 100% opposite of what he is implying. He obviously cannot show any of this because 99.9999999999% of all dogs at any level deemed to be a “Pit Bull” (or otherwise) have not killed or seriously mauled someone. This is indisputable.
Liefferink goes on to reference the Colombian child-murderer, torture-killer, and rapist known as “La Bestia,” who has apparently confessed to killing at least 140 children and is suspected of murdering over 400 victims. Liefferink says that he is the most successful serial killer of all time. What does this have to do with anything, you say? Hauke Liefferink goes on to say that “in La Bestia’s 42 years of life prior to apprehension, he killed 0.001% of the time (if he spent 1 hour killing each of his 400 victims).” He then compares “most Pit Bull owner’s reactions” to any attack that may happen in the universe with those same Pit Bull owners “being surprised when a man like Luis ‘The Beast’ Garavito kills another victim.” After all, he’s “already proved his tremendous ability and affinity to do so.” Liefferink ends his paragraph by stating that Garavito may have been a nice guy 99.999% of the time.
Holy wowza, what an incredibly ignorant stretch. The fact that anti-dog folks online are holding this guy’s ludicrous perspective up as a proper response to scientific obviousness just shows you what kind of irrational, non-objective individuals we are dealing with.
The Colombian serial killer is 1 man. He is 1 man that has repetitively committed heinous acts of violence and murder, a total criminal, an obvious piece of filth. I don’t care if 99.999% of the time he wasn’t out physically killing people. He still murdered over 400 people. How in the hell that is relatable to 1 dog, let alone millions, is absolutely beyond me. I mean, it’s so absurd. If any dog, no matter the breed, goes out and kills a human being, whether provoked or not, that dog is usually euthanized almost immediately! Again, if a dog kills 1 person then the dog dies. That’s how that story goes. Yet this Liefferink guy, now being cheered on by anonymous dog-haters across the internet, is trying to compare a psychopathic man’s repetitive criminal intent with any dog’s alleged intent after a singular incident. But I thought that dogs don’t have any comparison to human beings, folks? This is what any Pit Bull-hater that I’ve ever come across will say when they need to dodge any direct or philosophical points that are being made, that at any level involve any kind of a human reference. You can’t have it both ways. Now dogs have criminal intent? Lol. Worse, he’s scapegoating every dog (millions) as being like an individual serial killer with 400 notched kills!
This guy continues…
Thus when Pit Bull owners are telling us that their dogs are so loving, timid and haven’t eaten any kids yet, what they are actually saying is that they haven’t experienced their day 1,000 yet.
We haven’t experienced our “day 1,000” yet? Liefferink says that as if millions of people will inevitably face this day 1,000; never acknowledging that almost all people with Pit Bulls (or any dog) never face such a day. Take me, for example. I’ve lived every day since early 2001 with at least 1 dog that we can go ahead and categorize as being a “Pit Bull-type” dog. It’s now 2015. Since 2010, I’ve been living with 3. I lived nearly 3,285 days with Sway. She did nothing negative to anyone, ever. I’ve since lived over 1,825 days and counting with my 3 current dogs. They’ve did nothing negative to anyone, ever. My mom, my girlfriend, a few cousins, my old roommate, numerous close friends of mine and about 200 acquaintances that I could name-drop in about 20 minutes, from just Los Angeles County alone, would have the same kind of testimony to give about their own dogs. Testimony based on actual history. Testimony based on actual reality. Testimony based on fact. Yet we don’t count to anyone with the agenda of exterminating all dogs that look like Pit Bulls. It’s funny how that works.
He then accuses “Pit Bull owners” of denying science. Denying science? Every peer-reviewed publication that I’ve ever seen in my life not only clearly explains that breed is not the issue, but it then breaks down why it isn’t. Further, quite literally every single dog or human safety expert organization in North America as well as all professional animal welfare groups have come out publicly stating that breed-specific legislation is not only ineffective but unjust.
Liefferink sources numerous Wikipedia links referring to dog fighting and bull-baiting, both totally illegal, mind you. He wants you to believe that every single dog mixed at any level with a Pit Bull is a “fighting dog” that comes from an actual dog fighting background and environment. In reality, so few dogs, Pit Bulls or otherwise, even fit that history. Actual dogs coming from a fighting environment are incredibly rare, and those that do, most of them are bait dogs or dogs that don’t show the ability to be the kind of fighters that scumbag dog fighters even desire. This notion that every Pit Bull is a dog fighting dog is completely untrue. It’s fear-mongering. It’s a lie. He then sources a study from 1990 which involved 168 Philadelphia children. Only 12 of those 168 children were hospitalized following their incident with whatever dog they encountered. German Shepherds were identified in this study as being the most common “perpetrator,” yet they go unmentioned in Liefferink’s rant. The study explains in no way how they went about identifying any of the dogs, and the unreliability of Pit Bull identification has been made quite clear by, wait for it, scientific studies. It states that 46% of the dogs were “provoked” prior to biting. It states that over half of the dogs were freely roaming at the time of incident. None of these things are even highlighted by Hauke Liefferink.
Are we noticing the trend of outright ignoring any and everything that overwhelmingly contradicts the Pit Bull-hating narrative?
Upon viewing this trash heap of an article being shared around Facebook by the DogsBite.org klan, I couldn’t help but take note of some of the comments rolling in from their echo chamber. One commenter posted a YouTube video link showing Andrew Millard, an investment advisor out of North Carolina, taking a few minutes to explain what a “Black Swan” event is to his subscribers. At around 1:58 in the video he says this… “On the other hand, we should never let fear dictate our actions.” Well said. Apparently they didn’t even watch it.
For BSL-advocates, dog-banners, dog-hating exterminators, collective blame ideologues and prejudicial control freaks, fear is the only thing that dictates their every move.