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“Politics is downstream from culture,” Andrew Breitbart famously said. Rather less famously, but persistently, this columnist has always maintained that dog politics (which arouses more fervour than human politics) is downstream from human culture. Canine advocacy is permeated with the exact same tropes we hear from social justice warriors: “victims,” “equality,” “rights,” and — the canker that really gnaws away at logic and reason — “racism.”

At the heart of what I estimate to be 90 per cent of heated dog politics is the pit bull-type dog.

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Canine advocacy is permeated with the exact same tropes we hear from social justice warriors

There are two camps. I’m in the public-safety camp. Our concern is for the victims of a dog type that we know, based on irrefutable epidemiological evidence, is genetically programmed for elevated risk to humans and other animals. Researcher Merritt Clifton, who has been tracking media reports of dog attacks against humans for decades, has published data showing that pit bulls are responsible for a massively disproportionate share of attacks — in the period between 1982 and 2014, Clifton found that pit bulls accounted for more than 62 per cent of reported attacks causing bodily harm in Canada and the United States, despite making up less than an estimated seven per cent of the North American dog population. (Another three per cent involved mixed breeds that were at least part pit bull.)