When dog breeds are singled out as dangerous or vicious, responsibility is removed from the dog owner, which is where it belongs. Behind every dangerous dog is an irresponsible owner.

Contrary to myths propagated by the media, human aggression occurs in all dog breeds. Canines can exhibit many kinds of aggression: human-, dog-, territory-, and food-aggression, to name a few. These are independent behaviors.

Each year, the American Temperament Testing Society holds evaluations across the country for dog breeds and gives a passing score for the entire breed based on the percentage of passed over failed within total number of the particular breed tested.

Here is how the pit bull breeds scored in the latest statistics from February 2012:

American Pit Bull Terrier - 86.8%
American Staforddshire Terrier - 84.2%
Bull Terrier - 91.1%
Miniature Bull Terrier - 100%
Staforddshire Bull Terrier - 90.3%

And here are the scores of some other popular dog breeds:

Chihuahua - 68.3%
Jack Russell Terrier - 84.1%
Golden Retriever - 85.2%
Labrador Retriever - 92.3%

The average score for all the breeds tested was 82.8%.

As you can see, all the pit bull breeds scored higher than the overall average and better than some of the most popular breeds.

To date, every shred of empirical evidence we have suggests that pit bulls are the same as, if not better than, other breeds when it comes to human interaction.

I urge you to oppose any effort to ban pit bull breeds in Seattle.