• Vespair@lemm.ee
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    7 months ago

    Hot take (I’ll accept my downward facing arrows, thank you), but people regularly vastly overestimate the safety and docility of “regular” dogs too

    • Woht24@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      You’re absolutely correct. Any dog over about 10kg has the power to cause serious injury, especially to a child or other dog/pet. Greyhounds have a horrendous prey drive and will eat your cat in 2 seconds flat

      • Chocrates@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        I tried to rehabilitate a dangerous dog and failed and now find myself with another one (thankfully MUCH less prone to biting). “regular” dogs are one abusive/neglectful adolescence away from being unsafe

        • Emerald@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          Pitbulls also have the issue of being abused at higher rates then other breeds. It’s not all genetic

            • Woht24@lemmy.world
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              7 months ago

              You’re half correct.

              Pitbulls, Staffordshire terriers, Bullies etc, are all variations of same or similar breeds. These breeds are viewed as ‘tough’ and are treated and trained as such by their owners. They also aren’t treated like family dogs by these people who buy them for their tough image either.

              You get a few generations like this, a couple idiots who don’t desex or seperate their dogs on heat and you’ve got the beginning of a problem.

              I’m Australian and in animal control, bull breeds are always number 1 for attacks every year but working breeds are VERY close behind, think Cattledog, Kelpie, German Shepherd etc.

              If you look at the skewed breed ownership statistics, there Staffys and Bull breeds get a bad wrap from being incredibly popular and very poorly taken care of.

            • Liz@midwest.social
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              7 months ago

              Gotta love when they don’t bother to normalize their statistics so it’s basically just a question of human population density.

        • Draedron@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          7 months ago

          No. They just often have shit owners who either want them to be aggressive or habe no ideas about dogs but think pitbulls are cool

        • Woht24@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          Pitbulls, bull terriers, Staffordshire terriers etc are no worse than other dogs. I work in animal control, it’s a big misconception.

        • joel_feila@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          If only regular people could id pitbulls. No really it hard for average people to do that. Really compromises all our data.

    • Deceptichum@kbin.social
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      7 months ago

      And the media and courts will ruin the next 20 years of your life as we harass you over your dead baby.

      Meanwhile dipshits on the Internet laugh about your dead baby 30 years later.

      • mean_bean279@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Have you ever considered people make the joke because of Seinfeld and no inherent knowledge of the actual situation that took place in Australia?

          • mean_bean279@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            As do most people. Deceptichum is just unable to grasp a concept like time. Or that not everyone who lived in that era even knows it’s a real thing.

            • Soggy@lemmy.world
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              7 months ago

              And a lot of us who were around in the 90s also used “gay” as a casual pejorative without really understanding it. It wasn’t right then and it’s not right now and most of us grew up and realized that.

              The key is thinking, “dang, that’s messed up actually” and changing. Not “it’s just a joke, geez people are so sensitive.”

              • mean_bean279@lemmy.world
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                7 months ago

                You joked about how half of US states outside of the cities aren’t worth visiting. You joked about how everyone in Florida is crazy. Is that not messed up, generalizing whole groups of people like that? Or are the jokes about people you disagree with ok?

                Using Gay as a negative is bad… because it impacts a whole group of people. We aren’t directly making fun of the kid specifically, but joking about the situation. Making a joke about the kid, wrong. Obviously. Joking about a dingo eating a baby? Funny. Because it’s not about a person or who they were, but about a shitty situation.

                Get off your high horse. Take a joke.

          • z00s@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            A murder investigation in the NT is like a blind guy looking for his sunglasses

        • Deceptichum@kbin.social
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          7 months ago

          Have you ever considered, even without contemporary context, you’re still making a joke about a real life baby being killed?

            • WillFord27@lemmy.world
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              7 months ago

              I never understand this argument. How does humor come before empathy to some people? How could having a giggle ever overrule a tragedy? There’s coping with pain through humor, but if it’s not your pain, it just seems juvenile and insensitive.

              • weker01@feddit.de
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                7 months ago

                Because Humor can be coping mechanism also for stuff there are not involved with. Some people need to laugh at tragedy.

                Edit: you are saying “not your pain” as if empathy does not exist. We sometimes need to distance ourselves from tragedy and some do this with humor.

              • Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                7 months ago

                I’m not downvoting you because that’s a valid question I don’t have an answer for. All I know is, I stand by my statement, because it’s been proven to me time and time again.

          • Crashumbc@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            You realize humans have made jokes about terrible things, pretty much since language was invented? And that making light of horrible situations is a coping mechanism?

          • mean_bean279@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            Woah, sorry Mr. Sensitive pants. How do people know it’s a real life baby?

            Care to write out a list of all the things society can’t joke about?

            • WillFord27@lemmy.world
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              7 months ago

              Needing a list of things to treat with care and not joke about is a new level of lack of social awareness.

              • mean_bean279@lemmy.world
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                7 months ago

                Oi, you fukn wot m8?

                I work in tech sales. If I didn’t have “social awareness” I’d be terrible at my job. Joking about shit that’s dark is a human response to things we sometimes view as uncomfortable. It sucks that a kid died from being attacked by dingos. It probably wasn’t the first time it happened, and probably won’t be the last. 9/11 was a national tragedy, but we still joke about that too. Far more than dingo ate your baby jokes. Do the deaths of 3000 people not equal one baby? Or is there some strange math problem where 1 baby, but only when eaten by a dingo, is somehow more sad (and less jokey) than all those deaths?

      • Fleur__@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        I see it as the same as the saying “If it’s brown, lay down. If it’s black, fight back. If it’s white, goodnight” when referring to what to do when around bears. Yes it is comedic and yes it is referring to being mauled to death by a polar bear. Sure there’s an argument to be made about being insensitive to the victims of polar bear maulings but that’s not the purpose of the statement. “dingo ate my baby” is pretty clear cut on the meaning. Don’t leave your baby alone where it can be eaten by a dingo, some people will find that funny because it kind of is ridiculous and horrific that this actually happened.

        • Soggy@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          Nobody has been thrown in jail and dragged through a media circus over a polar bear mauling. Lindy and Michael Chamberlain had their lives ruined after a traumatic loss. It’s not the same.

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      You know that’s a true story, right?

      Lady lost a kid.

      Tropic Thunder may have taught me that, but I’ll never not picture RDJ disguised as a dude playing another dude when I hear it.

  • NathA
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    7 months ago

    This is actually something being debated in Australia. Until a few years ago, Dingoes were considered the same species as the regular dog Canis familiaris. Recent DNA studies have shown them to be distinct, however. So now there’s Canis dingo. Only, Dingoes can interbreed with the regular dog, which normally is the test for them being the same species. Maybe that makes them a subspecies?

    So, yeah - even we don’t know what they are. If they were raised by humans, they are happy friendly doggos. If in the wild, then they’re dingoes.

    • luves2spooge@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      It depends if their progeny can reproduce. A male donkey and a female horse can make a mule but mules are sterile.

      • Soggy@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Not that simple. Brown bears and polar bears produce fertile offspring, as do bison and cattle, and the false killer whale with a bottlenose dolphin. (Far from an exhaustive list)

        It’s generally a useful definition but it isn’t a “rule”.

        • Sorcaeden@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          They are not, it’s just some breed representation thing, and they certainly look more dingoey than a Jack Russel, but at least in the United States, it’s likely to be trace amounts. Source, I own two, but admittedly neither have had any sort of genetic test so I guess my hearsay is as good as yours…I should find out, I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if they had up to a quarter dingo somehow.

          • NoSpiritAnimal@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            They actually are a dingo cross breed. The Blue Heeler and The Red Australian Cattle Dog are both mixed with dingo. English breeds were not able to handle Australia and were bred with captured dingos for toughness.

            There seems to be some confusion with how a hybrid could breed in this chain.

            Cell Division is what causes problems for Hybrid animals reproducing.

            If the cell begins dividing and the chromosomes within can not find like pairs the cell stops dividing and will not become an animal.

            Dogs and Dingos are close enough that even though not all chromosomes are paired correctly, they can still create a viable animal.

            Dingos are wild dogs, they’re descendants of Dogs brought to Australia about 4,000 years ago.

            • Sorcaeden@lemmy.world
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              7 months ago

              No disagreement on viability of the offspring and their subsequent ability to mate further down, only a disagreement about percentage between single digit up to “half” in the current breed (as it exists in the USA). I believe it’s notably diluted from the original cross for reasons I stated in my other reply, but I’m curious about my red since she’s considerably more dingo-esque than my blue.

              Anecdotal evidence is the best evidence, right?

          • R0cket_M00se@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            No I just mean in general, the Australian cattle dog was originally created by crossing herding breeds (mostly speckled collies) with the native dingo. The collies couldn’t handle the heat so they introduced a breed that was capable of doing so.

            If you do a genetics test it’ll just show them as being “Australian cattle dog” cause that’s what the genetic markers are identified as now.

            • Sorcaeden@lemmy.world
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              7 months ago

              Right, but they’re no longer half dingo after the multitude of generations has passed in whichever pedigree, because for whichever innate temperament traits you might desire, along with the inability to selectively breed for physical ones with a wild dog, you wouldn’t take a second generation heeler and cross a dingo back in just to keep the percentage up. I don’t honestly know the whole history but it’s conceivable that enough of the original breed starters contained sufficient “dingo” to keep the content up.

              I thought I had read that one of the various tests…wisdom panel maybe…was providing results indicating wild crosses, including dingo. My thinking was that any significant percentage would show, but time will tell, since we have whichever brand that was, and just need to collect and run the sample.

    • WhiteOakBayou@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Canis Lupus and Canis Latrans also can and do breed with Canis Familiaris. The ability to interbreed is one test for being the same species but not the only test. Libraries worth of books are out there on the subject and there are lively debate as to where animals fit in the taxonomy.

      • Soggy@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Canis familiaris is a subspecies of C. lupus as of 2005. There is a push to distinguish it as a distinct species but that is not the current consensus.

        “Testing” for speciation is pretty silly, tbh, because it’s an arbitrary distinction no matter what. Our placement of rigid definitions onto the constant gradual process of evolution is always going to have edge cases and outliers. So we give things useful labels and move on until we have better tools (DNA analysis has been great) or have need of better definitions.

        Does dogs being wolves do anything for the general public? No, but that’s what common names are for. Does the distinction of Canis lupus familiaris help scientists right now? Probably. If not there’d be a stronger push to change it.

      • chatokun@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        7 months ago

        In the scale of human lives, no. In the scale of human history, yeah. In the scale of planetary or universal history… it was a few seconds ago.

    • Razzazzika@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      So Australia just had evil stray dogs that adapted to the extreme Australian environment like every other evil thing in Australia, meanwhile in Russia you got stray dogs riding public transportation and learning to scavenge and beg. It’s all the environment.

    • DroneRights [it/its]@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      Species is a social construct and debates like this prove it. People can’t agree what the line between different species is, because the line is socially constructed.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Don’t go to Tasmania either.

    Look at this cute guy!

    I want to hold him and pet him and love him and- OH FUCK!

  • Chickenstalker@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Do you pet random dogs on the street? No? Then you won’t have any problems with Dingoes. Drop Bears on the other hand…

    • angrystego@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      There are countries where all dogs have owners (mostly on the other side of the leach) and you are always supposed to ask the owners before you pet them.

      And then there are countries blessed with really cute street dogs that tend to turn tummy up when you’re passing them. You’re supposed to pet those randomly.

      • Aram855@feddit.cl
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        7 months ago

        Communal care of stray dogs. Everybody is supposed to feed and pet them, and usually they crash at any random place.

      • lunarul@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        My country was the type with packs of street dogs that you had to keep your distance from and that you saw on the news from time to time for mauling another passerby

      • Khrux@ttrpg.network
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        7 months ago

        One of my saddest days was waiting to cross a road and a car stopped Infront of me with it’s passenger window open and a big Labrador hopped up and was face to face with me.

        I excitedly asked the owner if I could pet the dog, as it was literally delivered to my face and she said no like it was a weird request. Thats stuck with me for half a decade already.

    • Iusedtobeanadventurer@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      What? Of course I pet random dogs on the street. You don’t?

      I mean, I ask first, if they’re with a human… if not, well…

  • OceanSoap@lemmy.ml
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    7 months ago

    Any wild creature bigger than a rat is an animal you should be cautious of. I mean, I wouldn’t pet a wild rat, either, but I’m also not afraid one will attack and kill me.

    Wild dog packs roam lots of countries in south-east Asia. Don’t fucking go near them. They will try to seperate you from other humans and take you down for a snack.

    So weird though when you see, like, a golden retriever in their ranks. The urge to go pet them is too strong. I did a lot of catching myself walking towards them when I was in thailand.