I wear one of these chips on my wristwatch since the 125 kHz RFID lets me open doors and use the elevator in my building without needing to pull out my keys. It’s entirely passive so I’m guessing that the chip in question carries an ID that is read by a reader and points to an ID on some pet identification database. So she was “updating the chip” less and “keeping the database up to date” more.
Ubiquitous microchips are really quite amazing.
mcpherrinm 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, it's just a number referenced in one of a few databases.
> The 15-digit pet microchip is the international standard (see ISO 11784:1996 and ISO 11785:1996)
And when they used it as a digital identifier to check for the Covid-vaccination status, of course all the wormbrained screamed that "Covid certificate mandate leads to Swedish government microchipping its citizens!'.
joezydeco 21 minutes ago [-]
Is this how the whole "Bill Gates is putting 5G chips in the Covid vaccine" meme got started?
Rebelgecko 2 hours ago [-]
* they're definitely disproportionately common in the furry community but not really a "furry thing"
I think most people use them as a backup work badge or controlling other RFID readers (car key, smart lock, etc). Or as a party trick
It's not particularly common but I've met other people.
Some people selfinject but it's probably more common to go to like a tattoo parlor or body mod shop
zoklet-enjoyer 2 hours ago [-]
Hahaha definitely not a furry. I had some magnets implanted and was looking into other subtle body mods and thought an NFC chip would be fun. I bought the magnets and the chip from dangerousthings.com
I went to a piercing shop to get it done by a guy who does silicone implants and other less common body modifications.
It's not common. The only other people I've met with chips are the guy who implanted it and my girlfriend at the time.
I have considered getting a newer model implanted and using that to badge in at work and home, but I'd likely have to travel halfway across the country to get it done.
Buildstarted 47 minutes ago [-]
was this a couple decades ago or so? i remember reading a blog about someone who implanted a magnet in the tip of one of their fingers and then put a chip in the skin between the thumb and forefinger.
zoklet-enjoyer 14 minutes ago [-]
You might be thinking of a blog called Feeling Waves. https://feelingwaves.blogspot.com That's where I heard about it too. He had magnets custom coated in some sort of Teflon like material. I ordered some magnets from him in 2009 but then couldn't find anyone who would implant them. I was living in Fargo, ND at the time and had called a bunch of tattoo and piercing shops as far away as Omaha and nobody would do it.
A few years later and I was living in Tacoma. I found a guy in Seattle, John Durante, who does all kinds of body mods. So I got one of the Dangerous Things magnets implanted in my finger. I still had those magnets from the blogger, but John wasn't going to install mystery objects into a client haha and he already had some magnets on hand.
Maybe a year or 2 after that I had moved back to Fargo. Somehow I came across a guy, Ian Bell, out of St. Cloud, MN who also did some more extreme body boss. He implanted the NFC chip in my hand. Later on I had him implant a magnet in each ear, in the tragus. The idea with that was I could wear a coil necklace hooked up to an audio jack and I'd have implanted headphones. That didn't really work. The magnetic field is much to weak. It did work if I held the coil up to my ear, so that was a near trick, because the audio was audible from a few inches away. The magnets in my ears were stronger than the magnet in my finger, so I was able to hang paperclips off of them and that was a fun party trick. The ear magnets had to be removed after several months because the casing had cracked and the magnets were disintegrating, causing my ears to swell and hurt. I forgot what the magnets were coated in, but it was a different coating than the finger magnet; the finger magnet is still in there and fine today.
The magnet removal sucked and I was dumb about it. Only one bothered me at first so I left the other one in there. Well, the 2nd one started to bother me a bit later and by the time I was like ok I should get this taken out, the only person within 1400 miles who would do it was out of state. So I went to a walk in clinic and explained the situation and I'm pretty sure they thought I was crazy. They scheduled me for a surgery that was a couple of months out and I had a vacation to Australia coming up. I ordered some scalpels off Amazon and tried to DIY. I couldn't do it. I asked a friend, and she couldn't get it either. At this point my ear was swollen, discolored, and had some scalpel cuts. So I flew to Australia with a messed up ear. I tried to meet up with the owner of a piercing shop in Sydney who Ian had hooked me up with but he was in Perth while I was in Sydney. Suffered for the next month. Got back home. Ian cut it out.
I typed all this on a phone and I'm not going to proofread it. Sorry
bombcar 2 hours ago [-]
Bright side! you'll never be John Doe - unidentified serial killer victim #3
if they bother scanning the bodies
s5300 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
arjie 2 hours ago [-]
Haha, mine is meant to fit in the webbing between thumb and index finger, but I just have a little 3d-printed attachment that holds it to my watch. Didn't have the balls to go the whole way.
nickthegreek 2 hours ago [-]
21 years in my right hand. Sadly, they weren't writable back then, so it is just a static number.
zoklet-enjoyer 2 hours ago [-]
You must have been one of the first to do it!
sanswork 55 minutes ago [-]
I've had mine for a similar length of time. Friend ran a few piercing/body mod shops in the UK and had just gotten them in. A few friends got them at the same time though most eventually had them cut out. Mines still there it's a fun party truck these days I never actually used it for anything.
Now what? Gotta pay to have 18 digits and an address inserted in a database?
I thought it was very weird in the USA
sojournerc 18 minutes ago [-]
Coloradan with all chipped pets for decades. Not sure where you're coming from. Our friend was reunited with a cat with a chip that was lost for a 6 months. Shitting on the US is great for karma these days
3eb7988a1663 18 minutes ago [-]
That is upsetting for what could almost certainly be run from a SQLite database on a garbage-tier host. Presumably 99.9% of all animals are registered one time and never again queried. Could be near zero operational burden, but of course, capitalism.
sillysaurusx 53 minutes ago [-]
I don't think it's legally required for vets to check chips whenever new "owners" take them in for a visit. I've been holding out hope for reuniting with my missing cat Salt, but wherever he is, he's happily in someone else's living room. And I doubt the microchip will bring him back anytime soon.
Sadly cat snatching is a real thing that's happened to me possibly twice. The first time was confirmed beyond a doubt; I had to bust out my cat from her back porch at 2am or so when I was roaming the neighborhood looking for him. The only reason I was even in the vicinity was that it was the last spot the GPS tracker reported before he went missing.
"Keep your pets indoors, then!" Yeah, yeah. The risks come with the territory. But my boy Pepper is still with me after a couple years, and I'm hoping a tag with "I have a happy home" followed by my number will keep would-be "do-gooders" away. (A lot of these crazy folks that snatch pets think they're doing the pet a favor by taking them.)
Miss you Salt.
Anyway, the point is, if vets were legally required to actually check the chips when they're brought in for appiontments, they'd quickly notice the discrepancy. They're the only entity in the world in a position to do something about it. But what vet is gonna try to take "your" pet away from you when you take them in just because of mismatched chips? Nobody, because pets are property, and that would be theft according to the law.
akerl_ 45 minutes ago [-]
> The risks come with the territory
To be clear here, the “territory” here is letting your pet free roam off of your property and expecting everybody else to be cool with that?
sillysaurusx 39 minutes ago [-]
Yes. Believe it or not, that's fine for cats. "Everybody else" is by far the biggest risk. Not cars, not animals.
It's always so frustrating when you've been doing something for 15 years, speak from experience, and then someone comes along and says "Well, that's bad!" Sure. Meanwhile, my cat comes home happy and healthy each night, unless "everybody else" decides to steal him in the guise of doing him a favor.
Verified microchips during vet appointments would cancel out this exploit.
Daneel_ 40 minutes ago [-]
Exactly. Please keep cats indoors - they kill all the local wildlife.
I have a cat and it stays indoors exclusively.
sillysaurusx 37 minutes ago [-]
This is a widely-cited myth, and almost impossible to measure in practice. What does "all the local wildlife" even mean? Is the threat here that birds are going to go extinct because of cats? Not likely, and the burden of proof is on the people repeating this mistaken belief.
Using "think of the birds" as a justification for imprisoning your cat for their entire lives is also pretty crummy. It's called wildlife because they exist in the wilderness. Even if cats kill a large number of birds, so what? Those birds don't have a happy, loving home with emotional bonds to an actual human.
If you think this logic is flawed, explain why you're fine with flies dying but not birds. I bet you've swatted a few in your time.
Brybry 13 minutes ago [-]
> Free-ranging cats on islands have caused or contributed to 33 (14%) of the modern bird, mammal and reptile extinctions recorded by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List [1]
Cats are probably a leading cause of mortality in birds. [2] Domestic cats are not native to North America. The birds here would not have evolved to avoid them (and beyond that, domestic cat numbers are not limited by prey availability because they're pets bred and fed by humans).
You'll find plenty of studies with evidence that domestic cats are probably bad for bird populations. [3][4]
But to be fair, buildings/glass windows kill a lot of birds too. [5]
Suppose it's true that cats are bad for bird populations. The implication is that just because birds are dying, it's okay to snatch a cat. More than that, that cats should be imprisoned for their entire lives, when they naturally want to roam.
Someone can take one side of this ethical debate or the other, and both sides probably won't agree. I personally find it sad that people would place the well-being of birds above that of a wonderful, furry companion that clearly belongs to someone.
The logic also doesn't quite line up: I was hoping someone would try to justify why it's okay to kill flies but not birds, since that's the real counterargument to this one. Especially when they kill flies with their own hands.
So much of life boils down to "we're the apex species and we do what we want." But such is life. I find it difficult not to call out the absurdities when they appear, though.
To the topic at hand, how exactly is this quantified? I suspect that word "contributed" is doing a lot of work here. [2] seems to admit as much:
> True estimates of mortality are difficult to determine. However, recent studies have synthesized the best available data to estimated ranges of mortality to bird populations in North America from some of the most common, human-caused sources of bird mortality.
The numbers in [2] are admittedly pretty startling. But it looks like they come from one report labeled "2013a". Any info on where to find it, or what it even is? Otherwise it's easy to call [2] a citation when in fact no evidence whatsoever is being presente.
[4] is much better. https://wildlife.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wsb.737 But cats are still only a contributory factor, not the main cause; the report says they're the second leading cause of admissions, not the first. So, high, and worth thinking about.
But again, the cost here is "removing, by force, someone's beloved pet." I'm not above saying that we should probably care about cats more than birds, because of the emotional bonds they form with humans. After all, that's why we're fine with flies being killed, right? No emotional bonds.
russdill 33 minutes ago [-]
Vets already have enough to deal with you'd be more likely to end up with undesirable outcomes vs what you want. People would not take the animal to the vet. People would try to destroy the chip by whatever method they happen to read in facebook. People would try to maliciously make changes to the database. Etc etc
sillysaurusx 29 minutes ago [-]
I'm not so sure. The people who snatch cats off the street think that they're doing the cat a favor. They assume the original owners won't even notice, let alone care if the cat goes missing. And they justify it with "Well, they shouldn't have let them out anyway."
The brutal reality is that pounds are overflowing with lost animals. Statistics are on your side that if you snatch any given cat that you see, you'll likely be doing it a favor. But cats with collars are a different story. If people see that they're owned, they should keep their hands off. Unfortunately that doesn't stop some fanatics.
thelastgallon 2 hours ago [-]
> her beloved pit bull, Forty-Cal, had been missing for 11 years.
> He's super docile and friendly. Always has been.
Are pit bulls known for being docile?
vjvjvjvjghv 48 minutes ago [-]
They are actually super sweet dogs in most cases. But once they get going, they are super strong and don’t give up. With most dogs you can separate them when they bite but a pit bull won’t let go.
Years ago we fostered a lot of different dogs and the pit bulls were some of the nicest. But you have to pay attention to their strength. For example playing tug-o-war may end up in a shoulder injury because the pit bull will pull really hard.
Another problem is that a lot of idiots like pit bulls and make them aggressive.
phyzome 9 minutes ago [-]
Ingenuous question. You know they have a bad reputation.
The main problem with pit bulls, AIUI, is that they can be aggressive towards other dogs. Also, assholes buy them (due to their reputation) and then encourage aggressive behavior.
I've met some pit bulls owned by nice people and the dogs were super friendly and especially very tolerant of children.
macintux 1 hours ago [-]
I took a few pit mixes out of the local humane society last summer for "Doggy Day Out", basically an opportunity for dogs who need new homes to get exposure to the community and get away from the kennel for a few hours, and they were universally friendly, sweet dogs.
There's some selection bias, obviously, but their reputation is definitely overblown.
dmix 1 hours ago [-]
They are banned in Ontario, Canada for a good reason and banned in UK for the same reasons.
The only time my dog was ever randomly attacked was a pitbull and you quickly learn talking to other dog owners how common this is. Nothing clears out a dog park like a pit bull showing up.
16 minutes ago [-]
macintux 56 minutes ago [-]
I suspect the reasons are (generously) keeping them out of the hands of people who would treat them poorly and perpetuate the stereotypes, or (less generously) ignorance and fear.
crooked-v 12 minutes ago [-]
There are plenty of statistical studies out there that pit bulls specifically cause both a significant plurality of dog bites and significantly worse injuries than other dog breeds.
That's just what the owners tend to say after the dog has ripped some child apart. It's the "I didn't know it was loaded" defense.
hinkley 57 minutes ago [-]
The dumbest thing I’ve done in the last ten years was stick my hands in the mouth of a “docile and friendly” pitty to extract a screaming puppy.
Only afterward did I realized I almost destroyed my livelihood.
My partner Google stalked the owner and discovered that he’d been force to surrender another pit bull two years earlier.
grantith 6 minutes ago [-]
The lucky ones learn about the finger in the butt and hind leg wheel barrow maneuvers before they have to use them.
thewoodsman 2 hours ago [-]
Honestly, all the ones I've known have been super sweet dogs. I can never quite bring myself to fully trust them, but frankly I never fully trust any dog.
bsder 26 minutes ago [-]
> Are pit bulls known for being docile?
Not really. Even "old school" working catch dogs in this breed may require a break stick to get the dog to release game. In addition, the dogs are strong.
And that's really the crux of the problem.
Dogs will be dogs. They can be the nicest animal on the planet, but at some point a dog will bite you--maybe you did something stupid, maybe the dog accidentally got underfoot and got kicked, maybe the dog is just sick, maybe something agitated the dog, whatever. A bite will happen. The problem with pit bulls is that when they bite the damage is much more problematic than with other breeds.
And this is the real issue. Because of their strength, pit bulls (and a small number of other breeds) account for a disproportionate amount of deaths and hospitalizations relative to other breeds.
It also doesn't help that these types of dogs are disproportionately owned by jackasses.
tom_ 2 hours ago [-]
Not typically - but when it's called Forty Cal, maybe? That's what, one bell pepper?
doodlebugging 1 hours ago [-]
Or maybe it's short for Forty Caliber. Pretty big difference.
tom_ 1 hours ago [-]
Hm, that's a good point. I totally did not think of that as a possibility. But what are the chances? I mean, it's just a cute little pit bull we're talking about here! It's not as if it's even a big dog, like a golden retriever, or a nice friendly alsatian.
zer00eyz 33 minutes ago [-]
> Animal Care and Control Team (ACCT) Philly sent her some pics of the pooch in question.
Don't get me wrong Philly is great, but Philly is... something.
xoxxala 2 hours ago [-]
“It’s not the dog, it’s the owner.”
There is a self-selecting bias with pit bulls. People who buy and raise pit bulls often want a “mean” “tough” dog, so that’s what they get. You get a loving sweet pit bull if you raise them in a loving sweet way. Dogs are like children; they are very observant and pick up on even the tiniest of cues.
Although, like people, some dogs (of all different breeds) are born more aggressive. That can usually be corrected with training. It’s mostly nurture, and part nature.
zoklet-enjoyer 2 hours ago [-]
I used to have a pitbull/boxer mix and she was the sweetest dog. She had the longest tongue and would do big yawns and I'd just stick my hand in her mouth and grab her tongue and she'd shake her head and look confused. It was pretty funny. Most dogs are nice if they live in good homes.
_doctor_love 2 hours ago [-]
Microchipping dogs makes a lot of sense. What are the privacy concerns though? If someone wants to hunt a person down, I imagine the microchips in the dogs would make a great tracking device.
duskwuff 2 hours ago [-]
> I imagine the microchips in the dogs would make a great tracking device.
They don't. The range of a typical chip reader is a few inches - reading one requires handling the dog (and can be tricky if the chip's migrated from its expected position). It's not something that can be done covertly, or from a distance.
xoxxala 2 hours ago [-]
They are very short range RFID tags that contain no personal information, just an ID number. They don’t make good tracking devices.
Some owners do use GPS trackers or AirTag like devices.
conductr 2 hours ago [-]
My dog wears an AirTag in her collar. The collar was designed for it and has a waterproof case for the AirTag.
randycupertino 1 hours ago [-]
It may vary by company but a lot of the time the chip company acts as a neutral intermediary. For example we adopted a homeless cat, and the vet found a chip on her, gave us the chip company info. The chip company wouldn't give us the owner's information but contacted them on our behalf and said we'd found her. They replied to the chip company who told us they moved away and we could have her. We love her so much!
EGreg 2 hours ago [-]
Can someone here explain what she was updating? If her dog wasn't nearby, what does it mean to "update his chip"?
gnabgib 2 hours ago [-]
It's an RFID, it just emits a unique token, which an online system links to records... she's updating the linked record.
netsharc 1 hours ago [-]
Stupid people who don't understand how things work and then convey them imprecisely... Even with a job as a "journalist"...
sjsdaiuasgdia 2 hours ago [-]
Updating her contact information with the database the chip was registered with
Baeocystin 2 hours ago [-]
Her contact information.
1 hours ago [-]
zzzeek 1 hours ago [-]
was the dog a stray for 11 years? or just owned by someone? I'm not following what actually happened
aaron695 39 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 03:45:31 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Ubiquitous microchips are really quite amazing.
> The 15-digit pet microchip is the international standard (see ISO 11784:1996 and ISO 11785:1996)
https://www.aaha.org/for-veterinary-professionals/microchip-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_11784_and_ISO_11785
- Are you a furry?
- Do you tend to wander off and forget who you are?
- Who would think to scan a human for a chip?
- Is this a common thing to do and I just don't know it?
- Did you put the chip there or did someone else?
- Or was it some kind of freak accident?
And when they used it as a digital identifier to check for the Covid-vaccination status, of course all the wormbrained screamed that "Covid certificate mandate leads to Swedish government microchipping its citizens!'.
I think most people use them as a backup work badge or controlling other RFID readers (car key, smart lock, etc). Or as a party trick
It's not particularly common but I've met other people.
Some people selfinject but it's probably more common to go to like a tattoo parlor or body mod shop
I went to a piercing shop to get it done by a guy who does silicone implants and other less common body modifications.
It's not common. The only other people I've met with chips are the guy who implanted it and my girlfriend at the time.
I have considered getting a newer model implanted and using that to badge in at work and home, but I'd likely have to travel halfway across the country to get it done.
A few years later and I was living in Tacoma. I found a guy in Seattle, John Durante, who does all kinds of body mods. So I got one of the Dangerous Things magnets implanted in my finger. I still had those magnets from the blogger, but John wasn't going to install mystery objects into a client haha and he already had some magnets on hand.
Maybe a year or 2 after that I had moved back to Fargo. Somehow I came across a guy, Ian Bell, out of St. Cloud, MN who also did some more extreme body boss. He implanted the NFC chip in my hand. Later on I had him implant a magnet in each ear, in the tragus. The idea with that was I could wear a coil necklace hooked up to an audio jack and I'd have implanted headphones. That didn't really work. The magnetic field is much to weak. It did work if I held the coil up to my ear, so that was a near trick, because the audio was audible from a few inches away. The magnets in my ears were stronger than the magnet in my finger, so I was able to hang paperclips off of them and that was a fun party trick. The ear magnets had to be removed after several months because the casing had cracked and the magnets were disintegrating, causing my ears to swell and hurt. I forgot what the magnets were coated in, but it was a different coating than the finger magnet; the finger magnet is still in there and fine today.
The magnet removal sucked and I was dumb about it. Only one bothered me at first so I left the other one in there. Well, the 2nd one started to bother me a bit later and by the time I was like ok I should get this taken out, the only person within 1400 miles who would do it was out of state. So I went to a walk in clinic and explained the situation and I'm pretty sure they thought I was crazy. They scheduled me for a surgery that was a couple of months out and I had a vacation to Australia coming up. I ordered some scalpels off Amazon and tried to DIY. I couldn't do it. I asked a friend, and she couldn't get it either. At this point my ear was swollen, discolored, and had some scalpel cuts. So I flew to Australia with a messed up ear. I tried to meet up with the owner of a piercing shop in Sydney who Ian had hooked me up with but he was in Perth while I was in Sydney. Suffered for the next month. Got back home. Ian cut it out.
I typed all this on a phone and I'm not going to proofread it. Sorry
if they bother scanning the bodies
I highly highly encourage all you pet lovers to obtain one for your little homie.
You never know when you’ll need it.
In Belgium there is a centralized database in which the data is maintained.
When I moved to the USA I thought it was very weird that it wasn't done automatically, and that there are many databases out there.
In fact, one went bust a while ago: https://www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/news/microchip-company-cl...
Now what? Gotta pay to have 18 digits and an address inserted in a database?
I thought it was very weird in the USA
Sadly cat snatching is a real thing that's happened to me possibly twice. The first time was confirmed beyond a doubt; I had to bust out my cat from her back porch at 2am or so when I was roaming the neighborhood looking for him. The only reason I was even in the vicinity was that it was the last spot the GPS tracker reported before he went missing.
"Keep your pets indoors, then!" Yeah, yeah. The risks come with the territory. But my boy Pepper is still with me after a couple years, and I'm hoping a tag with "I have a happy home" followed by my number will keep would-be "do-gooders" away. (A lot of these crazy folks that snatch pets think they're doing the pet a favor by taking them.)
Miss you Salt.
Anyway, the point is, if vets were legally required to actually check the chips when they're brought in for appiontments, they'd quickly notice the discrepancy. They're the only entity in the world in a position to do something about it. But what vet is gonna try to take "your" pet away from you when you take them in just because of mismatched chips? Nobody, because pets are property, and that would be theft according to the law.
To be clear here, the “territory” here is letting your pet free roam off of your property and expecting everybody else to be cool with that?
It's always so frustrating when you've been doing something for 15 years, speak from experience, and then someone comes along and says "Well, that's bad!" Sure. Meanwhile, my cat comes home happy and healthy each night, unless "everybody else" decides to steal him in the guise of doing him a favor.
Verified microchips during vet appointments would cancel out this exploit.
I have a cat and it stays indoors exclusively.
Using "think of the birds" as a justification for imprisoning your cat for their entire lives is also pretty crummy. It's called wildlife because they exist in the wilderness. Even if cats kill a large number of birds, so what? Those birds don't have a happy, loving home with emotional bonds to an actual human.
If you think this logic is flawed, explain why you're fine with flies dying but not birds. I bet you've swatted a few in your time.
Cats are probably a leading cause of mortality in birds. [2] Domestic cats are not native to North America. The birds here would not have evolved to avoid them (and beyond that, domestic cat numbers are not limited by prey availability because they're pets bred and fed by humans).
You'll find plenty of studies with evidence that domestic cats are probably bad for bird populations. [3][4]
But to be fair, buildings/glass windows kill a lot of birds too. [5]
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380
[2] https://www.fws.gov/library/collections/threats-birds#:~:tex...
[3] https://www.mdpi.com/1424-2818/13/7/322
[4] https://wildlife.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wsb.737
[5] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Suppose it's true that cats are bad for bird populations. The implication is that just because birds are dying, it's okay to snatch a cat. More than that, that cats should be imprisoned for their entire lives, when they naturally want to roam.
Someone can take one side of this ethical debate or the other, and both sides probably won't agree. I personally find it sad that people would place the well-being of birds above that of a wonderful, furry companion that clearly belongs to someone.
The logic also doesn't quite line up: I was hoping someone would try to justify why it's okay to kill flies but not birds, since that's the real counterargument to this one. Especially when they kill flies with their own hands.
So much of life boils down to "we're the apex species and we do what we want." But such is life. I find it difficult not to call out the absurdities when they appear, though.
To the topic at hand, how exactly is this quantified? I suspect that word "contributed" is doing a lot of work here. [2] seems to admit as much:
> True estimates of mortality are difficult to determine. However, recent studies have synthesized the best available data to estimated ranges of mortality to bird populations in North America from some of the most common, human-caused sources of bird mortality.
The numbers in [2] are admittedly pretty startling. But it looks like they come from one report labeled "2013a". Any info on where to find it, or what it even is? Otherwise it's easy to call [2] a citation when in fact no evidence whatsoever is being presente.
[4] is much better. https://wildlife.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wsb.737 But cats are still only a contributory factor, not the main cause; the report says they're the second leading cause of admissions, not the first. So, high, and worth thinking about.
But again, the cost here is "removing, by force, someone's beloved pet." I'm not above saying that we should probably care about cats more than birds, because of the emotional bonds they form with humans. After all, that's why we're fine with flies being killed, right? No emotional bonds.
The brutal reality is that pounds are overflowing with lost animals. Statistics are on your side that if you snatch any given cat that you see, you'll likely be doing it a favor. But cats with collars are a different story. If people see that they're owned, they should keep their hands off. Unfortunately that doesn't stop some fanatics.
> He's super docile and friendly. Always has been.
Are pit bulls known for being docile?
Years ago we fostered a lot of different dogs and the pit bulls were some of the nicest. But you have to pay attention to their strength. For example playing tug-o-war may end up in a shoulder injury because the pit bull will pull really hard.
Another problem is that a lot of idiots like pit bulls and make them aggressive.
The main problem with pit bulls, AIUI, is that they can be aggressive towards other dogs. Also, assholes buy them (due to their reputation) and then encourage aggressive behavior.
I've met some pit bulls owned by nice people and the dogs were super friendly and especially very tolerant of children.
There's some selection bias, obviously, but their reputation is definitely overblown.
The only time my dog was ever randomly attacked was a pitbull and you quickly learn talking to other dog owners how common this is. Nothing clears out a dog park like a pit bull showing up.
For example:
https://blog.dogsbite.org/2016/10/table-retrospective-level-...
https://www.dogsbite.org/dog-bite-statistics-studies-level-1...
Only afterward did I realized I almost destroyed my livelihood.
My partner Google stalked the owner and discovered that he’d been force to surrender another pit bull two years earlier.
Not really. Even "old school" working catch dogs in this breed may require a break stick to get the dog to release game. In addition, the dogs are strong.
And that's really the crux of the problem.
Dogs will be dogs. They can be the nicest animal on the planet, but at some point a dog will bite you--maybe you did something stupid, maybe the dog accidentally got underfoot and got kicked, maybe the dog is just sick, maybe something agitated the dog, whatever. A bite will happen. The problem with pit bulls is that when they bite the damage is much more problematic than with other breeds.
And this is the real issue. Because of their strength, pit bulls (and a small number of other breeds) account for a disproportionate amount of deaths and hospitalizations relative to other breeds.
It also doesn't help that these types of dogs are disproportionately owned by jackasses.
100 percent this dog is named after a bullet.
Because thats how Philly rolls.
In case you dont know:
HitchBOT got murdered in Philly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HitchBOT
Bill Burr's Philly set: https://www.reddit.com/r/cowboys/comments/1il5msw/in_honor_o...
Don't get me wrong Philly is great, but Philly is... something.
There is a self-selecting bias with pit bulls. People who buy and raise pit bulls often want a “mean” “tough” dog, so that’s what they get. You get a loving sweet pit bull if you raise them in a loving sweet way. Dogs are like children; they are very observant and pick up on even the tiniest of cues.
Although, like people, some dogs (of all different breeds) are born more aggressive. That can usually be corrected with training. It’s mostly nurture, and part nature.
They don't. The range of a typical chip reader is a few inches - reading one requires handling the dog (and can be tricky if the chip's migrated from its expected position). It's not something that can be done covertly, or from a distance.
Some owners do use GPS trackers or AirTag like devices.