Thursday, April 9, 2009

We've done studies!

According to San Antonio City Council member Justin Rodriguez, pit bulls are three times more likely to be aggressive and bite. I mean, they've done studies.

"Whether it's a breed specific ban on pit bulls... you know, my office has done studies and we've seen, by an almost three-to-one margin, the pit bull breed is one that's obviously more aggressive (and) has the most incidents of bites," he said.
I'm sorry, what? City council offices don't generally do studies - researchers with degrees and knowledge about statistics and confidence intervals and correlation crap do studies. People who spend years analyzing data do studies. Your local city council member is not doing studies, at least none that are scientific.

I don't even have to tackle the 3:1 or "obviously more aggressive", because both are based on faulty logic. Even better, I don't have to argue against them because arguing against magical studies and made-up numbers is an exercise on silliness. If I want to have an exercise on silliness, I will watch my two dogs play.

2 comments:

YesBiscuit! said...

I am delighted to hear of these new studies - more information is always better than less. I hope the studies are published in a peer reviewed journal soon so we can learn the details. Any word on when that will be?

EmilyS said...

I think Karen Delise and Brent T would like to see those studies. Since they're done by the city council, they're public and surely there won't be any problem distributing them.