The Pit Bull Placebo, Karen Delise, is available online in pdf form from Karen Delise.
Delise is the author of Fatal Dog Attacks As well.
The Pit Bull Placebo: The Media, Myths and Politics of Canine Aggression is available at Amazon, as is Fatal Dog Attacks: The Stories Behind the Statistics (United States).
See Also Janis Bradley's Dogs Bite: But Balloons and Slippers Are More Dangerous
If you want to gain understanding about why people can't understand highly improbably events, you may want to read Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time
Public misunderstanding and fear of Pit Bulls is largely based on a lack of comprehension probability of incredibly rare occurrences. Dog bites and Airplane crashes frequently recieve disproportionally large coverage.
John Buginas of Civilpooch said, in the book The Dog Trainer's Resource 2: The APDT Chronicle of the Dog
"In a study looking at the front page of the New York Times regarding coverage of causes of death. (AIDS, automobiles, cancer, homicide, suicide, airline crashes), articles about airline accidents outnumbered other causes. Adjusted to a per-death basis, airline accident articles appeared sixty times more than AIDS and eight thousand times more than cancer. The airline industry is subject to distorted coverage similar to what we encounter daily about dog bite statistics."
See also these citations about unreasonable fear:
(John Buginas and Janis Bradley are instructors at the SFSPCA Academy for Dog Trainers.)
- Barnett A., Wang A. (2000), Passenger-mortality Risk Estimates Provide Perspectives About Airline Safety, Flight Safety Digest, Vol. 19 No. 4, p 1.
- Reid, W., PhD. (1996), Don’t Panic, Harper Collins, pp 341-342.
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