Note: This comment is not intended to be callous towards any victims of dog attacks. Fatal dog attacks are extremely tragic, especially when they involve children. It is not my intent to take make light of them in any way.
It is extremely abnormal for any dog to kill anyone, period. Dogs killing humans is abnormal, period.
This comment is not advocating for anyone to be killed by any dog. This comment is not advocating for any dog that kills anyone.
This comment is posing what I believe to be a valid question about dog attacks. It is posed in good faith and not meant in poor taste. However, I am aware that dogs killing children is a distasteful subject. If you find the subject of children killed by dogs to be so distasteful as to be offended by a comment asking a question about children being killed by dogs, you are free to downvote this comment or block me.
I will only reply to comments relevant to the content of this comment, not those making a value judgement on the existence of this comment. If that is the case, assume in advance that I agree to disagree on that.
This comment is not intended to defend pitbulls, nor is it intended to advocate for pitbull ownership. I do not advocate for pitbull ownership.
Anyway:
From what I've observed, when non-game breeds do kill humans, it seems like they mostly kill children.
If true, while children's deaths are especially tragic, it would also make a morbid kind of sense. Children are not as hardy as adults and they are much easier for a dangerously aggressive dog to kill. Their faces and necks are at or near eye level to a dog, and a sustained mauling isn't actually required to kill a small child.
I am haunted by the story of an adult Doberman purchased by a family from a stranger to replace their dead Doberman. Within hours of the purchase the four year old daughter bent to give the dog a treat and it ripped her throat out.
But as these pictures show, non game bred dogs, even dangerously aggressive ones, require a lot more effort to actually kill an adult.
It is a tragedy when any child's life is taken. However, it wouldn't be surprising if it turned out that normal breeds, when they do kill, mostly kill children. It would actually track with them being normal breeds - it's technically even more abnormal for any dog to sustain an attack long enough to kill an adult.
Note: I am referring not the relative abnormality of the act itself. Dogs that kill children are equally as abnormal as dogs that kill adults.
Has it ever been statistically broken down how many non-pitbull dogs kill children vs how many kill adults? I have been searching, but I may be using the wrong search terms. Most sources agree that mostly children are bitten by dogs overall. Dogsbite.org does compile these numbers for dog bites in the U.S. from 2005 onwards, and although their numbers are not specifically related to this question, their information does seem to agree with this theory.
I think that although it is an admittedly morbid question, such information is actually relevant to pitbull statistics and to the further understanding of pitbull behavior vs. normal breed behavior.
(Comment previously deleted because it wasn't meant as a reply to another user.)