20% of fatal pit bull attacks in 2025 resulted from a victim trying to save a pet

Sometimes the pet was another pit bull.  Usually not.  Either way,  getting between the pit bull & the victim was a fatal mistake.

Fifteen of the record 84 fatal dog attacks on humans in the U.S. and Canada in 2025,  including 13 of the 64 fatal pit bull attacks on humans (20%,  or one in five),  appear to have resulted from the victims trying to break up fights among pets,  both their own and those of others.

Before 2003,  when pit bulls alone killed 13 Americans and Canadians,  there had never even been 13 dog attack fatalities in a year in the U.S. and Canada combined.

That statistic alone should alert Americans and Canadians to the soaring cost of pit bull proliferation,  not only in human deaths but in harm to other animals,  including pets,  poultry,  livestock,  and wildlife.

Disfiguring injuries from interfering with pit bull attack on another animal are even more frequent

The human death toll from trying to stop pit bull attacks on other animals is only a part of pit bull toll on humans.

Exactly a third of the disfiguring dog attack injuries to humans logged in 2024 by ANIMALS 24-7 were suffered by people trying to stop a dog attack on another animal,  most often a smaller dog.

In about 90% of those attacks,  the attacking dog was a pit bull.

This appears also to have been the case in 2025,  and throughout the past 43 years,  but ANIMALS 24-7 has not done the exhaustive data searching in our more than 14,000 case files on fatal and disfiguring dog attacks that would be necessary to conclusively prove the point.

The data from the 561 cases we looked at in 2024 should be sufficient to illustrate the trend.  Anyone without sense enough to recognize the likelihood of severe injury resulting from getting between a pit bull and another animal the pit bull is trying to kill is unlikely to be reading this.

Boldly going where no statistician went before

Beyond that point,  we can attest to the soaring contribution of pit bulls to deaths and disfigurements of other animals because ANIMALS 24-7 in January 2013 embarked on what is now a 13-year voyage to boldly go where no statistician had gone before,  to find not only how many other pets and livestock animals are killed by dogs each year,  but also to establish which dogs are doing the killing.

As of 2013,  the only prior estimate of the sort was that USDA Wildlife Services had projected since 2004,  based on calls for help from farmers,  that dogs kill upward of 22,000 livestock animals per year,  including both poultry and hoofed species.

No one else counts dog attacks on other animals by breed

Critical to realize is that USDA Wildlife Services has jurisdiction only over domestic dogs who kill livestock on working farms.  Domestic dogs otherwise are a local animal control jurisdiction.

No one calls USDA Wildlife Services to complain about dog attacks on other dogs,  attacks on cats,  or dog attacks on other animals not kept as livestock on working farms.  Hobby farms are not covered.

Further,  there are no agencies at either the state or federal level that routinely and systematically collect,  aggregate,  and evaluate local animal control reports,  even about dog attacks on humans.

This is why ANIMALS 24-7 has since 1982 logged fatal and disfiguring dog attacks on humans in the U.S. and Canada,  adding logs of human dog attack fatalities in the United Kingdom in 1991 and in South Africa in 2004.

(See Pit bull body count & other breeds too.)

Nearly 29,000 dogs per year kill other animals

What we now know,  from the average of thirteen years’ worth of data,  is that at least 28,500 domestic dogs per year participate in killing or severely injuring other animals.

About 89% of those dogs are pit bulls.

Just under a third of the animals killed by domestic dogs are other dogs:  more than 9,300 per year.  At least 86% of the dogs doing the killing are pit bulls.

Both figures round up to 90%.

Close to 10,000 domestic dogs per year are severely injured by other dogs,  exclusive of the victims of illegal dogfighting.

Eighty-three percent of the dogs severely injured by other dogs are injured by pit bulls.

Dog attacks on cats are under-reported

A verifiable average of approaching 3,000 cats per year are killed by domestic dogs,  a figure which we believe is far low due to under-reporting of dog attacks on ownerless cats.

Pit bulls kill 94% of the feline victims in attacks that are reported.

Domestic dogs,  exclusive of situations to which USDA Wildlife Services would respond,  kill about 12,000 animals of species otherwise classed as livestock per year,  including sheep,  goats, cattle,  pigs,  horses,  donkeys,  mules,  llamas,  alpacas,  and poultry.

Pit bulls account for about 76% of these animal deaths,  more than 9,000 per year,  with German shepherds,  huskies,  and Rottweilers the far distant runners-up.

“Iceberg problem”

Since USDA Wildlife Services field agents seldom actually see the dogs reported by farmers to have killed livestock,  USDA Wildlife Services does not even attempt to categorize attacking dogs by breed.

None of that means that reliable and reasonably consistent annual estimates of the domestic toll on other animals,  including by breed type,  cannot be produced.

To be addressed is what is called by statisticians an “iceberg problem,”  in which the mass of an iceberg lurking beneath ocean waves must be calculated from the slope of the tip of the iceberg floating above sea level.

This process is familiar to Arctic and Antarctic mariners,  at least since the Titanic sank in 1912,  but not to most people who count animals.

Finding the tip of the “iceberg”

Individual “iceberg” estimates can be misleading in detail,  because iceberg shapes vary greatly,  but with great consistency about 10% of the floating mass of an iceberg is above water. 

Knowing that about 90% of each iceberg will be underwater,  mariners can estimate from the floating 10% what the maximum width and depth of the unseen portion may be,  and steer far enough clear of the unseen part to avoid a collision.

The first step,  always,  is to measure the tip of the iceberg.

The tip of the “iceberg” of dog attacks on other animals is those attacks that are individually documented,  primarily by news media.

Data sources

Individually tabulating the thousands of dog attacks on other animals that are mentioned on social media would provide a more accurate description of the “tip,”  but apart from being a data compilation task perhaps beyond the ability of any one individual,  would also require a different approach to figuring out the ratio between the reported attacks and those that are not reported.

Collecting and collating information about fatal and disfiguring dog attacks on humans,  working from news media reports,  ANIMALS 24-7 has learned over the years that while human fatalities due to dog attack are usually extensively reported,  insurance industry data consistently shows that about 25 times more payouts are made in claims for injuries inflicted by dogs than in cases of non-fatal disfigurement reported by news media.

In other words,  “if it bleeds,  it usually doesn’t lead,”  or even get noticed,  short of a person dying.

Assuming an under-reporting ratio of 25 unreported cases to one that makes news is,  in general,  a good starting point for estimating the under-reporting factor in cases involving human victims.

Factors contributing to under-reporting

By 2014,  however,  after a year of collating reported dog attacks on other animals,  several further factors contributing to under-reporting,  not applicable to cases of dog injury to humans,  became evident:

•  Dog attacks on animals receiving media notice are almost exclusively incidents in which either a human was also killed or injured;  and/or

•  Law enforcement or other intervenors killed the attacking dog;  and/or

•  The dog attack caused the death(s) of animals valued at more than $1,000.

In addition,  dog attacks on other animals belonging to the same household as the dog are usually not reported at all.

Compensation factor

Therefore our final estimate of fatal dog attacks on other animals each year became reported attacks multiplied by 25,  to compensate for the gap between reported attacks and hypothetically possible insurance payouts if the victims were human,  and then again by three to compensate for under-reporting of dog attacks that do not meet the criteria for hypothetically possible insurance payouts.

This amounts to reported attacks multiplied by 75.

But even this has turned out to be much too low when looking at the difference in numbers between attacks verified by news media and attacks reported only by animal owners on social media.

Social media accounts of dog attacks on other animals so far outnumber news media reports that ANIMALS 24-7 now believes the ratio between attacks reported by news media and attacks actually occurring is at least 150-to-one,  and probably greater than that.

86% of dogs who kill other animals are pit bulls

Regardless of whatever quibbles anyone may have with this method of producing the ANIMALS 24-7 annual estimates,  collecting the raw data for 13 years has amassed information about 4,189 individual dogs killing other pets and/or livestock animals.

Of those 4,189 individual dogs who killed other animals, 3,728––89%––were pit bulls.

From year to year,  the primary input data from news media has varied widely,  showing a general trend downward.  This does not mean,  however,  that fewer dogs,  and fewer pit bulls,  are attacking and killing other animals.

What it appears to mean,  mostly,  is that as dog attacks on other animals become more common,  at the same time as local news media are contracting due to economic pressures,  those dog attacks are becoming less newsworthy.

Fatal attacks on humans are steeply up

If dog attacks on humans were declining,  one might reasonably presume that dog attacks on other animals would be down,  too.  However,  fatal dog attacks on humans in the U.S. have approximately tripled since 2013;  fatal attacks by pit bulls have more than quadrupled since 2005.

If the number of households including pit bulls had increased,  incidentally,  since 2013,  a higher percentage of pit bull attacks on other animals occurring within the owners’ homes might be going unreported.

This,  however,  is not the case:  pit bull ownership from 2013 through 2024 appears to have flatlined.  See Pit bull pushers are nuts, free market economist Adam Smith would say.

Percentages remain steady

Despite the year-to-year variation in the numbers of dog attacks on other animals collected by ANIMALS 24-7,  there has been relatively little variance in the percentage of those attacks that are inflicted by pit bulls.

(Click here for the year-by-year totals since 2013.)

Most of what variation there is results from instances in which just one or two dogs break into poultry barns and go on killing rampages,  sometimes killing hundreds or even thousands of birds.

Several such rampages occurred in each year from 2017 through 2019,  but ANIMALS 24-7 has received no reports of a large-scale rampage in a poultry barn since 2020.

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