One extra criticism I'd add to your commendable list is that the pitbull subgroup analysis is literally the "do jelly beans cause cancer?" XKCD strip, where they test 20 different colours of jelly bean and find that the green ones (and only the green ones) cause cancer with confidence p = 0.05.
If you were to accept the data, then a ‘people are racist’ interpretation is possible. Other explanations are ‘non-black people are worried that having a stereotypically black dog with a stereotypically black name would make them appear racist’, or that pit bulls with black names grew up in black households, and exhibit racial preference towards humans - there’s at least weak evidence that dogs may take on the racial preferences of their owners: https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/canine-corner/201909/can-dogs-be-racist . If you’re adopting a dog with the capacity to eat your face, you may be hyper-attuned to whether it appears to like you.
Most U.S. population-level dog studies meant to infer broad trends are not going to be very good, because the quality of population-level data is not very good. We only have mandatory registration in some localities so dogs' breeds usually aren't recorded, when they *are* recorded the types often come from owner reports that aren't linked to a breed registry or DNA test (for what they're worth...), and the definitions for the breeds come more from breeders than controlled research. We don't even have a good idea of how many dogs there are in the U.S. and have to rely on proxy measures like shelter intake (with the breed visually reported by staff or reported by the person surrendering the dog, both dodgy measures), vet reports, reported sales of purebreds, etc. etc. to try to guess at what all is out there. So you can never really know how much scarcity is playing a role in shelter dog breed choice, and thus studies like this one are always going to be really muddled.
I *do* think that, in much of the country, more dogs popularly considered to be a "pit bull" are brought in to shelters, but again, I have no hard data to demonstrate that, because our data just kind of sucks. IMO, Bronwen Dickey makes a good journalist's case for the racialization of "pit bulls" in the U.S., but she's highly reliant on media reports over controlled research.
And using PETA as an authoritative source for information about much of anything about "pit bulls"...oyyyy. This is an organization that still lobbies for the destruction of "pit bulls" even as the veterinary industry and most other dog- and animal-control-related organizations have long since moved on. They don't really have a decent research department and while they may have some legitimate insights from their work in the field, their tendency to project their worst experiences onto the rest of the population is, uh, not sound.
Isn't the process of naming the dog also relevant? Like, if someone at the shelter is choosing to give undesirable dogs black-coded names, for example ... those dogs would be harder to adopt anyway, but not because of the names. That would indicate racism, but by a different party to the people adopting?
Really does turn a serious problem into a cutsie headline, doesn’t it? What’s even more embarrassing is you can still make a career in social psych with this formula — don’t pre-register, slice-and-dice the data post-hoc until you find what you were looking for, shop around for a journal, then publicize it in hopes of boosting citations with your catchy headline. You’ll get tenure somewhere.
Another problem with the Twitter thread is that it heavily implies a "racialized name -> longer adoption waits" causal path, but imo they'd need to do something like a multi-level analysis on the individual shelters to get towards that answer -- it feels pretty plausible that e.g. shelters in predominantly black areas give dogs more black-sounding names and also have longer adoption waits for non-naming reasons, like socioeconomic status.
One extra criticism I'd add to your commendable list is that the pitbull subgroup analysis is literally the "do jelly beans cause cancer?" XKCD strip, where they test 20 different colours of jelly bean and find that the green ones (and only the green ones) cause cancer with confidence p = 0.05.
If you were to accept the data, then a ‘people are racist’ interpretation is possible. Other explanations are ‘non-black people are worried that having a stereotypically black dog with a stereotypically black name would make them appear racist’, or that pit bulls with black names grew up in black households, and exhibit racial preference towards humans - there’s at least weak evidence that dogs may take on the racial preferences of their owners: https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/canine-corner/201909/can-dogs-be-racist . If you’re adopting a dog with the capacity to eat your face, you may be hyper-attuned to whether it appears to like you.
Most U.S. population-level dog studies meant to infer broad trends are not going to be very good, because the quality of population-level data is not very good. We only have mandatory registration in some localities so dogs' breeds usually aren't recorded, when they *are* recorded the types often come from owner reports that aren't linked to a breed registry or DNA test (for what they're worth...), and the definitions for the breeds come more from breeders than controlled research. We don't even have a good idea of how many dogs there are in the U.S. and have to rely on proxy measures like shelter intake (with the breed visually reported by staff or reported by the person surrendering the dog, both dodgy measures), vet reports, reported sales of purebreds, etc. etc. to try to guess at what all is out there. So you can never really know how much scarcity is playing a role in shelter dog breed choice, and thus studies like this one are always going to be really muddled.
I *do* think that, in much of the country, more dogs popularly considered to be a "pit bull" are brought in to shelters, but again, I have no hard data to demonstrate that, because our data just kind of sucks. IMO, Bronwen Dickey makes a good journalist's case for the racialization of "pit bulls" in the U.S., but she's highly reliant on media reports over controlled research.
And using PETA as an authoritative source for information about much of anything about "pit bulls"...oyyyy. This is an organization that still lobbies for the destruction of "pit bulls" even as the veterinary industry and most other dog- and animal-control-related organizations have long since moved on. They don't really have a decent research department and while they may have some legitimate insights from their work in the field, their tendency to project their worst experiences onto the rest of the population is, uh, not sound.
Isn't the process of naming the dog also relevant? Like, if someone at the shelter is choosing to give undesirable dogs black-coded names, for example ... those dogs would be harder to adopt anyway, but not because of the names. That would indicate racism, but by a different party to the people adopting?
Really does turn a serious problem into a cutsie headline, doesn’t it? What’s even more embarrassing is you can still make a career in social psych with this formula — don’t pre-register, slice-and-dice the data post-hoc until you find what you were looking for, shop around for a journal, then publicize it in hopes of boosting citations with your catchy headline. You’ll get tenure somewhere.
Also noteworthy is that this study of cats found no influence of naming on adoption waits, though they don't test for race-coded names specifically.
=> https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/11/1/62
Another problem with the Twitter thread is that it heavily implies a "racialized name -> longer adoption waits" causal path, but imo they'd need to do something like a multi-level analysis on the individual shelters to get towards that answer -- it feels pretty plausible that e.g. shelters in predominantly black areas give dogs more black-sounding names and also have longer adoption waits for non-naming reasons, like socioeconomic status.