As good as the article may be, it still don't really answer why Fila's are not only dog but human aggressive, this has been told/confirmed to me on many occasions by people that own them, you only have to scour threads on another website to have that confirmed.

One of them being attacked by her own dog, which was a titled dog in Schutzhund

Without being there it's impossible to theorize as to what happened. It can be a combination of many factors, some genetic (low threshold) and the environment they're raised in. The dog could have been in pain and she didn't know it. The list could go on and on, but really no one knows unless they were there (and even then they may not know).

However, in looking on the web, this might have something to do with it:

"A lot of Fila fanciers recommend stopping all socialization at age 4 months. When a canine puppies socialization stops at such a young age it molds their temperament into an anti-social dog. This is the end goal for many Fila owners as it is the breeds trademark so to speak. "

And I found this...

Taken from the new translated Brazilian Breed Standard..

I find that seemingly mainstream acceptance of the breeds apparent tendency twoards human directed agression to be quite worrying.

Normally, within breeds bred to guard for example, the good ethical breeders will stress the importants of socialising a puppy/dog to a variety of environments and to al kinds of people. Whilst this is no guarantee that the dog won't grow up to have a strong guarding instinct, it should hopefully be a well balanced in temperament enough to tell what is a genuine threat from what isn't.

Personally, I'd say stopping any dog of any breeds socialisation at 4 months old would be unwise, and in the case of the fila I'd go as far as to say it is damn irresponsible.

Now I'm not normally one for the what ifs. But, what if, given that it seems to be perfectly acceptable for dogs of this breed to display human agression, one of these dogs got loose, and the owner was at work say, so wasn't aware, and therefore couldn't do anything about it...I'll leave the rest up to your imagination.

Maybe we should start a thread for the fila, as it is quite ot.

A bit off topic (sorry) I have to confess to not knowing a lot about the Fila until this thread provoked me to look more into them. They do look quite stunning but it does seem a worrying trend about socialisation etc I found the following quote
Maybe a fila thread or a Section 1 banned breed discussion thread?

May be a good idea, but then again maybe someone in the UK responsible for the DDA actually took time to read the descriptions of them, hence them being covered by the DDA - I like the breed a lot, not sure about the aggression side of things though, so doubt I'd ever be in the position of owning one ever. I like my hands and arms and other body parts exactly where they are
That is one of two breed standards, and while the other one isn't quite as descriptive, I find the standards rather worrying, especially the dogs coming directly from Brazil, which of whom would be covered by the above standard.

I'll start a thread for them in the non recognized breeds section then.

I'm actually surprized someone bothered to look them up at all, never mind decide they should be banned too. As as far as I'm aware, there wasn't any in the country at the time the dda was introduced, and I'm not sure if there ever have been any over here. Which also surprizes me, as I'd have thought they'd be a prime target for the idiot wanting a hard dog to threaten people with.

I've put the standard up in this section a few minutes ago - it is one of two standards but put the revised new translated Brazilian one up to be debated

Will go have a look. Providing my internet doesn't decide to crash for the 100th time today before I get there. Grrr, its driving me mad. Some people get road rage, I get pc/laptop rage lol.

I did put a thread in the non rec breeds section for general comments, not refering to the standard specificly.

She had me until the bolded bit.