Dogs Bite: But Balloons and Slippers Are More Dangerous

by Janis Bradley

Dogs are dangerous. And they are more dangerous to children than to adults. Not as dangerous of course, as kitchen utensils, drapery cords, five-gallon water buckets, horses, or cows. Not nearly as dangerous as playground equipment, swimming pools, skateboards, or bikes. And not remotely as dangerous as family, friends, guns, or cars.Here’s the reality. Dogs almost never kill people. A child is more likely to die choking on a marble or a balloon, and an adult is more likely to die in a bedroom slipper related accident. Your chances of being killed by a dog are roughly one in 18 million. You are twice as likely to win a super lotto jackpot on a single ticket than be killed by a dog. You are five times as likely to be killed by a bolt of lightning than be killed by a dog. Because it is so extraordinary, lightning is often regarded as a universal cliché for an Act of God. Dog-attack deaths are even more extraordinary—five times more extraordinary.The supposed epidemic numbers of dog bites splashed across the media are absurdly inflated by dubious research and by counting bites that don’t actually hurt anyone. Even when dogs do injure people, the vast majority of injuries are at the Band-Aid level.Dogs enhance the lives of millions more people than even the most inflated estimates of dog-bite victims. Search-and-rescue and cancer-detecting dogs save significant numbers of human lives, and assistance dogs enormously improve the quality of many more. Infants who live with dogs have fewer allergies. People with dogs have less cardiovascular disease, better heart attack survival, and fewer backaches, headaches, and flu symptoms. Petting your dog lowers stress and people who live with dogs just plain feel better than people who don’t.Yet lawmakers, litigators, and insurers press for less dog ownership. This must stop. We must maintain perspective. Yes, dogs bite. But even party balloons and bedroom slippers are more dangerous.“A tour-de-force examination of dog bites. Among other persuasive appeals for sanity, Janis Bradley has outed “lumping”: the erroneous connection between kitchen-injury level bites and maiming or fatal dog attacks. She dares to be rational. Her rationality will—hopefully—raise the level of discussion in a topic mired in hysteria.Why do we get so excited about this particular class of injury? Enter the irrational. Human brains are organs that evolved for a single over-arching to maximize the representation of genes possessed by an individual brain’s owner in subsequent generations. We evolved in a different environment than the one we currently inhabit, however. Because of this, we are genetically predisposed to learn to fear animals with pointy teeth much more than to fear, say, hurtling along in hunks of metal at sixty-five miles per hour.Our brains are also not reliable truth detection devices. Any instances of truth detection are lucky by-products of selection for reproductive success. Scientific method was developed because of the chronic, abysmal failure of our brains to dope out reality, coupled with a fascination to know truth. Our intuitions are flat-footed much of the time. Stephen Jay Gould once mused, “the invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning."If one searches the backgrounds of that small minority of dogs that kill people, lo and behold, many of them will have previously engaged in species-normal ritualized growls, snarls and kitchen-injury or less level bites in predictable contexts.

Genres: Dogs, Nonfiction

Kindle Edition

First published September 1, 2005

Reviews

[Don · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dog bites and fatalities from dog bites are a very emotional topic. As can happen with emotional topics, data can get skewed, making it difficult to make logical decisions. In this book the author presents that data as we know it, explaining why some of the data is not that good. The gist of the book is society has blown the dog bite story out of proportion. This book should be mandatory reading for any professional who works with dogs, medical personnel that treat people who have been bitten by a dog, journalists that report on dog bites, politicians who create laws affecting dogs, and anyone who comments about dog bites on social media.

If you are interested, you can list to an interview with the author at http://traffic.libsyn.com/woofmeowsho...

[JC · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clearly and concisely breaks down the facts of just how dangerous dogs are!

[Veronica-Lynn Pit Bull · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bradley provides a sensible, balanced view of dog behavior, aggression and "the dog bite epidemic". She provides a nice overview of available statistics/research and their scientific relevance. She notes that the rate of dog bite deaths has remained very steady for decades despite that the population has increased and we tend to spend more time with our dogs (inside vs. backyard solitary confinement). She also notes that dog bite injuries occur much less often than other common injuries such as slipping, having a car accident or falling off your bicycle. Available ER and hospital data indicates that as a class of injury receiving medical treatment dog bites on average are considered much less severe than injuries caused by falls. The point Bradley repeatedly drives home is that "Dogs almost never kill people, and they don't actually bite very often, and when they do, we're seldom injured, and when we are, it's seldom serious".

I think Bradley also does a nice job of looking at canine aggression; triggers, normal dog behavior and common sense strategies for behaving safely around dogs (simple things like not bothering a sleeping dog, teaching children not to take food away from dogs trying to eat, asking strangers for permission to interact with their dog before running up to it and grabbing it in a bear hug (that happens, I've seen it)and a variety of other common sense approaches to dogs that would come close to eliminating all dog bites if adults heeded them and children were taught the proper way to behave around dogs and supervised - the same way they're supervised around swimming pools).

I also like the way she pulls in current research which dispels the notion that any dog that growls or snaps or even delivers an inhibited bite is dangerous. That may be too much for the general public to process, but from a behavioral stand point "The only good predictor of future injurious biting is prior injurious biting." Bradley does a nice job of explaining the ways in which dogs communicate, making the point that if we better understood their communications and hard wired behaviors...there would be less misunderstandings and errors on the part of humans leading to bites.

I don't think this book will turn around anyone who doesn't like or is fearful of dogs; but it is a good reference for the average person wanting to better understand canine behavior. It also presents a solid argument against current efforts towards dog bite legislation and examines how our litigious society fueled by media frenzy and sensationalism created the "dog bite epidemic".

[Ana D. · Rating 3 out of 5]

O título do livro está certo. O número de pessoas que vai parar ao hospital por ter escorregado com os chinelos de quarto é bem maior que aquele referente às pessoas que foram mordidas por cães. Se compararmos com o número de crianças que sofreu graves traumatismos em parques infantis, então o número de ataques de cães torna-se ridículo. Gostei da forma como o livro elucida o leitor nesse aspecto. E é verdade que a comunicação social fez um alarmismo do assunto inacreditável, muitíssimo exagerado. Pontos positivos do livro: Explica que as mordidas são raras, que a raça não tem nada a ver com o assunto, que muitas vezes a raça não é bem identificada ( o que acontece com o Pit Bull) e explica como prevenir mais ataques. Não gostei muito, no entanto, da autora dizer que nem devemos preocupar-mo-nos muito com o assunto, de certa forma, porque não é assim tão frequente. Pessoalmente, acredito que cada pessoa que morra devido a um cão, devia ter sido evitado. Tudo o que leve à morte de alguém e que tenha prevenção, então devemos preveni-lo. Sem desculpas.

[Angela · Rating 3 out of 5]

Extremely sensible book based on quantitative data, easy to read graphs and careful deliberation. I recommend it not just for people concerned at the moral panic around dogs, but also for social science students, both undergraduate and postgraduate.
*Update - changed my rating after re-reading the book. The above still holds for the first part - maybe a good deal of the book: but the notions of being able to breed out aggression has so many problems of logic and makes unwarranted leaps based on the very limited scientific knowledge available. It ends up losing explanatory strength because of this problem, unfortunately.

[Ryan Jankowski · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book dispels the myth surrounding the frequency of dog bites and dog aggression. Less than a year ago I read the book, "The Science of Fear" by Dan Gardner. Janis Bradley and Gardner are on the same page. Fear has been exploited, particularly in the US, and dogs have been included in that process.

[Deirdre]

A dog trainer gave me this book after I volunteered for a while as a coach in a reactive dog class.

[Stephanie Jackson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book breaking down the 'dog bite epidemic' and why it's not nearly as big a problem as the news would like us to believe.