I thought this was a very well written article. I hope owners of certain breeds aren't offended by anything said in the article. I believe the author was just using them as examples.....

Dog Bite Statistics: Bad Logic




By Katharine Dokken



The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and many local jurisdictions issue yearly dog bite statistics that affect pet owners everywhere in ways they seldom think of until its too late. What are some of those effects? How about sudden cancellation of your home owner?s insurance policy or denial of a new one, or an outright ban on the ownership of your dog? If you own your own home and one day your city decides to ban ownership of your dog, what do you do?



Dog breeds the CDC considers the highest risk? Pit bulls, Rottweilers, German shepherds, Huskies, Alaskan Malamutes, Doberman pinschers, Chow Chows, Great Danes, St. Bernards and Akitas. But are these the breeds that actually are the highest risk? And "Huskies" is a class of dogs, not a breed. What kind of "Huskies" are they even talking about? The generic term of Husky refers to Siberian Huskies, Alaskan Malamutes, Samoyeds, and other Northern type breeds which may or may not even be purebred. Are they talking about Siberian Huskies? If so, then why don't they specify that?



Many homeowners insurance companies and local law enforcement jurisdictions use these statistics to decide what dog breeds they will discriminate against or out right ban. While statistics on dog bites are nice, they actually tell us almost nothing about the issue, and are the basis of many pieces of flawed dog ownership restrictions or outright banning legislation.



In the first place, the dog breed identifications in the reports are dubious at best. Entire categories of bites are frequently not included in the statistics, such as the so-called provoked bites, which may or may not be such. In addition many dog bites are never reported, especially if they do not require medical treatment.



To use statistics alone in determining who an insurance company will sell to and who they won?t ignores the basic issues of personal responsibility and just how many of those so-called statistical bites were caused by the human involved and not the dog, besides being downright racist. If insurance companies refused to provide homeowners insurance to all black people there would be a national outcry. Yet many companies today refuse to sell insurance to someone who owns a dog, regardless of the dog?s history and temperament.



Many jurisdictions force the dog bite reporter to list the dog by breed, but many of these dogs are not purebreds. They are mixed breeds, frequently of unknown parentage. Some jurisdictions will accept a listing of mixed breed but many will not. Is the dog that just bit someone a multiple-breed-Chow mix? Guess what, it will probably be listed as a Chow Chow bite. Own a Hound/Bull dog mix? Chances are good it will be listed as a Pit Bull. A mixed breed dog is just that.



For the average person, they can accurately identify less than 30 dog breeds on sight, let alone in a stressful and intense situation like a dog bite. The bite will get reported as whatever breed the people involved think it most closely resembles. Even law enforcement officers, animal shelter workers, and some veterinarians cannot accurately identify many breeds. I can remember just a few months ago taking one of my dogs into the regular vet clinic we always go to. We saw one of the veterinarians on staff that we hadn't seen before. He made the comment that he hadn't realized that my dog breed was as big as it is because he had never seen one in person before. He had only seen pictures in books, yet the breed of dog I own is fairly common in both my area and nationally, and the dog in question was actually very small for the breed.



For the average person anything with prick ears and blue eyes automatically becomes a "husky," yet many breeds can have blue eyes, and many more have prick ears. Any smooth coated brown dog, medium sized, and muscular becomes a "pit bull" yet upon examination many have been found to be purebred Boxers. Any tall dog becomes a Great Dane, fuzzy or hairy and it?s a Chow Chow. If it?s black and tan and heavy it?s a Rottweiler, etc. See the problem with this? The average person cannot tell the difference between an Alaskan Malamute, a Siberian Husky, and an Akita.



Fatal attacks since 1975 have been attributed to over 30 different dog breeds yet all the media can talk about are Pit bulls, Rottweilers, Dobermans, or Akitas. Size alone is not an accurate indicator of which dogs are capable of killing and which dogs are not. In October of 2000, a baby was killed by a four pound family Pomeranian dog in California. In February of 2002, a Jack Russell Terrier mauled a 6 week old baby in Tennessee.



For an entire category of bites, there is no reporting at all. This is for so called provoked bites. Bites that occur at veterinarian offices, dog groomers, and boarding kennels in many counties are automatically declared to be provoked bites. Those that know dog bite statistics from the inside out are those that work with animals for a living. I recently polled a number of animal shelter workers and this is what they said about dog bites. Most of the bites have been by small unfriendly Terrier type dogs and Cocker Spaniels. Occasionally they have seen a larger dog on a bite case but the vast majority of the bites were from small to medium sized dogs.



The dog groomers I spoke to said most of the bites they see are from Schnauzers, Cocker Spaniels, Westies, Scotties, and Dachshunds.



Next I polled a number of veterinarians. One veterinarian said to me, "Give me a so-called vicious Pit Bull over a Cocker Spaniel, Dachshund, or even a Lab any day!! These are the breeds I have the most problem with." Another vet concurred saying that in years of working at a veterinarian clinic she never once encountered a single vicious Pit bull yet had problems all the time with Cocker Spaniels and Yorkshire Terriers.



Speaking of provoking, an entire category of bites that are reported and shouldn?t be are the truly provoked bites. The bites in which the person involved was clearly at fault and not the dog. The bites that occurred for instance when the person who was bitten was somewhere they should not have been in the first place. For example, recently in Maryland a 13-year-old boy was bitten after he was caught leaning over the fence into a person?s yard, teasing the Pit bull contained there. Prior to the bite incident, this boy was warned 3 times to leave the dog alone. The dog owner was having so many problems with people teasing and provoking her dogs that she contacted Animal Control for assistance. Under advisement from the authorities, she ringed her backyard fence with evenly spaced ?Beware of Dog? and ?No Trespassing? signs. Yet these signs and 3 verbal warnings from an adult witness were still not enough to keep this boy out of the dog owner?s yard. The dog owner has now lost her dog to the authorities and another bite statistic has been entered. Yet, was it this dog?s fault? No! This dog, Pit bull or otherwise, was simply defending itself and its territory from an intruder.



Just days later an Akita bit a 16 year old girl in the face in Rhode Island and again, the dog was confined in its owners backyard and the teenager was trespassing on private property. These stories are not even anomalies, but frequent occurrences. In this day and age of zero personal responsibility, the dog owner is now always deemed to be at fault regardless of the circumstances.



Hand in hand with this is the general failure of parents today to teach their children even the most basic rules of canine safety and good manners. Parents encourage their children to approach and touch strange dogs without a single thought of the consequences, or even bothering to ask permission of the dog owner involved. They allow children to put their hands through fences to grab at animals contained inside. This is the epitome of irresponsibility. Fences are there for a reason and that reason is to keep people, animals or things, in; and others out. No animal should have to put up with strangers of any size, grabbing, groping, pulling their tails and ears, and hitting or poking them, yet this goes on and people expect that the animal will be some sort of saint in fur in return. This is a completely unrealistic viewpoint. A parent would be outraged and probably screaming for the police if a stranger approached and started groping their child, yet they think nothing of doing the same thing to a strange animal.



To go by statistics alone assumes that the majority of dog bites are reported and that the majority of breeds identified are correct. As a long time dog fancier, I have a serious problem with either assumption. Too bad many insurance companies are now refusing to provide home owners insurance to owners of certain breeds and many communities are banning ownership of dogs, based on statistics that are dubious at best.



Katharine Dokken