Despite the teeth, dogs are really not that dangerous

[Crossfire Bulldogs]

By Sarah Casey Newman
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
02/03/2006

Which of the following is more likely to kill you or your child?

A bicycle.

Marbles.

A 5-gallon bucket.

A Christmas tree.

A baseball.

A dog.

Hint: It's not the dog.

Statistically speaking, in fact, the average dog is less likely to kill you than anything else on the list.

That's according to a thought-provoking new book - "Dogs Bite: But Balloons and Slippers Are More Dangerous" (James & Kenneth Publishers, 184 pages, $14.95 softcover) - whose catchy title succinctly sums up the research inside.

The book's author, Janis Bradley, a former college administrator and teacher, has a bit of experience with dogs and the people who own them. She's an instructor at the San Francisco Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals' Academy for Dog Trainers, where she has helped prepare nearly 400 students for careers as professional dog handlers.

"The book had been in the back of my mind for a long time," Bradley said by phone from her home in Oakland, Calif. "It seemed to me that dogs were being held to an extraordinarily high standard of amicability." When Diane Whipple was fatally mauled by her neighbors' dogs outside her apartment in San Francisco in 2001, the bar got even higher.

"People in the city became extremely sensitized," Bradley said. "There were calls for all kinds of legislation. It became pretty much an epidemic. All of a sudden there seemed to be an outbreak of serious dog bites."

Yet none of that jibed with what Bradley was seeing, either personally or professionally. "Even with my massive exposure to dogs and to people who know dogs and have dogs, I knew no one who had ever experienced any of these things."

The disconnect made her wonder if the dog-bite problem hadn't been blown out of proportion.

Her resulting research convinced her it had - "vastly more than I had imagined," she said.

The numbers most often cited to support claims of a dog-bite epidemic came from two studies by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which reported in 1994 that some 4.7 million Americans, or nearly 2 percent of us, are bitten by dogs every year.

Comparing the numbers with a study done eight years earlier, the CDC also concluded that dog bites had increased at the "alarming" rate of 36 percent.

Both studies were based on telephone interviews. And as Bradley says in her book, both were embarrassingly flawed. In her words, comparing them was "statistically ludicrous."

More viable statistics come from emergency rooms, although an emergency-room visit is no indication of the severity of the bite. Perhaps because of a fear of infection or rabies, dog bite victims tend to go to emergency rooms for more "low-level treatments" than injury victims of such mundane hazards as paring knives and salad forks, Bradley said.

Hospital studies show that the typical dog bite is much less severe than injuries from a fall, and most amount to little more than Band-Aid treatments.

Even though the number of dogs in this country has climbed to 74 million, and even though they are out and about more than ever before, "there is no good data to support the contention that dog bites are on the rise," Bradley said.

In the five months since Bradley's book has been on the market, she said, all the feedback has been positive. "I expected some hate mail from people who had had traumatic experiences with dogs or who thought I was minimzing the problem, but so far that hasn't happened," she said.

Perhaps it's because her book does address the damage a dangerous dog can do. It also provides important information for individuals and communities on how to address the dog-bite problem.

But her main point is that much of the problem is based on perception.

Our perception differs from reality in part because fatal dog bites are so rare, and rare events make headlines. Only one dog in 5 million kills someone. As a comparison, consider the classic lightning-bolt cliche: You're five times more likely to be killed by lightning than by a dog.

Now add the fear factor. "We're hard-wired from way, way back to have fear responses to things like large animals with pointy teeth rather than 4,000 pounds of rolling metal," Bradley said. So even though cars are infinitely more dangerous than dogs, we fear fangs more than we fear fenders.

"People who study risk analysis have also found that anything that threatens children more than adults tends to be perceived as a more serious risk," Bradley said.

Most dog-bite studies put children at the top of the victim list. But Bradley said that "a series of good studies on aggression" done at Purdue University and at the Atlantic Veterinary College in Canada found that kids were bitten no more often or no more seriously than adults. Rather, people were more likely to classify their children's bites as more serious.

"Also, children tend to get bitten on different parts of their body than adults do, especially on the face," Bradley said. A bite to a baby's face is potentially more serious than a lunge at an adult's leg.

No breed is more guilty of biting than any other, and legislation banning breeds doesn't work, Bradley said.

"England has had breed-specific laws for decades, and there has been no change in the incidence of serious dog bites," she said.

One of the problems with such legislation is that once one breed is banned, another is soon brought in to take its place.

Breed identification is a big problem, too, Bradley said. "Are dogs that look like pit bulls going to be unfairly targeted? And what's a pit bull anyway?"

"The bottom line is that all dogs are aggressive, just like all people are aggressive, all cats are aggressive, all hamsters are aggressive. Aggression is just a reaction," she said.

Bradley describes most dog bites as the animal's way of yelling at someone. Dogs have become family members, and "we expect to be perfectly safe around them. But it's unrealistic to expect them to go through their entire lives without getting upset enough to yell at somebody.

"Dogs are extraordinarily tolerant of humans," Bradley continued. "That's what separates them from the wolves. It takes vastly more to provoke them than it does to provoke us."

In fact, she said, humans are just as responsible for serious bite injuries as dogs are.