DOGS BITE But Balloons And
Slippers Are More Dangerous
by Janis Bradley
$14.95 (184 pages)
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 five times more likely to be killed by a bolt of lightning.
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. 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 purpose: 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 aggression: growls, snarls
and kitchen-injury or less level bites in predictable contexts.
This then becomes the foundation for the faulty causal leap,
a slippery slope argument that says: if a dog is growly around
his food dish, he will someday seriously hurt or kill someone.
What is omitted is that a significant percentage of all dogs
engage in species-normal ritualized aggression and the overwhelming
majority will never hurt, much less kill, anyone.
A significant percentage (I guess close to one hundred) of people
will argue in their lifetimes but this is not a flag for subsequent
felony assault. If this book does no more than raise awareness
of the difference between arguing and assault in dogs — and
I suspect it will do much more — it will have done a great
thing.” Jean Donaldson |
