I saw this dumb show where someone had to run away from an attack dog with one of those suits on. What i was wondering is? A good attack dog, whether sheperd, rottweiler, pit bull, vs. your avg. 30 yr old 5’10 175 lb. guy. Who would win generally in a fight to the death? It seems strange that they are so effective in law enforcement at making criminals submit. They are trained to attack the right arm and shake and bring opponent down. Whenever I see this I cant imagine not being able to spin around and wrench its neck. Now i love dogs and could see myself submitting to it rather than hurting it, but i think so may feel otherwise (softee). I know there is a surprise factor in those police dog takedowns, but in a ring with great attack dog and average guy, who would you bet on? One thing i notice is that domesticated dogs don’t really have a killing strategy - they don’t go for the juglar like a wolf instinctively does.
That was Fear Factor and I think it was rigged against the females. It is such a dumb show, so why did I watch it?
I’ve thought about this a fair bit, actually. The conclusion I eventually came to was it depends on how vicious the man is willing to be. And that depends a lot of his mental attitude, which is hard to predict.
Most of us associate dogs with house pets. And we don’t want to hurt them. If attacked, most of us would probably reflexively try and duck, dodge, cover ourselves with our arms, etc. A properly trained dog that has no scruples and no hesitation could probably manage to kill a man in this situation. (If only by ripping our belly or neck up and letting us bleed to death…)
On the other hand, I considered the case where I knew the dog was coming, knew it was going to kill me if it could, and, most importantly, I had my katana with me… Well, the dog jumps at me and ends up in two pieces a half-second later.
The man’s real strength here is his intelligence and ability to acquire makeshift weapons. A naked man in a big steel cage with a large, well-trained dog is a surprisingly even match. Odds are probably in the mans favor, but he’s going to get torn up pretty bad and lose a lot of blood before he can manage to choke the dog to death, which is about his only option in that kind of a situation.
Now, in the real world, there’s usually a fence you can climb over, a drainpipe to shimmy up, or a car to get into to avoid the fight. Or, if you’re an inherently vicious type of person (don’t know any of these, but I can imagine) you can probably find a rock, brick, or just go for the dog’s eyes with your keys. Or maybe you tear the drainpipe off
and club the dog to death with it. ;]
Anyway, although in theory in a normal real-world confrontation between man and dog is tilted fairly well in the man’s favor, psychological factors in the man’s head make this an awfully hard thing to predict…
-Ben