Dog experts - If a dog kills cats will it tend to be aggressive toward children?

In the thread below the issue of a dog that is aggressive towards cats (and kills them) and the danger this dog may pose generally is discussed.

Dog Control Officer is a Bitch–Long, Angry RANT

In your experience is a dog that is fatally aggressive toward cats going to be a greater danger to children (or adults)?

There are plenty of opinions in the other thread. I’m mainly looking for input in this thread from people that have real world experience with cat aggressive (or other animal aggressive) dogs and their overall behavior.

Nope. I’ve had dogs that were purely sweet with kids, and death to cats. One had been badly scratched by a cat when she was a puppy, and hated cats ever after.

Sometimes. Sometimes not. Depends on the individual dog.

Some dogs will kill anything smaller than them, but be submissive to anything bigger than them. Unfortunately, in my experience, these dogs are often fear biters. They’re also prone to attacking children their size or smaller. I would trust one roughly as far as I could drop-kick the Taj Mahal.

Some dogs are aggressive to most animals, regardless of size and species. They’ll attack cats, other dogs, adult humans, whatever. On the whole, I’d rather deal with these dogs, because at least you know for sure where you stand with them and you never have to worry about someone mistaking them for a non-biter.

Other dogs are hell on non-human animals, but don’t have a speck of people-aggressiveness in them. Unsocialized pit bulls tend to be that way. Very dog aggressive, very strong prey drive (with proper socialization and training, this can be refocused), but almost never aggressive toward humans unless they’ve been attack-trained.

Unfortunately, it can be really, really hard to tell type 3 and type 1 apart. It’s not uncommon for people to think they’ve got a dog that’s only aggressive to other animals, then realize they’ve got one that’s aggressive to anything smaller than it. All too often, they realize this after someone (usually a child) has been bitten rather badly.

Of course, any dog that will kill a cat or other small animal will bite the everloving fck* out of somebody trying to stop the carnage. I’ve seen people get a couple steps from an outright mauling trying to beat a dog off another animal.

Long story short: Some critter-killing dogs are fine around humans, but you couldn’t pay me to have one around my family. YMMV.

Personally I wouldn’t trust a dog which had any aggressive tendencies around children, especially ones that attack other small animals.

I was attacked as a child by one of our own work dogs. It was completely unexpected and unprovoked. This particular dog was used to chasing rabbits and had killed one of our cats on a previous occasion.

This site states

This leads me to believe that a dog which exhibits predatory behaviour is probably more likely to attack a child than one which does not.

Nope, and don’t take the word of me or others on this board, just go “googling”
on dog aggression. It is a well researched topic.

county’s right, the two things aren’t necessarily related. Most Siberian Huskies can’t be trusted around cats & other small animals, but most are excellent with children. I’ve been working with that breed for almost 10 years, and have placed over 200 through our rescue, and of those I would trust less than 10 with cats unsupervised. Of those dogs I can’t think of one I would say would be aggressive with children.

I am not a computer expert, so if something I say looks dumb, it’s just ignorance. But I’d like some information.

I have a Dell computer, running Windows ME. In the past two years, I’ve had hard disk problems twice. What happens is this: I’m working along normally, the computer gets kinda slow, then finally locks up. I reboot, only to be told that now it can’t find the operating system, or something like that.

Both times I’ve pulled the disk and taken it to another computer to retrieve files (I know, I should back up better). When we ran a Norton program (I forget which one, it was my sister’s computer) against the disk, both times it came up with a bunch of crosslinked files. I did a little googling and found that crosslinked files are a definite problem, but I didn’t see anything that suggested what might cause them. Both times the disk had been running for about a year (I bought a new disk after the first failure).

Is it something in Windows ME that causes that, or what? (After the second failure within a year’s time, I bought an HP with Windows XP.)

Enlighten me, oh computer gurus, please.

Holy non-sequiter, Batman! :slight_smile:

Regarding dogs and kids - I dunno. I know when I went dog shopping I wanted something that wouldn’t be agressive towards anything (and he’s not).

More importantly, if Windows XP were to kill me cat, could I trust it around my kids? For that matter, can any Windows operating system be trusted around my kids, my cat or my computer?

Oh cripes, I’m sorry, and an idiot to boot.

Please forgive this post in the wrong spot. :rolleyes:

I would err on the safe side. I think it is a bad idea to act on anecdotal stories about a single dog.

In my case, if a dog shows a willingness to kill another animal I don’t want it around. It might be perfectly fine around people it knows, like children, but attack a strange adult or child.

Ditto on the Husky deal. We had a Samoyed when I was a lad that was death to cats but would tolerate any amount of abuse from children. I once saw a toddler grab his ear and use it as a handle to pull himself up to a standing position. He really pulled on that ear hard and was right in the dog’s face and the dog just licked him. Oh yeah, the dog was nuts too. He once killed a feral cat on top of our picnic table (yes he jumped up on the table to get at the cat) and from that day on would spend at least a few hours every day continuously walking in circles around that table, no matter where in the yard we moved it.

My high-drive Aussie tended to regard children like any other small animal, to be chased or herded. She wasn’t aggressive per se, but it might have looked like it to someone who didn’t know what herding behavior looked like.

I always monitored her carefully around children, especially when they were running and shouting.

Some of the sweetest (toward people) Danes I’ve ever known have been sudden death on all cats. Most Danes will either tolerate them, or even appear to actually see them as another ‘member of the family’.

So I’m siding with the majority of resps. What I’d suggest is to get the dog evaluated by an expert. If you can’t (or don’t wish to) afford to pay an animal behaviorist, then find the most experienced dog obedience training istructor you can find, and ask them. A good one will be just as accurate - or even more so - than the behaviorist, and will probably do it for free. Free is good, especially if you’re supporting kids, and want to add the expense of a dog to the budget. :slight_smile:

You may want to contact someone involved in retired racing greyhound rescue groups for some first hand info. Many retired greyhounds are wonderful with people but cat aggressive.

Though I have a much, much smaller sample size, the my family’s dogs were the same - cats, squirrels (and sometimes birds) they were very clear about not liking them… but they weren’t at all aggresive toward very small or very young children no matter what they did.

With my 7 year old Sibe, it’s just the chase.She’ll run a cat or a squirrel until it trees itself, then, will run back to me with a grin on her face. The one time a cat decided to stop and fight, my dog did a 180. :slight_smile: