Fortunately, this is not the Pit. We’re being informative and reasonable without being mean or attacking personally one’s opinion or feelings. I appreciate that.
It’s kind of silly to say I’ve had my fair share. I know enough to be able to differentiate between a human being and an animal.
Human beings are- for the most part- sentient beings with some reasonable degree of moral code. One can throw out Dahmer’s name, but a Dahmer is an incredible rarity. There were 4.5 million dog bites last year alone.
So, comparing a completely amoral sociopath with 4.5 million animals strikes me as a wee bit of a stretch.
Animals attack. They are…um…animals. This thread is full of first-hand accounts. Post after post after post after post. Not just my accounts, which have no more or less weight or value than anyone else’s on the SDMB.
One degrades the value of human experience when one equates it with the rights and lives of animals. Like it or not, we are the species of the moment. If Jeffrey Dahmer made a dark mark on society, he has little company. There are roughly 270 million people in the USA. Name a hundred Dahmers.
We have a cite of 4.5 million dog attacks in a single year.
[QUOTE=phouka]
The attack your friends’ child suffered was horrific and tragic. I do not want to minimize it in any way. But it is not a fate in store for every person who spends time around a dog.
[quote]
Prove it.
I understand your point of view in this, and respect it. I know you feel it would be nice. It just isn’t the way it is.
I’m sad so many people hate dogs so much. I absolutley love mine, they are the best companions and friends sometimes. Sure some dogs are really mean and do bite, but some dogs are very well tempered and would never hurt a human. When I was really young we had a dog, Topper. Since my brother and I were little kids, whenever we were in the backyard, so was Topper. He protected us from things in the yard that could hurt us, like snakes. Some dogs are very sweet and kind, while others are mean. It’s just about their personality and how they were raised as pups.
Um, no, YOU prove it. You’re the one who said all dogs will eventually end up attacking someone. You made the statement, now it’s YOUR job to back it up. You’ve been here long enough to know that.
Any dog will bite when threatened, in self-defense. That’s pretty much a given. But Jesus, not every dog is going to become some viscious beast!
Neighbors dog bit my foot when I cut through his yard when I was about 10. Scared the shit outta me because it was at night and I didnt even see or hear the dog.
Some of you already know about this, but my most beloved cat was attacked by my landlord’s dog. The dog is a mix breed but she has that round head, pointy ears, and beady eyes of a boxer or pit bull mix. I thought she was a tame, gentle, friendly dog (she was extremely submissive to me), until I tried to get my little cat out of her jaws. I failed. The cat and the dog bit me, the cat had to be put to sleep, I had to go to the hospital for and X-ray and a tetanus shot… the consequences for the dog? Nothing. The owner had to pay my $4000 vet bill, and my insurance covered the physical therapy for my soft tissue injuries. The scars to my psyche after that ordeal? Vast. Incalculable. Nightmarish.
I have tried not to dislike dogs after this, and I have been largely successful. I do believe that most dogs are gentle, though this is not the only time a dog has bitten me (walked by a husky tied to a street sign when I walked out of a bakery eating a bagel; husky lunged, bit my arm, but fortunately I had an army coat on… owner said the dog “was just hungry” :rolleyes: ). I even want a dog when I buy a house, but it has to be a gentle, submissive dog who would NEVER hurt a cat or person even in play.
Well, according to Phouka, 6,000 people were hospitalized in the US due to dog bites in one year. According to the FBI, 16,503 people were murdered in the US in 2003.
Being murdered by another human is a lot more likely to be in my future than getting a serious dog bite.
Dogs are great, so long as the humans don’t screw up.
I wanted to add to my previous post. Although my injuries were quite severe, and being on my face impacted quite significantly on my personal life, I do not dislike or have a fear of dogs. I am however, careful around strange dogs and was particularly protective when my kids were little.
I like cats too even though I sport significant scars on my arm from a neurotic Siamese who suddenly decided he didn’t want to be patted further.
I couldn’t find more recent statistics, but in 1995, there were 439,660(pdf!) cases of assault with injury in the US. The population of the US at that time was 261,638,000. That’s one assault with injury for 595 humans. Note that this does not include other types of violence like murder, rape and assault that did not result in hospitalization.
If I use Phouka’s statistics of 65,000,000 dogs and 6,000 attacks requiring hospitalization, we get one assault with injury for about 10,800 dogs.
Judging by those statistics, it appears that humans are more violent towards other humans than dogs are.
That’s not to say there aren’t mean, dangerous dogs out there. The vast majority of dogs, however, will not cause injury to a human.
Right. I’d say most bad dogs are the result of bad training. It could be abuse, or it could be incompetence.
Cartooniverse we raise guide dogs. Our third made it, and is about to graduate, and we have our fourth, a 9 week old Golden puppy. These dogs will spend their lives helping people. A guide dog led a blind guy down the stairs of the World Trade Center on 9/11 and saved his life.
Guide dogs are pretty big, but bred to be docile. However we’ve learned that you have to correct them early. Puppies like to nip, and they like to jump on things, and if you let them do it they grow into dogs too big to correct easily. It isn’t easy to train dogs not to chase cats, but you can do it. Alas, dogs get licenses, but dog owners don’t.
We had a dog until I was five, then I got allergic. At the urging of our daughter we got one 8 years ago. Until then, I was a bit afraid of dogs, not having been near them. But having one has taught me not to be afraid, and to love them again. Maybe you need to make friends with a smaller one to show you that they are not out to get you. You might also want to read a training book (I liked one called At the Other End of the Leash to see why dogs misbehave.
I can’t name 100 Jeffrey Dahmers, but I can name just a handful of folks who were ultimately responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people. You already know the biggies - Hilter, Stalin, Pol Pot. Throw in a few corrupt African dictators and some ethnic genocides and it seems to me that that we really ought to be scared shitless of each other, and not animals.
When I was in the military training for some weird stuff, the instructor specifically training us to deal with attack dogs used to tell us never turn your back on a dog. You have no defense that way. When it attacks try to get an arm (preferably the left) in its mouth and then jam the arm as deep as possible into the dog’s mouth falling to the ground holding the dog with the other arm and then rolling over onto the dog.
As I remember his comment was, “you will get bit, sure, but you would of anyway and as the arm presses into the mouth he will try to unbite not bite, so there will be less damage.”
At this point we were told to then take out our knives with our right hand and cut the dogs throat (gross right? but I’m not done yet).
If our knives were not available to us, we were to raise our left arm higher so the throat of the dog was at our face level and we were to attempt to bite the throat of the animal sufficiently hard that it would be killed or silenced (I told you it got grosser).
The instructor said something to the effect of, “It will be hard, sure, but remember, you will be in a life-and-death situation.”
The instructor said he had never had to bite the throat of a dog. “I’ve always had a knife handy.” The implications are obvious. But keep in mind this was a military instructor and in my experience, they have accomplished very little of what they claimed to have done.
I have never had to use the advice they gave us, but everytime I am threatened by a dog, I make a point to tell it that I have been trained to be just as much a beast as he is. My feeling is that somewhere in the back of its brain, I have confused him just a little.
It’s not spelled viscious, unless the dog goes thick when chilled.
Read all of the posts. Carefully. Really carefully. Forget my posts. Totally. You don’t see a pattern here, then I’m so very sorry.
I’ll be delighted to modify that statement. Here. Try this on for size:
Every single dog has the potential to attack, frequently with major trauma or death as the result.
Self defense, huh? Read the posts. Read them carefully. I suppose a 3 year old girl who has the unmitigated gall to…um…breathe? Walk on the floor? Play with her parents? Yes, that sure is some major-league threat. Cause, that’s all she was doing when that dog went to lunch on her face. But, forget my posts. Really.
What about all the other posts in here where Dopers are first-hand victims of dog attack? So, the logical thing to do is never leave your car. Never go jogging. Never enjoy a walk through your neighborhood with the baby. Why? Gosh, apparently all of those things are direct and accepted and totally understandable provocations for a dog attack.
I’m not missing anything here, am I? Most if not all of the posts here do not include aggressive or attacking behavior on the part of humans. They include unprovoked attacks by dogs.
-shrug- Deal with it. Dogs are vicious ( sp ) animals who are unpredictable and not to be trusted. Your mileage may vary, right up until the moment an E.R. doctor tries to explain why your child no longer has a working trachea…
Oh lord love a duck. Please, okay? Yes, by all means, throw in some 9/11 stuff to win the day. Dude, I’m human and spent two days with the blood of strangers all over me working as an EMT at that particular nightmare. I could give a rat’s patootie what some dog did. I’ll wager that if the person using the dog didn’t have the dog, a human would have accompanied him/her down with equal if not greater poise. M’kay?
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I do appreciate where you are coming from. However, that book would do better to be entitled, " Why I’m Having You For Lunch".
You said up there that most bad dogs are the result of bad training, abuse or incompetance. There are more than 50 posts in this thread- many but surely not all giving first-hand accounts of dog attacks.
And, you wonder why I regard dog-owners and dogs with equal derision? Your words… bad training, abuse or incompetance.
Oh, and I have to say, that it’s a faint straw man argument to throw in human murderers. This thread is about dog and dog attacks. Might do well to read the OP and Title before making such leaps in logic.
You might want to read the entire thread, including all of my posts, before quoting that and going after me here, okay? It’s uncalled for, and shows an utter lack of understanding of what I said in my post that you quoted here.
That was exactly my point. There is a pattern in many of the posts here. So, saying " Umm… it’s a thread inquiring about dog attacks" doesn’t score any points, it just shows the readers here that you did not take the time to read all of the posts in the thread.
I’m sad so many people hate dogs so much. I absolutley love mine, they are the best companions and friends sometimes. Sure some dogs are really mean and do bite, but some dogs are very well tempered and would never hurt a human. When I was really young we had a dog, Topper. Since my brother and I were little kids, whenever we were in the backyard, so was Topper. He protected us from things in the yard that could hurt us, like snakes. Some dogs are very sweet and kind, while others are mean. It’s just about their personality and how they were raised as pups.
) animals who are unpredictable and not to be trusted. Your mileage may vary, right up until the moment an E.R. doctor tries to explain why your child no longer has a working trachea…