There are lies, damn lies, and statistics, according to Benjamin Disraeli – something to keep in mind regarding this year’s spate of pleas to ban so-called “dangerous dog breeds.”
Teacher turned dog trainer Janis Bradley pleads for sanity in her book, Dogs are Dangerous. They are more dangerous to children than to adults. Not as dangerous, she points out, 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 twice as likely to win a Super Lotto jackpot on a single ticket as to be killed by a dog. You are five times as likely to be killed by a bolt of lightning than be killed by a dog. Because it is so extraordinary, lightning is often regarded as a universal cliche for an Act of God. Dog-attack deaths are even more extraordinary … five times more extraordinary. 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. Search-and-rescue and cancer-detecting dogs save significant numbers of human lives, and assistance dogs enormously improve the quality of many more.
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 the right to dictate what sort of dogs we can own.
