Dog attacks on humans, including those which have resulted in the death of the victim, have become more common in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. There is much debate over whether the attacks can be blamed on the prevalence of certain breeds of dogs or whether they are due primarily to the actions or inactions of the dogs owners.
After thousands of years of domestication and selective breeding for dogs who do not show aggression towards humans, most dogs are unlikely to attack people. However, provocation can range from something as seemingly innocuous as a toddler pulling a dog's tail, in which case the dog might nip to discourage the behavior, to something completely undetectable to humans, such as an odor or a movement that sets a dog off, to blatant human aggression or violence towards a dog, causing it to defend itself. There are hundreds of shades of provocation; it is not always a black and white case as to why a dog might attack a human.
Dogs can inflict serious, sometimes fatal, injury to humans. As evidenced by their attacks on other creatures, both wild and domestic dogs are superpredators, though tamer (and weaker) than the wolves from which they descended. Their sharp teeth and powerful jaws can inflict serious injuries; their sharp claws have powerful muscles behind them. Scratches from dogs are easily infected. Even a boisterous dog of adequate size can knock down a person and possibly cause serious injury although there was no intent on the part of the animal. A single large dog, or a group of medium-sized dogs, are capable of seriously injuring or killing an adult human.
Note that dogs can exhibit aggression towards other dogs without ever exhibiting aggression towards humans. These are generally accepted to be separate traits.
Education for adults and children, animal training, selective breeding for temperament, and society's intolerance for dangerous animals combine to reduce the incidence of attacks and accidents involving humans and dogs. However, improperly managed confrontations can lead to severe injury from even the most well-tempered dog, much like most humans can be incited to violence given sufficient provocation.
There are many signs that a dog is about to attack, such as barks. A wagging tail indicates an attempt to communicate excitement, but a territorial dog may wag its tail at a chance to defend its home. A highly disturbed dog may sometimes emit confusing or misleading signals, yelping or jumping.
Human behavior as provocation
Some human behavior (especially by people unfamiliar with dogs) can potentially evoke a predatory or aggressive response from some dogs. Not every dog responds to all or even any of these behaviors with aggression. However, some do. These behaviors include:
* Attacking a dog or its companions, or acting in a manner that the dog perceives as an attack (for example, a sudden enthusiastic hug or inadvertently stepping on any portion of the dog's anatomy, such as a paw or tail).
* Attempting to take food away from a dog, or moving towards a dog's food or between a dog and its food, even inadvertently.
* Threatening a puppy in the presence of an adult dog, especially its mother.
* Looking a dog directly in the eyes. In dog communication, this is an act of dominance or aggression. This is more dangerous when on the same visual level as the dog (such as small children), or when the human is unfamiliar to the dog.
* Approaching a sick or injured dog. Note that older dogs, like people, often become "cranky" and develop a tendency to become "snappish".
* Related to the previous point, failure to recognize a dog showing signs of insecurity or fear and continuing whatever behavior is causing the dog's anxiety to increase, until "fear biting" occurs. Again, an older or chronically infirm dog is liable to develop feelings of vulnerability and anxiety, and therefore become less tolerant and more aggressive.
* Running away from a dog: the atavistic chase-and-catch instinct is not fully lost, and most dogs can outrun and overtake the average human.
* Similarly, the natural instinct to jerk one's hands upwards away from an inquisitive dog often elicits in the dog a strong impulse to grab and hold, or at least to investigate, resulting in the dog jumping on the person and thrusting its head towards the raised hands.
* Ignoring "Beware of Dog" signs: trained attack dogs, unlike most dogs, may attack an intruder without warning.
* Startling a resting or sleeping dog.
* Entering a dog's "territory" and behaving in an unfamiliar pattern or being unfamiliar to the dog. The dog's territorialism, powerful senses, and latent ferocity makes almost any dog, irrespective of size, a powerful deterrent to burglars. The territory that a dog recognizes as its own may not coincide with the property lines that its owner and the legal authorities recognize such as the inside of a neighbor's home
* Attempting to disrupt a fight between dogs.
Many adoption agencies test for certain aggressive behaviours in dogs, and destroy any animal that shows certain types of aggression.
Child safety
Even Golden Retrievers are capable of biting a child. A parent would rarely leave a child alone with an unknown pitbull, but people forget that even a cute dog is still a dog. Just because a dog typically has a good temperament does not mean that it is safe to leave a child alone with it. Since children are most easily harmed by dogs, there are a few steps that can be taken to ensure no harm comes to a child, or to the dog by extension:
* Teach your child never to approach a dog that they don't know.
* Always ask the owner if you can pet their dog. Owners know the temperament of their dogs.
* Approach dogs from the front. They could be startled if approached from behind and at the least may knock you over.
* Refrain from making sudden jerky movements. This could make the dog think you are playing or being aggressive.
* Never let a child play unsupervised with an adult dog or puppy, yours or a neighbors. An accident only takes a minute.
* Intervene and stop play if it looks too rambunctious or boisterous. Children aren't as durable as puppies. Puppies regularly bite as a part of regular play with other puppies.
Training and aggression
In a domestic situation, canine aggression is normally suppressed. Exceptions are if the dog is feral, trained to attack intruders, threatened, or provoked. It is important to remember that dogs are predators by nature and instinct is something that never completely disappears. It is possible to acclimatize a dog to common human situations in order to avoid adverse reactions by a pet. Dog experts advocate removal of a dog's food, startling a dog, and performing sudden movements in a controlled setting to train out aggressive impulses in common situations. This also allows better animal care since owners may now remove an article directly from a dog's mouth, or transport a wounded pet to seek medical attention.
Small children are especially prone to provoking dogs, in part this is because their size and movements can be similar to prey. Also, young children may unintentionally provoke a dog (pulling on ears or tails is common, as is surprising a sleeping dog) because of their inexperience. Because of a dog's pack instincts, more dominant dogs may view children or even adults as rivals rather than as superiors, and attempt to establish dominance by physical means. Any attempt at dominance behavior, no matter how tentative, should be extremely firmly discouraged as early as possible, to affirm to the dog that all humans are pack superiors. To avoid potential conflicts, even reliably well-behaved children and dogs should not be allowed to interact in the absence of adult supervision.
Dogs with strong chase instincts, especially shepherds, may fail to recognize a human being in its entirety. They may fixate on specific aspect of the person, such as a fast-moving, brightly colored shoe, as a prey object. This is probably the cause for the majority of non-aggressive dogs chasing cyclists and runners. In these cases, if the individual stops, it immediately loses interest since the prey has stopped. This is not always the case, and aggressive dogs might take the opportunity to attack.
Additionally, most dogs who bark aggressively at strangers, particularly when not on "their" territory, will flee if the stranger challenges it. Conversely, there is always the danger of the occasional dog who will stand its ground and escalate the situation.
Dog attacks on humans that appear most often in the news are those that require the hospitalization of the victim or those in which the victim is killed. Although it is possible for small dogs to seriously maul or kill humans, it is more difficult for them to do so than it is for large, muscular breeds.
Some large breeds have surged in popularity in recent years, such as pit bull-type dogs, Rottweilers, and other similar muscular breeds. Not unexpectedly, attacks involving such breeds have also become more common. This has occurred historically; for example, when German Shepherd Dogs were among the most common breeds chosen as pets, attacks by German Shepherds also increased. As a result, many countries and municipalities have enacted breed-specific legislation in an attempt to prevent additional attacks from the dogs perceived to be dangerous.
Considerable controversy reigns about such legislation. Proponents might argue that pit bulls and certain other breeds are inherently aggressive towards humans and shouldn't be allowed at all, or they might simply argue that since the breed is so popular, they are often owned by irresponsible owners who provide insufficient training or, worse, aggressiveness training, and that controlling the breed is the best way to control the irresponsible owners.
Opponents might argue that no breed is inherently aggressive towards humans or that regulating one breed simply moves the irresponsible owners to start focusing on breeds that haven't yet been regulated, moving the problem to other breeds.
It is extremely difficult to establish the inherent human aggressiveness of a breed in general. To establish meaningful results, research would have to consider such factors as the following:
* What proportion of a breed's owners are knowledgeable about dog training? When a breed's popularity increases, it might be more likely to be the first choice among owners with no previous experience with dogs because it's the breed with which they're familiar. Novice owners might not know how to properly socialize a dog of any breed.
* What proportion of owners deliberately encourage aggression in their dogs, or keep their dogs in a manner which fosters aggressive traits? This would be a difficult number to discover, because it seems likely that not many owners would readily admit to it. Also even though it may not be intended to train a dog to be aggressive, it is well documented that many dog owners do inadvertently teach a dog to think of itself as dominant.
* What proportion of dogs involved in acts of human aggression came from a known mother or father who exhibited human aggression? This can happen in any breed, and responsible breeders would generally not breed such a dog. However, as a breed's popularity increases, people who know nothing about breeding or genetics (or who don't care), might breed dogs who otherwise shouldn't be bred.
* What proportion of that breed in the community exhibits human aggression? For example, if there were 5,000 pit bulls in a given area, and 5 attacked humans during the previous year, but there were 100 of some other breed in the same area and 5 also attacked humans, statistics would suggest that the other breed is a far more aggressive breed than pit pulls, with 4,995 pit bulls behaving quite decently.[1] Most statistics published show only the number of dogs of various breeds involved in attacks, not the percentage of dogs of that breed in the area who were involved in attacks. Any popular breed is more likely to show up with more attacks because there are simply more dogs.
One approach that acknowledges that it's hard to determine the dangerousness of a specific breed takes the strategy of regulating all dogs over a certain size or weight, which would greatly reduce the chance of a dog being large enough to inflict serious harm. This, of course, would remove from circulation most of the hundreds of breeds available in the world today, most of whom would never deliberately harm a human.
Although research and analysis[2] suggests that breed-specific legislation is not effective in preventing dog attacks, with each new attack, pressure mounts to enact such legislation, despite indications[3] that dangerous dog legislation would be more effective—that is, focusing on specific individual dogs having exhibited signs of human aggression. The controversy is bound to continue.
Specific examples
For example, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in 1997[4] that fatal attacks by Rottweilers rose fairly steadily from 0 in 1979 to 10 per year in 1995 and 1996. During the same time, fatalities from pit bulls peaked in the mid-1980s and have been declining since to only 3 in 1996; however, if one were to look only at the total number of fatalities over those 18 years, it would appear that the pit bull was the bigger threat, when in fact Rottweilers were currently a more common attacker.
However, it is interesting to note that AKC registration of Rottweilers rose from 27th most popular in 1982, with just over 9,000 dogs of that breed registered[5], to second most popular in 1996, with roughly 90,000 dogs registered[6]. That doesn't account for the possibly hundreds of thousands of Rottweilers not registered with the AKC. With this many dogs of a single breed in the country, it is not surprising that there were some attacks on humans. However, even if one were to ignore all the hundreds of thousands of non-AKC Rottweilers, 10 out of 90,000 dogs is one one-hundredths of one percent of Rottweilers involved in fatal attacks on humans. One might question whether that proves that this breed is inherently dangerous and should be regulated by legislation.
By the same token, "pit bull" is a term often used to lump several similar-looking breeds. Many people have difficulty distinguishing one broad-faced, muscular breed from another[7]. It is difficult to track the registration of the "pit bull" during the same time period.
Legal issues (United States)
Although using a firearm against an attacking dog may seem acceptable, laws in the United States which prohibit cruelty to animals, discharging a firearm in a city, and reckless endangerment may limit the extent to which a person is legally able to defend themselves in this way. [citation needed] However, there will generally be no legal defence to taking such action where the dogs involved were not acting aggressively towards humans.