Dogs Bite, But Balloons and Slippers are More Dangerous

By Janis Bradley, Foreword by Jean Donaldson

Description from Back Cover: “Dogs are dangerous. And they are more dangerous to children than to adults. Not as dangerous of course, 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 five times more likely to be killed by a bolt of lightning.”

“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. 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 less dog ownership. This must stop. We must maintain perspective. Yes, dogs bite. But even party balloons and bedroom slippers are more dangerous.”

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Dogs do fairly often get irritated enough with us to growl or snarl or snap, although far less frequently than we engage in the human equivalents of making snide remarks, arguing, and yelling. Dogs share with us some of the common triggers for such irritation, like possessiveness, self-defense, and the urge to protect offspring. But they tip over into actual violence in resolving conflicts less readily than we do.

Much of the effort put into studying which dogs are most likely to bite has been wasted on looking at incidence by breed. Breed characteristics are driven by fashion and change too quickly, and breed identification is too unreliable for this to yield any useful information. 

Legislatures respond to this flawed research and the media frenzy surrounding dog bites with laws that have no hope of decreasing dog bites. The worst of these are the breed bans which get a lot of dogs killed but do nothing to deter criminals who conduct dogfights and deliberately breed neophobic dogs. Insurance companies jump in by denying homeowner’s insurance to many dog owners, perhaps with an eye to exploiting people’s paranoia about lawsuits with a whole new liability insurance product.

JANIS BRADLEY