By Naomi Kane
First Published in Dogs in Canada Magazine
Run for your lives there is a dog bite epidemic! Or at least some people would like you to think so. Fear of dogs is on the rise that is the real epidemic. The world has become sanitized and safety crazed, people buy helmets for toddlers learning to walk so it shouldn¡¯t be surprising that dogs are perceived as dangerous too. Fuelled by unconfirmed statistics and irresponsible not to say hysterical media attention people are feeling quite justified in their fear. So let¡¯s take it down a notch and look at the reality.
Dogs hold a unique position in our lives as companions, workers and heroes and at the same time as threats and dangers to be avoided. For some people dogs are family members, kept in our homes and involved in our activities at the other end of the spectrum are those who believe that dogs are unclean and should never be touched much less kept as pets. And then there are those that keep dogs as possessions to be chained to a dog house or left in a basement unsocialized and untrained or worse trained to attack other dogs or people. Irresponsible, abusive and ignorant dog owners, create most of the situations where dogs have harmed people.
We all know that early and positive training and socialization with children is the best way to teach dogs that kids are not so scary or dangerous. The same goes for kids, early and positive interaction with dogs, learning how to pat them and play with them, learning the ¡°Do¡¯s¡±, not just the ¡°Don¡¯ts¡± will teach kids that dogs are not so scary or dangerous. Familiarity breeds not contempt but confidence and ability. People with the proper skill set won¡¯t torment, tease or unwittingly provoke a dog. Parents who are terrified of dogs need to look carefully into the facts before instilling an unreasoning fear into their kids.
In doing research for this article I came across an astonishing amount of contradictory information, inflammatory language, misinformation and inflated numbers. The oft quoted number of four point five million Americans, or two percent of the population bitten per year, and that one in five dog bites require medical attention has been used to prove how big a problem dog bites are in North America. But wait, the National Canine Research Council points out that number was obtained by phone surveys of just over five thousand people conducted in 1994, by J.J. Sacks, M. Kresnow and B.Houston and the data was ¡°weighted to provide national estimates¡±. The estimated numbers are not corroborated by actual public health agencies. Even if the huge numbers estimated were correct how can a problem that affects not quite two percent of the population and in most cases requires no medical attention be called an ¡°epidemic¡±? The facts are that dog bites have decreased steadily even though the dog population has increased and yet the perception remains that dog bites are a major problem especially for children.
The Canadian Hospitals Injury Reporting and Prevention Program (CHIRPP) database has compiled injury reports from the program which takes data from the emergency rooms of ten pediatric hospitals and four general hospitals across Canada. To put things in perspective using actual data from real hospitals bicycles or hockey are far more dangerous than dogs but dogs are a bit more dangerous than wheeled shoes or hot beverages. Check the reports yourself on the CHIRPP website http://
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