Taking Risks with Your Dog (Part 3)
It’s said that there’s a dog bite epidemic. And trainers agree that any dog, even a friendly one, can be pushed into a bite. How much risk is there that your dog will bite your kid – or someone else’s?
Jolanta Benal, CPDT-KA, CBCC-KA
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Taking Risks with Your Dog (Part 3)
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This dog’s closed mouth, tense facial muscles, and look away from the child tell us she’s uncomfortable being hugged. So are most dogs! Teach your child to engage with your dog in ways the dog enjoys, and avoid a bite waiting to happen.
Take them at face value, and dog bite statistics may sound terrifying: 4.7 million bites a year! 800,000 require medical attention! 386,000 require emergency room treatment! Better get rid of Dogalini, quick, before she rips your throat out. Alternatively, there may be dangerous dogs Somewhere Out There, but your Dogalini wouldn’t hurt a fly..
What Do Bite Stats Tell Us? (Maybe Not Much)
Needless to say, neither panic nor denial is in order here. Take a close look at those bite stats, for instance. They date from the mid-2000s or earlier, when the U.S. population was a bit shy of 300 million. For the sake of discussion, let’s say 290 million. Assuming the stats are accurate, about 1.6% of those 290 million people were bitten by dogs each year. About 17% of those episodes, fewer than 1 in 5, required medical attention. Fewer than 1 in 10, that’s 8%, required ER visits. Not to minimize, but I’m never sure what “required” means here. Some people will visit the doctor for a scrape, whereas others just stay home and pour peroxide on wounds that I would swear call for stitches. Your guess is as good as mine about how many dog bites result in serious injury.
Also, I’m often consulted by people whose dogs have inflicted half a dozen or more skin-breaking bites. Usually, almost all those bites are to family members. The statistics count the number of bites, rather than the number of dogs who bite, so a relatively few dogs may account for the lion’s share of damage done. And, if my clients are a reasonable sample of what’s out there, the same people may be getting bitten repeatedly. In that case, what I said about 1.6% of Americans being bitten every year could make it sound as if the average person is at much higher risk of a bite than they really are.
So when we look hard at the scary stats and compare them with personal experience, they might not seem as terrifying as all that. On the other hand, it’s axiomatic among dog trainers and behavior consultants that under the right circumstances, or the wrong ones, any live dog may bite. But whereas some dogs bite readily and often, others have to be pushed hard. To judge where your dog falls on this spectrum with respect to your kids and other people’s, consider the following factors.
Is Your Dog at Ease with Kids?
In general, the more at ease a dog is with children, the less likely he is to aggress against them.
A dog who really, really likes kids goes all soft and wiggly-butt when they greet him. He doesn’t move away when they pet him, but on the contrary may even press into their touch. When kids run past, shouting and flailing, he pays them no mind or maybe acknowledges them with a quick soft wag and a friendly look. He certainly doesn’t lunge or bark at them.
See also: Dog Trainer Answers Kids’ Canine Questions
Flip that description to get a dog who isn’t comfortable with children. You often see such a dog standing per-fect-ly still while kids pet him. Many people call this dog “fine” or “okay” with kids; truth is, he’s just putting up with them. A dog who actually moves away when kids approach is sending a clear signal of discomfort – or a signal that should be clear, at least! If that’s your dog, and you’re holding him in place for kids to pet, now would be a good time to end that practice.
See also: Help! My Dog Bit My Baby
Even stronger discomfort is expressed by a dog who barks incessantly at children visiting your home, or who approaches them with slow, cautious body language to sniff them and then backs up barking when they reach to pet him. Â
Of course, dogs are more attached to their own family than to other people, so your dog might behave in more affectionate and engaged ways with “his” children than with others. Say your Zippy clearly adores your kids but isn’t comfortable with others. Your kids might be able to get away with hugging him, or with approaching him while he’s got a rawhide chew, but it doesn’t follow that any random kid will be safe doing the same things.
Has Your Dog Bitten Anyone in the Past?
The best way to predict future behavior is to look at past behavior. Not that it’s quite that simple, of course. Maybe your Dogalini who’s never bitten is an easygoing sort who’s friendly to everybody, isn’t scared at the vet’s office, and drops her rawhide chews in your lap. She growled the first time she saw a Halloween lawn display, but then she investigated it, relaxed, and never looked at it again. Ah, congratulations!
But maybe you live in eternal vigilance. When Zippy nabs your packed lunch, you keep a healthy distance from him so he doesn’t lunge at you. When you have guests, Zippy is locked in another room with a big “Keep Out” sign on the door. If you see a skateboarder coming while you’re taking Zippy for a walk, you hightail it because you know he’s going to lunge at the guy. Sure, Zippy’s never landed a bite, but…
In general, the more at ease a dog is with children, the less likely he is to aggress against them.
Or maybe Lulu has bitten people half a dozen times, but never broken skin. Maybe all those bites came after a long series of warnings that are clear to you in retrospect. Maybe she bit the hand of someone who was trying to stop a spat she was having with another dog. Maybe she growls whenever she sees a man wearing sunglasses, but she’s 6-years-old and the behavior has never gotten any worse.
As the above examples suggest, your dog’s bite history is important, but nuanced. In judging the risk your dog poses of biting again, consider how many bites there were, how much damage they did, whether your dog gave escalating warnings that were ignored, and so on. Did she bite once and then let go, or did she bite repeatedly or hang on?
Re-grabbing and hanging on are serious danger signs. I discount heavily for bites inflicted when someone reaches into a dog fight to break it up and for bites inflicted when a dog is in obvious pain. Finally, it’s important to think about how limited and predictable your dog’s aggression is. If Zippy growls only when he has that much-mentioned rawhide chew, and if he delivered his one and only bite over that chew, you may have an easily manageable problem. Either Zip doesn’t get any more rawhide chews, or he gets them only in his crate, with a lock on the door to keep your children from bothering him.
Read Your Dog, Manage Your Child
Your ability to read your dog’s body language and manage your child’s behavior is a huge risk reducer in life with kids and dogs. Young children can’t regulate their own behavior, often don’t know when they’re causing pain or fear, and are generally not great at reading canine body cues. YouTube is a gold mine, if that’s the phrase I want, of videos in which toddlers climb on dogs, chase dogs, throw themselves onto sleeping dogs, and oh, the list goes on, bringing a cold sweat to trainers everywhere. What are those parents thinking?
No matter how patient and easygoing your dog is, it’s normal and reasonable for an animal to get tired, to have had enough, to not want to interact just now, to enjoy his chew toy in peace without a 2-year-old trying to kiss him. It’s up to you to direct your child’s behavior toward your dog and to supply your dog with a secure refuge for those times when Kidlet just won’t stop. Also, no unsupervised interactions, period. You know how those horrible baby-drowns-in-bathtub episodes always include the line “I just stepped away for a second to answer the door”? Well, those horrible “toddler requires 27 stitches” episodes all too often include either that line, or the one about how Buster kept walking away but Kidlet wouldn’t leave him alone.
So there you have it – some ideas for assessing the extent of the risk your dog presents to your child, and for managing life to reduce that risk. Phew. If you’re worried, a visit with a qualified behavior consultant might be in order. A terrific resource is Colleen Pelar’s book Living with Kids and Dogs: Without Losing Your Mind, where you’ll find much more information than I could include here. I’ve also done a number of episodes on kids and dogs, including how to raise a puppy who’s comfortable with children and how children can safely greet new dogs. I hope you’ll check those out as well.
Stop by and see me on Facebook, or write to me at dogtrainer@quickanddirtytips.comcreate new email. I get so many questions that I can’t reply individually, but I welcome them and read every single one. And I may use them as the basis for future articles. Thanks for reading!
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About the Author
Jolanta holds professional certifications in both training and behavior counseling and belongs to the Association of Professional Dog Trainers and the International Association of Animal Behavior Consultants. She also volunteered with Pet Help Partners, a program of the Humane Society of the United States that works to prevent pet relinquishment. Her approach is generally behaviorist (Pavlovian, Skinnerian and post-Skinnerian learning theory) with a big helping of ethology (animal behavior as observed in non-experimental settings).