Dogs Bite: But Balloons and Slippers Are More Dangerous [Paperback]

Janis Bradley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2005

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 twice as likely to win a super lotto jackpot on a single ticket than 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 cliché 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 less dog ownership. This must stop. We must maintain perspective. Yes, dogs bite. But even party balloons and bedroom slippers are more dangerous. “A tour-de-force examination of dog bites. Among other persuasive appeals for sanity, Janis Bradley has outed “lumping”: the erroneous connection between kitchen-injury level bites and maiming or fatal dog attacks. She dares to be rational. Her rationality will—hopefully—raise the level of discussion in a topic mired in hysteria. Why do we get so excited about this particular class of injury? Enter the irrational. Human brains are organs that evolved for a single over-arching purpose: to maximize the representation of genes possessed by an individual brain’s owner in subsequent generations. We evolved in a different environment than the one we currently inhabit, however. Because of this, we are genetically predisposed to learn to fear animals with pointy teeth much more than to fear, say, hurtling along in hunks of metal at sixty-five miles per hour. Our brains are also not reliable truth detection devices. Any instances of truth detection are lucky by-products of selection for reproductive success. Scientific method was developed because of the chronic, abysmal failure of our brains to dope out reality, coupled with a fascination to know truth. Our intuitions are flat-footed much of the time. Stephen Jay Gould once mused, “the invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning." If one searches the backgrounds of that small minority of dogs that kill people, lo and behold, many of them will have previously engaged in species-normal ritualized aggression: growls, snarls and kitchen-injury or less level bites in predictable contexts. This then becomes the foundation for the faulty causal leap, a slippery slope argument that says: if a dog is growly around his food dish, he will someday seriously hurt or kill someone. What is omitted is that a significant percentage of all dogs engage in species-normal ritualized aggression and the overwhelming majority will never hurt, much less kill, anyone. A sign

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

After two decades as a college administrator and teacher, Janis Bradley became an instructor at the SFSPCA Academy for Dog Trainers in 2000, where she and her colleagues have prepared more than 300 students for careers as professional dog trainers. Janis lives in Oakland, California with Ruby, the teeth-clacking Doberman, and Henry, the Greyhound clown.

Product Details

• Paperback: 184 pages
• Publisher: James & Kenneth Publishers; 1 edition (September 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1888047186
• ISBN-13: 978-1888047189
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #140,052 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 37 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars loaded with "science sense" December 24, 2005

By Carmen Buitrago

Format:Paperback

Dogs Bite is loaded - not with common sense, but with lucid, refreshing scientific sense. In a reader-friendly style, in clear layman's language, Bradley fluidly weaves in basic logic, statistics, risk analysis, evolutionary psychology, neurobiology, systems theory, evolution, ethology and behavior analysis to support her formidable argument that, as she repeats throughout the chapters in a soothing sort of mantra, "...dogs almost never kill people, and they don't actually bite us very often, and when they do we're seldom injured, and when we are, it's seldom serious."

Not many books can make you laugh aloud uproariously and at the same time teach you so much. Chapter 5, in which she examines her own childhood family's interactions with various pets, is poignant and instructive. Bradley tells about her defensive aggression toward Chipper their parakeet, and her mother's maternal aggression toward Tippy their Sheltie-cross puppy, among several anecdotes. In these incidents, she analyzes each animal's motivations and behavior (through the clear lenses of ethology and behavior analysis) and provides readers with diagnoses on the type of aggression, if any, involved. Take home point: aggression is normal across most animals, yet dogs seldom take their aggression to the point of hurting people or each other.

Bradley's chapter on the current state of research on biting dogs is incisive and scathing. One can only hope that it motivates researchers to clean up their statistical act and revise their highly suspect recommendations.

If for no other reason, every dog loving citizen should have this engaging, enlightening book on their shelf in the remote chance that a dog mauling or fatality occurs in their city. Then they can use its clear, calming data to offset the rising hysteria in a letter to the editor, to legislators, and to anyone else who wants to bridge the schism in the human brain between fear and reason. With Bradley's brilliant book, maybe we can help our cortex prevail over our ancient alligator brain!

29 of 29 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Great Teaching Tool January 12, 2006

By C. M. Boyle

Format:Paperback

I use sections of this book in my Critical Thinking class. Along with shark attacks, public beliefs about dog bites are probably the best example of the most common "common sense" mistakes we make about statistics, and Janice Bradley's book is a wonderful way to introduce those ideas. Engaging, clearly written, entertaining and fully of cogent analysis, this book manages to be both importantly educational and a great read.

Of course, dogs are carnivorous animals with sharp teeth, and consequently we do have a solemn duty to socialize them early and to teach them good bite inhibition, so that if they ever are pushed beyond their tolerance level, they don't do any harm. Bradley's point in Dogs Bite is simply that we need to respond rationally to dog bites, with a sense of the great good dogs bring us as well as an accurate knowledge of the real extent of the danger.

I would recommend this to anyone in a Critical Thinking course, or to anyone interested in dogs or local legislation of any sort.

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Engaging review of statistics on dog bites- and more March 23, 2006

By Yellow

Format:Paperback

A couple of months ago I received a request to review for my EZine (www.behaviorlogic.com) a new book that was being published, and I'll reproduce it here. The book is called Dogs Bite But Balloons and Slippers are More Dangerous by Janis Bradley. It was published this year by James and Kenneth Publishers in Berkeley. (ISBN 1-888047-18-6).

The book reveals the reality behind the terrifying headlines about dog attacks against innocent humans. The fact of the matter is that while dogs are more likely to kill children and the elderly than hale and hearty adults, they rarely commit fatal attacks on humans of any age. A far greater risk to children is their own parents.

Bradley has produced a variety of statistics on the death and injury rates produced by various causes. More people die of fork lift accidents, balloons, and 5-gallon buckets than die of dog bites. And of the high number of reported dog bites (Some 800,000 each year in the US) remarkably few actually result in medical care.

This book is important to dog lovers right now, especially those who have certain breeds such as the dreaded pit bull or look-alikes such as the Staffordshire Terrier. The media focus on pit bull attacks has made them into pariahs, when in fact, they can be gentle, loving pets. Even a cocker spaniel or a dachshund can kill someone. In fact both breeds have. But no one is threatening to ban those breeds.

Bradley writes in an engaging and personable style about legislation, liability, breeds and appropriate strategies for managing the dogs in association with the people in our homes. If you want to get past the hype to the truth about dog attacks, this book is a wealth of information.