Well balanced article

Beware of the dog
Each year, 3,000 people are injured by dogs. In the past week alone, one baby has been killed by rottweilers, and another badly mauled. Is our best friend turning into our worst enemy? Michele Hanson reports

Michele Hanson
Thursday September 28, 2006

Guardian

This morning I took my two dogs out for a walk feeling like a bit of a pariah. I have two big boxers and thought the woman walking by with her two toddlers looked nervous. No wonder. In the past week alone, a five-month-old baby, Cadey-Lee Deacon, has been killed by two rottweilers and a 14-month-old toddler badly mauled by a dog in Leicester, and every year, 3,000 people in the UK are injured by dogs. Since the attack on Cadey-Lee, a good friend of mine, who was bitten in the face by a dog as a child, has been ringing daily and ranting about dogs and what he would like done to them: have them all put down. All of them.
He is blaming the wrong species. A dog is an animal. To a dog, something small and squeaky is easy prey and dinner, not someone's beloved baby. It is not responsible for the tragedy that it causes. I'm not blaming the adults involved in these two recent cases: both were heartbreaking accidents. But they have revived the public fear of dangerous dogs.

All too many people don't know how to look after dogs properly. Round here, the fashion among boys is for hoodie or shaven head, hanging-down trousers and a Staffordshire bull terrier. A vet I know used to call such dogs a dick-on-a-string, and they are certainly butch dogs: compact, muscular, big enough to look macho, and their jaws tend to clamp shut on whatever they're biting, never to be prised open. You can often see the boys swinging their dog around in the air like a bolus, its jaws clamped to a stick or rope, as a sort of warning: "If my dog gets yours/you, it will never let go."

So far, I have only spotted one boy with a rottweiler in my part of London. It started off as a playful puppy, then spent hours on a short lead while its owner and other boys sat on a bench and taunted it. Within months it had turned into a snarling monster. Not because it was a rottweiler. A rottweiler, if treated properly, will behave itself, like any other dog. But there is one obvious difference. A rottweiler weighs eight to 10 stone. My dogs weigh four stone each; I weigh 10 and a half. I nearly always take them out separately because I can't physically control eight stone of dog. I never let them off the lead together - I take them to isolated areas of the heath and put them on the lead near toddlers and weedier dogs. Not that I am perfect. If I was, I would never have bought a second dog in the first place and would have trained them more effectively.

Anyone can have a nuisance dog. It doesn't have to be a working-class boy in silly trousers. Princess Anne has been in trouble for having an out-of-control dog. Claudia Schiffer and her partner Matthew de Vere have a German shepherd and an Irish wolfhound at their home near Bury St Edmunds which allegedly attack other dogs, terrify passersby and bite postmen. Whose fault is that, if it's true? A wolfhound is the size of a small pony. It looks tremendously impressive, if that's what La Schiffer wants - but how is she to hang on to it when it bolts?

Obviously, dog owners all like the look of one particular dog or another, but looks aren't everything. Dogs take up a huge amount of time and money. They need hours of exercise, and too many people keep their dogs indoors or just walk them round the streets. You see too many large dogs pacing up and down on balconies, in back yards and on chains, like caged lions. What do their owners think these tormented animals are going to do if they ever get out? Sit nicely in one place? No. They're going to charge about in a fairly murderous way, discharging all that pent-up energy. But that's the trouble. Bad dog-owners don't seem to think at all. They just want a guard dog, an extra dick or a fashion accessory.

And your average woman can be just as idiotic as a boy or a film star. We have three sisters in the neighbourhood who own a large hound. They will never let it off the lead, in case it smells another dog's bottom. They are convinced that if this happens, their dog will go to hell. They have told us so. The dog is getting fatter by the month. Another family have a large husky-type dog, which they promised to have castrated when they bought it. Then they decided not to. They were not keen on cutting a chap's balls off. Now, having had a go at every other dog in the area, it can never be let off the lead. Another grossly overweight boxer sometimes lumbers by. I asked its owner whether it goes to the park. "No," says he. "It's seven. It doesn't need the park any more."

How I longed to punch the lazy man; but of course one cannot. It wouldn't help. You could drive yourself mad watching all the idiot dog owners in the country, but let's not be too negative. There are plenty of good dog owners and pleasant dogs who never harm anyone. In fact, there are about seven million dogs in the UK who never get into trouble, says Jon Bowen, a veterinary surgeon who specialises in treating behavioural problems in dogs and cats and works mainly at the Royal Veterinary College. "Only a tiny percentage are ever involved in this sort of thing. Millions just bring pleasure to their owners, and there is no evidence that dog attacks are on the rise," says Bowen. "I've not seen any significant change in pattern or number over the last few years. Children are rarely injured by dogs, and these recent attacks are very, very sad events, but not a real indication that the problem is getting worse, and we shouldn't generalise. Many such incidents are down to human error and people still insist on leaving dogs unsupervised with children."

Dogs can react in odd ways to babies, not always violent. I hear that it is unwise to have a dog first, then a baby. My friend Sylvia did just that. Once the new favourite arrived, the dog stopped eating and moped. It could barely drag itself into the garden, was clearly miserable, never recovered, and died within a year.

It seems that looking after a dog is rarely a breeze. They are often ill. They vomit, they make a mess, their crap needs picking up. They are so much trouble that lots of people tire of them and throw them away. A couple of years ago my daughter, while searching for "boxer rescue" on the internet, found that in Essex alone in one year, just over 200 boxers had been abandoned. So the dog-owning situation could do with some improvement.

Although attacks by dogs on humans may not, on paper, be going up, there is a feeling abroad that dog behaviour is going downhill. Sue Scully, a professional dog trainer, thinks dog behaviour is indeed getting worse, even if it is not resulting to more visits to A&E. She says this is because we expect too much from dogs - yet don't set proper boundaries for them. "We expect our dogs to go to the park and like every other dog they see, but they don't," she says. "And the way we live now is freer, more open-plan. You used to have a best room with your one sofa, which hardly any one used. Dogs were not allowed on that sofa. Now they're allowed everywhere: all over the house, on the beds. Dogs need rules and they're not getting them, and so there are more dogs out of control."

But there's a paradox here, says Roger Mugford, animal psychologist. Nowadays, because there is more traffic and cities are more densely populated, "dogs need to be more confined ... [but they] don't learn friendly relationships with people because they're supervised so intensely." In fact, he points out, there are fewer dog bites today than there were in 1991 when the Dangerous Dogs Act was introduced.

Things are, then, perhaps not as bad as you thought. We simply need to get those dogs under control. Perhaps the return of dog licences would help. Why did we ever get rid of them? What about charging £150 a year for one? If you really wanted a dog, then it would be worth it. The revenue could pay for dog wardens, who could patrol the parks and streets and deal with problem dogs and owners, from bullet-headed boys to film-stars. Just a little dream of mine.

What makes a dog dangerous?

What makes a dog dangerous? Is it in the genes? The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) certainly seems to think so, which is why four named breeds are prohibited under the 1991 Dangerous Dogs Act, among them the pit-bull terrier. The implication is that these dogs are born bad and none of them can ever be trusted. Rottweilers, while not banned, also have a tarnished reputation, which hasn't been helped by recent events. But are some breeds of dogs really more of a menace than others?

The Kennel Club thinks otherwise. "Blame the deed, not the breed," says a spokesman. "The responsibility lies with the owner and the circumstances they allow their dog to be in." No dog, for instance, should be left alone with a child. The Kennel Club stresses the importance of training and education (for both dogs and owners), and has launched a scheme to promote safe interaction between children and dogs. This includes advice such as "keep away from busy dogs, bored dogs, dogs that are ill, or dogs that are tied up" and "never eat when close to a dog".

Chris Laurence, veterinary director of the Dogs Trust, stresses the important of socialisation: dogs should be introduced to lots of people and other animals as early as possible. It's true that different breeds of dog have distinctive character traits, he says: "Everyone knows that retrievers like to carry things in their mouths and greyhounds chase things. But no breed is intrinsically aggressive."

No one collates statistics on dog bites by breed, so we lack the evidence to prove that one breed is more likely to cause injury than another. Yet no one is surprised to hear that the perpetrator of a serious or fatal attack is a rottweiler - so are we right to be suspicious of them?

Mary MacPhail is the rottweiler representative on the Kennel Club Breeds Liaison Council and has bred rotties for over 30 years. "They are very intelligent, loyal and responsive," she says. However, she stresses the need for good handling: "Any dog requires training, but, because they're large, they do require direction. Unfortunately, rottweilers became popular with the macho section of the public." A dog's behaviour is usually the result of the way it has been treated by people. MacPhail, a petite, politely spoken woman from Hampshire, says rotties often do very well with women - they are best, in short, with someone with no desire to instil aggression into a dog.

Interestingly, around 40 very non-aggressive rottweilers are among the volunteers for Pets as Therapy (Pat) - a charity that visits people in hospitals, care homes, day-care centres and so on. All Pat dogs are rigorously temperament- tested before they are accepted into the scheme. According to chief executive Maureen Hennis, these fine, upstanding canine members of the community are "very good emissaries for their breed".

Justine Hankins

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
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Now why don't the tabloids do pieces like that instead of scaremongering

Yay! Finally someone with a bit of common sense! Well done Justine and the Guardian!

I agree

Excellent balanced view, is there an email we can respond to to praise the common sense shown here?

GREAT ARTICLE !!

wish that was posted in the front page of every other newspaper then might not get people runnig across the street to avoid us !

I did always like the guardian

excellent article

Brilliant article

This is the url for the article

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0...ticle_continue

I couldnt see an addy to respond to but it has a register facility [ have`nt done that myself yet, just got in from Agility class lol ]