This was an interesting article – obviously from a Canadian perspective, so there might be a cultural difference in people’s reactions to dog injuries.
Of course, there are dogs that are aggressive and need the help of a trainer – but more often than not, especially when a dog bites a child, there was fault on both sides and probably almost always more on the human side.
This spring I spent 2 Saturday evening’s being patched up at A&E because of dog bites – both by my own dog of several years. In 6 years, I’d had nothing more than a surface scratch once or twice. It was unusual circumstances as we had a foster dog and in both cases I had pulled fighting dogs apart while I got my injury.
Yet, I don’t blame her (it was my misjudgment that didn’t prevent the situation) nor am I afraid of her. Dogs are dogs, stuff happens. I may well be bitten by her once or twice in her lifetime – c’est la vie. She’s not an aggressive or reactive dog in general, so I consider these injuries partly my fault – even if I’m still rehabilitating my right index finger 2.5 weeks later. That injury is my lesson learned, and pretty much entirely my fault for not foreseeing the situation and putting the dogs in the situation that ensued.
My point is that quite often the dog gets the blame whereas I think the first question we should always ask is what could I, as the human, have done differently – because that’s usually where the problem lies.
BusyDoggie 