Product Description
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

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 17 reviews)

A real life documentary on the truth of dog ownership

Fantastically written and completely engaging.
A real life expose of how dogs fit into our lives with real statistics that show just how safe living with a dog is compared to many other of our day to day interactions.
Too many people want to attribute dog ownership with potential danger, yet for man's best friend inflated statistics and over exaggerated stories have given some dogs and some breeds an unwarranted bad name.
If we believe the nay sayers who are too eager to point the finger of "danger" at dogs, then we may as well live in a bubble where we are protected from everything.
Dogs Bite - that is true, but very rarely. When compared to obstacles in day to day life, Janis Bradley shows how safe dog ownership is.
This is a fascinating book and will become a verified "fact" reference for so many dog enthusiasts. Highly recommended reading.
September 13, 2008

A must read for Governement Authorities making legislation

This book is an essential read for those government authorities in positions of power, before making any breed specific legislation. they say they make educated descions yet they never listen to both sides of the debate. The only reason those decisions are made is so they can have their moment in history and have their name down as having made legislation!
this book, although it can waffle on a bit in places, has been keenly researched and has been written in a fashion that is easy and a joy to read. The author has instilled humour as well as taking the extreme angry emotions out of the debate to make a clear and concise statement.
July 31, 2008

A Book That Puts It in Perspective.

I think that this book is a must-read for dog trainers, home-owners' insurance salesmen, and anyone involved in dog legislation. It includes facinating graphs and statistics that put things in perspective.
Still, the author recommends training and education for people and dogs.
If you're involved in breed ban legislation you should consider reading this book.
November 14, 2007

Enough already

Another pro-dog diatribe, attempting to justify dog ownership by trivialising the danger to children and the elderly from unconstrained dogs. There's something rather perverse and unnatural about 'owning' a mammal, whose utter dependence and williingness to endure anything strokes the fragile ego of the owner. Whether these types of books - of the polemical pro-dog type - spring from the PR department of the large petfood industry (very likely), or they are simply self-justifying therapy by dog owners, enough is enough. There are a few billion humans on this planet who could use the thousands that dog owners waste on dumb animals each year. And an environment that could benefit by ridding it of the massive damage that millions of dogs create annually.
September 17, 2006

Hey, it really puts it in perspective ...

It's true, as the author tells us, that more people die in wars. But with people like Saddam and Bush in the the world, whaddayagointodo?
It's true that more people die by swallowing random objects and choking on them, but with stuff like marbles and Kentucky Fried Chicken in the world, whaddahagointodo?
It's true that more people get killed and messed up in car wrecks, than get killed and messed up by dogs, but with all the cars and all those people commuting and driving to WalMart and Disneyworld and all the rest, whaddayagointodo?
Hey, dogs are all right! They just kill people, maim people, just like their owners would like to do themselves, but can't do, because they'd go to prison for it, and then get messed up themselves, bad, so the dogs rip into neighbors and passers by, and it's all right, "oh I didn't know he was out" or "what did you do, stomp at him?" or "I think you were trying to get into my yard, don't you respect private property" or "he doesn't like people who look like you, there was a [guy of your ethnic group] who used to beat him, you know some people just don't like dogs", hey you know "every dog has one bite", or maybe two or ten ...
You know, like "guns don't kill people, people kill people" just the same thing, we're just talking about dogs, this time ...
"There are no bad dogs." Right? Right. Just bad people. Like just about everybody who owns dogs. When are you people going to do something about yourselves?
June 10, 2006

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