sandgrubber

Calgarians unleash torrent of dog bite reports Complaints have jumped fourfold in five years By SHERRI ZICKEFOOSE, CALGARY HERALD MAY 21, 2013 http://www.calgaryhe...1084/story.html Out of respect for copyright I've not reproduced the article. The author is careful not to say there are more bites...just that there are more reports.

It would be interesting to know how many people have been prosecuted in Calgary for dogs attacking people or other animals on their owner's property. I would guess the number is quite small, and I'd hope it didn't include puppies who knocked a kid over and licked her or his face. Has anyone seen anything written on this?

Evidence? Who needs evidence? Aggression is a subject that causes lots of anxiety, and lots of us love to talk about it.If you want some numbers, these are kinda interesting. http://www.calgary.ca/CSPS/ABS/Documents/Animal-Services/Animal-statistics/Reports%20of%20Dog%20Aggression%20Over%20Time.pdf

I would be offended if I went into a doctor's office and the place was packed with expensive, highly commercial 'healthy' foods (but no fresh fruit or veg) and well stocked with leaflets telling me about trendy medicines for maladies I may not have.The high rate of product sponsorship, not only in vet offices, but also all over the walls of vet schools, makes me doubt the objectivity of the average vet...and makes me appreciate vets who give practical, sensible advice.

The US is a BIG place with lots of variation. Many many more pits in most places, it's true. But not everywhere is dog friendly, and the types of dog friendliness differ. Try finding a dog beach in California where you can let your dog off lead. I'm now in Florida in an area dominated by a large university. I'm amazed how seldom I see anybody else walking their dogs, apart from the occasional college student dragging a puppy on a leash. I joined a members only dog park cause I couldn't find a good place to socialize my two with other dogs. On the other hand, if you want to go hunting with dogs, there are lots of opportunities.

Is this the study you're referring to? Journal of Animal and Veterinary AdvancesYear: 2009 | Volume: 8 | Issue: 7 | Page No.: 1412-1418Factors Linked to Territorial Aggression in DogsJoaquin Perez-Guisado and Andres Munoz-Serrano If so, they found breed highly significant, though bull breeds did not show up as aggressive. I have my doubts about the study as it is based on opportunistic interviews with owners and sample sizes were small for most breeds. If bull breed owners feel under threat from authorities, they aren't likely to tell a stranger who walks up to them on the street. But someone who bought a mastiff as a guard dog might well beat his chest while bragging about how the dog barks at everyone and will attack any stranger who comes into the yard. Or maybe the Spanish tradition is to go for extra large dogs when they want a guard dog, keep the thing outdoors, and don't socialize. Meanwhile they are inclined to treat bull breeds as house pets. Just guessing. Dunno. I don't trust the study approach. I wish they had cross correlated breed and socialization factors. It would be useful to know if dogs considered by their owners as highly aggressive were all kept outdoors 24/7 and never exercised. Here's their table of highly significant factors affecting aggression.

Horrible story. Poor woman. Hope she survives.Stray dogs in Texas: of course there will be some pit bull blood. The pit is the favorite dog in less affluent regions of the US south, and the poor can't afford fencing. Bloody Houston. So anti government that they can't be bothered to control roaming dogs. Can you think of another major city that would allow the stray dog problem to get so out of hand that a pack of 15 could form? It's a disgrace.

I don't think it's a question of fault. If she had ripped you it would have been appropriate that she be flagged as vicious and her owners given a kick in the butt to encourage them to get her to a behaviouist or put up a 'dangerous dog' sign. If the goal is to prevent dog attacks, dogs with a tendency to attack need to be identified and put into some sort of management that makes them less dangerous. Waiting till the dog does serious damage and then euth'ing it is not nice.

On label use can also be dangerous. FDA Licensed pyretheroid flea meds nearly killed my old girl. I've had a whole litter of pups come down with kennel cough from the vaccine. There are organochlorides that are approved for flea dips and for ridding kennel premises of ticks. That's more toxic than I ever want to go! What's more, there are counterfeit pet meds on the market. If you buy discount on the Internet you may end out with something other than what is on the label, or no active ingredient. Careless use off label can be dangerous. Accidents with NSAIs, like Ibuprofin or tylenol, are pretty common and serious. Well researched, cautious, off label use can be pretty safe. Dilute vinegar for controlling yeast infections in the ear is quite safe...so long as you have common sense and go to the vet if the infection gets serious. All you're doing is changing pH. My vet recommended Benadryl for a bee sting once. I will use it again for that application without going back to the vet. Many breeders, often with vet recommendations, use livestock meds on their dogs. You need to study toxicities and dosages and be aware of possible reactions. You need to read the testing data on the product--they often do lab testing on beagles for insecticides. There are books, written by vets (eg, Eldridge, D.M. Et al, "Dog Owner's Home Veterinary Handbook" now on 4th Edn.) that advise on safe use of off label meds. Note, also, that most natural remedies are off label. It pisses me off that there is no real price competition in the pet meds market, and drug companies charge what the market will bear (bare?). It's as though they've learned that people will willingly pay $1/day to keep off fleas and ticks, so that's what we'll charge. This ends out with a situation where only the affluent can afford to take good care of their pets.

By my reading, the Calgary dog ordinances, which everyone holds up as the gold standard for controlling vicious dogs, might also put people up for fines if a dog showed menacing behavior toward kids who entered the yard to fetch a ball. I dont know the legal definition of tresspasser in Calgary, but I doubt it includes kids chasing a ball. Here's the text: The Owner of an Animal shall ensure that such Animal shall not: (1) Bite, bark at, or chase stock, Animals, bicycles, automobiles, or othervehicles; (2) Chase or otherwise threaten a person or persons, whether on the propertyof the Owner or not, unless the person chased or threatened is atrespasser on the property of the Owner; (3) Cause damage to property or other Animals, whether on the property ofthe Owner or not; (4) Do any act that injures a person or persons whether on the property of theOwner or not; (5) Bite a person or persons, whether on the property of the Owner or not; (6) Attack a person or persons, whether on the property of the Owner or not; (7) Attack a person or persons, whether on the property of the Owner or not,causing severe physical injury; or (8) Cause death to another Animal.

Speaking of colors, I haven't seen any chocolate-bashing lately on DOL. Have chocolate Labradors gotten accepted, or have the bashers just gotten tired and shut up?

I exported two pups from WA to Singapore. (Both puppy buyers were ex-pats working for major corporations and had decent-sized yards.) Although the requirements for import into Singapore are not horribly demanding, the logistics of meeting those requirements may be tough. Both times I exported, the puppy buyers and I decided it was easier to allow an experienced Singapore-based company handle the paperwork and arrival logistics. As I remember, this wasn't cheap, but it wasn't unreasonably expensive either. It was long enough ago that it's probably better to start fresh in looking for companies.

As my grandfather used to say: "All the fools ain't dead yet." That was 50 years ago, but it's as true as ever.

I agree with the general tone . . . BFD, vet prices vary . . . as do costs of apples and oranges. What I'd like to see, instead, is a well researched tirade about how drug companies jack up the prices for dog and cat medicines. So often, you can find the horse or cow version of the same active ingredient selling for 1/10th of the cost, and it's interesting to see how, when there (supposedly) is competition, the prices for online meds come out more or less the same. Eg, they know they can hit you for $1 to $2 a day for flea treatment, so they charge something in this range, even if the active ingredient costs pennies a day. Spinosid, the active ingredient in Comfortis, is cheap sold as an insecticide. Why is it so expensive bundled into a pill for dogs or cats?

Interesting. I didn't read the methods carefully, but thought it was something like factor analysis and putting labels to clusers. I also remember some of their tests involved someone dressing up in a white sheet and jumping out at the dogs. The fact that the Labrador shows up in the top quartile for aggressiveness suggests that his definition of 'aggressive' doesn't coincide with the usual usage of the word. My Labs put on a good show and don't back down when surprised, and would respond fearlessly to someone in a white sheet. They also seek out the source of power tools or gunshot. But faced with, say, attack by a Jack Russell, they look to me for guidance rather than going into attack mode. Probably better to put this in a fresh thread, but you say: "he's the only one I know of that has data to suggest breeding for the show ring essentially homogenises personality across groups". Has anyone else worked with a large enough data set to draw conclusions about show temperament? Has anyone reworked the Swedish KC's data to come up with different conclusions?

Referemces, please. The only such research I know of is K. Svartberg's 2005 review of temperament study of 13000+ pedigree dogs whose behavior was assessed by the Swedish Kennel Club. (Breed-typical behaviour in dogs—Historical remnants or recent constructs? Applied Animal Behaviour Science 96 (2006) 293–313). Svartberg tabulated four traits, called "playfulness, curiosity/fearlessness, sociability and aggressiveness". (I put this in quotes because I have quibbles with how the behavioral assessment was done. It looks like a dog that raises its hackles but does not attack will get classed as aggressive. ) Svartberg separated show dogs from working dogs (including dogs entered in any sort of performance trial). He concluded that: "selection for dog show use is positively correlated with social and non-social fearfulness, and negatively with playfulness, curiosity in potentially threatening situations and aggressiveness,whereas selection for Working dog use is positively correlated with playfulness and aggressiveness. Furthermore, correlation analyses show that popular breeds have higher sociability and playfulness scores than less popular breeds, suggesting that a positive attitude towards strangers is an important characteristic of a functional pet dog and desirable by dog owners. This indicates that selectiontowards use in dog shows may be in conflict with pet dog selection." I don't have the link handy, but you can easily find the full paper online by googling the author's name plus "curiosity/fearlessness". edited to correct errors introduced by cut and paste

The pedigree has potential, but as used, it hides as much as it reveals. How I wish pedigrees were kept like human family trees, with records of year of birth and death. I would love to be able to select for longevity! The easiest thing to pick up from a pedigree, how many titles are behind a dog, is hardly definitive. It does tell whether the owners of a dog's ancestors entered their dogs in dog shows, and it will let you select for dogs that did well in both bench and field. It tells you nothing of a fantastic, healthy dog that was never entered in a show. It lets you see whether there has been line breeding or inbreeding in the last three to five generations. But it's hard work to extend that back to eight to 12 generations as required to get an accurate read on COI. If you want to find out whether the lines are prone to early onset cancer, epilepsy, behavioural problems, or other grave, potentially genetic faults, forget it. Btw, there are dogs that don't have the right look for the breed whose pedigrees are faultless. If you breed two solid colored Labradors who are heterozygous at the K locus, you can expect that around 1/4 of the pups will come out with mismarks, eg., some brindling or black and tan looks. The pedigree does not guarantee against recessive traits that occasionally get expressed through the lottery of genetic mixing.

Thanks Nekhbet. Useful info, and you're right about the binders and fillers being potentially hazardous even if the active ingredient is fine. My old girl went into cluster seizures on pyretheroids (the artificial ones) in a spot on flea control product, so I'm a little afraid of pyrethrin.

Do look at the map in the SMH article. Many, perhaps most, councils report no attacks. In Central Darling the rate is over 4 per 1000! The geographical variation is bigger than the breed specific variation.

I'd tend to find these stats credible because 'breed not identified' is several times more common than any breed. Also, the Staffy is #2 in pedigree registrations in Australia, with numbers comparable to Labbies. In general Staffies are good at escaping. So they should be high on the list. ASBTs are much more common than APBTs so no surprise that they show up more often. So you'd expect aAmStaffs to outnumber pits. Of course there is reporting bias...I'm much more likely to go to council if a Rotti takes a bite of my hand than if a Daschund does. But that's reasonable....a Rotti is much more likely to do serious damage.

Can anybody explain 'close contact' between dog and horse? Is it entirely clear that the dog was not bitten by a bat?

I don't claim to be an expert, but I have taken a few graduate level business and marketing courses. Marketing is usually done in conjunction with research on what people want in a product, and product development to match what is produced to what the market demands. Some insight on media and dog popularity might come from looking at trends, by breed, of pedigree registrations. The following chart came from the most recent ANKC registration statistics. I just picked a few breeds that either had been getting press in recent years, or had spectacular trends (declines in GSD, Rotti, and rough collie). I think you can see the news affecting trends. Eg, ASBT sees rising popularity, then dampens with all the ugliness about bull breeds and BSL; pug, bulldog, and Cavvies, rising popularity somewhat dampened after PDE and related reporting (bulldog barely affected); Labrador, hit #1 around 2000 and has stayed there. Portuguese water dog saw an Obama effect, and the effect of demand for non-shedding, non-allergenic coats. My gut feeling is that you can't successfully market products that buck underlying social trends. People have smaller families, life in smaller spaces, spend more time indoors, and are less in tune with nature. They want convenient dogs: playful, small, responsive, and cute;. Guardian dog, herding dog, dogs that bark a lot or have high demands for exercise are out. Labbies, despite being medium large and shedding a lot, remain popular due to the free advertizement from guide dogs, toilet paper adds, and Marley and me (also the fact that they are playful and make wonderful companions, but that's my personal prejudice). I've barely scratched the surface on this. Looking at ALL registrations to see what breeds have risen and which fallen would be useful. But it's more work than I want to put in. But, in general, I think preoccupation with breed standards (especially high maintenance features such as extreme coat), inattention to temperament, and under-appreciation with the 'cute' factor have caused pedigree breeds to loose ground to designer dogs. Bad design means many designer dogs end up in pounds, but that's another story. It's not clear that the 'health' focus of PDE will be effective in the long run. BLOODY SYSTEM WON't let me upload the .jpg I spent a good hour creating. Not sure what's wrong. I'll try to add a graph later.

Every wondered what goes on inside the minds of dog fighters? I just finished an interesting novel, Jesmyn Ward. 2011, Salvage the Bones. (The Kindle version isn't that expensive if your library doesn't have it). It's set in poor, black, rural Mississippi with a Category 5 storm coming onshore (Katerina, the storm that destroyed half of New Orleans). The author uses the voice of a teenage girl, motherless, with three brothers and an alcoholic father. China, a fighting pit bull bitch, belonging to one of the brothers, is one of the main characters in the book. The telling is blunt, not romanticized, and sometimes a little gory (eg, fight descriptions). You get the feeling that it is based on elements of the author's own childhood. It left me with a greater sense of the emotional bonds between fighters and their dogs, but also of the depth of ignorance, and the effects of extreme poverty on owning and breeding dogs. Not a pleasant read, but a good basis for intuiting what is going on in the lives and minds of a class of people that pedigree breeders almost universally despise. Warning, no happy ending, lots of adult content.

A SUSPENDED jail sentence and $15k fines after conviction for three counts of GBH for setting his dogs on people. Sounds like those weren't his only offenses either. AND they let him keep the dogs! You gotta be kidding! If the legal system had given this bastard what he deserves, he'd still be alive today . . . in jail . . . but still breathing. Murder is wrong. But I can see why the townspeople might be protecting the murderer, if that's what is happening.

Yes, thanks!