January 20, 2009Comments are closed.dogs
An article on dog attacks which actually contains information from a dog behaviour expert looks like this:
Dogs that attack people should not necessarily be euthanased, a Sydney animal behaviour expert says.
Commenting on a dog attack that killed a young girl in a small town in southern New South Wales, Kirsty Seksel from the Sydney Animal Behaviour Centre says under certain circumstances, all dogs are potentially harmful.
“The key rule is that no child under the age of eight should be left unsupervised with any dogs, ever,” she said.
“What we usually say to people is supervision means one adult for the child and one adult for the dog, especially if the dog hasn’t been exposed to children before.”
Ms Seksel said any dog attack was a tragedy, but they often happened because dogs felt frightened.
“Children are very unpredictable,” she said.
“They act differently to adults.
“They are shorter, they have high-pitched voices.”
Children sometimes injured dogs without meaning to, she said.
“We’ve had cases where dogs have bitten kids that have poked pencils into their ear or put sparklers up the dog’s nose.”
Police have asked for the four mixed-breed dogs involved in today’s attack to be euthanased.
Ms Seksel said euthanasia was not necessarily the best solution to the problem.
“There’s a lot more to it than saying ‘Oh, it’s a bad dog’.
“It’s not necessarily that bigger dogs are nastier dogs.
“It just means there is potential to do greater damage purely because of their size.
“People sometimes forget that small dogs can also inflict wounds,” she said.
No quite so melodramatic as the ‘kill the child-eating dogs‘ articles that are getting so much attention; but there you go.
As tragic as any incident is where a child is attacked or even worse killed by a dog, I often wonder what the child did to provoke the attack, and even more importantly, where were the child’s parents or another supervising adult when the attack took place?
It is easy to blame the dog in this situation, it can’t speak to defend itself and say what really happened.
I know my own extremely placid dog would get very upset if she was overly harrassed by a child. There were would be very few dogs in the world that wouldn’t. But I would not let that happen, because I would never leave my dog and a child unsupervised.
The media is very quick to jump on any dog attack story because it sells, but I wonder how many journalists would be willing to write such a story if it was their own dog involved in the incident. How would the slant on the reporting change if that were the case? Would they be making excuses for their dog’s actions, instead of demanding it be euthanased and calling for more breed specific legislation?
Media reports also tend to label most dogs involved in these attacks as “pitbulls” and often show stock footage/photos of pitbulls when very often the dogs are not pitbulls or even pitbull crosses at all. This is simply because this fuels the BSL argument and justifies the banning of these and related breeds.
Any dog can bite, there are many dog bite/attack incidents which are never covered by the media because the dog was something boring like a small white fluffy or a chihuahua.
It is terrible to think of anyone being attacked by a dog, but the reality is a dog is an animal, not a person. They can only react as an animal; they can’t say, “Excuse me, can you stop doing that please?” if they feel threatened or unsafe.
I believe many dogs have been unjustly euthanased in similar situations, because it is human nature to blame someone, and in a case like this it is almost always the dog that is blamed.
Dr Kersti Seksel is an acknowledged expert in the field of animal behaviour. I applaud her for her comments and hope that many more people take them on board. Well done Shel, on spreading the word.
Wendy Herne
Associate Producer
Pet Talk Radio!