Dog attack fatality NSW

Regular readers of this blog will know I have a two year old toddler.

The news today that a NSW two year old was killed by a relative’s dog overnight makes my heart ache. Two year olds are just babies. They are completely innocent and they have their whole lives ahead of them. They find almost euphoric joy in a running tap. Dirty puddles. Walking on the beach. And of course, their pets.

But they are also completely blind to danger. My toddler is a twit – just as she should be. She cannot be trusted – not even the smallest amount – to do the ‘right’ or the safe thing. Given the chance, she does crazy, breath-stoppingly risky things. The biggest risks are the inane everyday things. Carparks and roads. Swimming pools. Electricity. Those little button battery things. Choking on crap she’s gotten somehow. And almost ironically, the pets.

These things pose the biggest threat to her safety because they’re there. And they’re ‘invisible’ because they’re the every day things.

As a parent you try try try to keep them safe. In the back of your mind you are worrying always. You have nightmares where something goes wrong. But if you’re going to be able to live, you also can’t worry too much. You have to find the sweet spot between nervous wreck and top-of-the-big-kids-slide.

And sometimes we get it wrong. Hopefully no one dies. Sometimes they do.

Dogs are remarkably safe animals. In Australia there are more than 3 million of them and only a handful will ever cause a human a deliberate injury. A small percentage (likely in the single figures), will injure a human accidentally during a dog-on-dog incident. While the rest will live their entire 10 – 15 year lifespan having never caused harm to anyone. Less than one person a year is fatally injured in Australia. And these facts are remarkable especially considering practically all dogs have the physical ability to cause humans great damage.

Learning why dogs do injure humans isn’t about assigning blame. It’s about incident prevention. And I say incident, because a dog bite or attack is rarely truly an ‘accident’. It is nearly always the result of several, often common, risk factors or behaviours which set the dog – and often the baby human – up to fail.

A two-year-old boy killed by a dog in south-western NSW was reportedly getting an ice-cream when the animal attacked.

The toddler was at his grandmother’s house in Deniliquin when he was mauled by his cousin’s mastiff cross about 2.30pm on Sunday.

It is believed the boy had gone outside to get an ice-cream from a fridge when the dog followed him back inside and attacked.

Police said the boy’s grandmother tried to intervene but she had been unable to force the dog to release the child.

The boy’s mother arrived at the Victoria Street house during the attack and managed to fight the dog off.

‘‘She’s just arrived midway through and found this happening,’’ a police spokeswoman said.

The boy suffered critical injuries and was taken to Deniliquin Hospital, where he died.

The Sydney Morning Herald

This situation leaves me in despair. It was an almost perfect storm for a death in this family.

A large breed dog, owned by a third person, was involved. It was outside rather than indoors with the family. Dogs being socialised to children is a skill that dogs learn through kind, regular and totally-and-utterly supervised exposure. This dog was owned by a 24-year-old cousin and likely had only limited socialisation to children.

The incident occured away from home, while visiting relatives. Unlike home, which is often totally ‘baby-proofed’, other people’s homes are generally less safe and less set up to protect toddlers.

The toddler’s mother wasn’t immediately available and it seems the child was being cared for by the grandmother. Primary caregivers are no doubt more intuitive to potential hazards being that they know their kid’s abilities intimately.

The child was an under ten. And in this case, just two years old. Children are almost exponentially more likely to be injured because they don’t read dog body language warnings, can be seen as ‘weird’ or a threat, are often at face height (threatening eye to eye contact) and can’t defend themselves if things do go wrong.

The toddler was allowed to interact with this likely unfamiliar dog, with no one immediately available to intervene or coach appropriate behaviour between dog and child.

And finally, throw in a bit of food.

This dog wasn’t seen as a threat. The family described it as a ‘family pet’. Like other ‘invisible’ household hazards, the risk came from being under-aware of the potential for harm.

Again, this is not about blame, but understanding. A toddler and a unfamiliar large breed dog, interacting unsupervised, around food is setting everyone up to fail. And they did fail. A child is dead and a family has been torn apart. The guilt and grief will be overwhelming. And as a mum, I will have cried in sympathy for this family.

But we have to learn from this. And we have to think about this. We have to stop setting our dogs and our children up for disaster. There aren’t many cases where ‘education’ makes all the difference – but in the case of kids and dogs and safe interactions, there is a huge potential to make everyone safer with just some basic dog-behaviour knowledge.

Check out the Dogs ‘n’ Kids program:

This program is a joint initiative of the Royal Children’s Hospital Safety Centre in Melbourne, the Children’s Injury Prevention Working Party, other child safety units, local government authorities and maternal and child health services. It is a national education program targeted at parents of young children (0-4 years) to help parents model and teach the correct behaviour inside and
outside of the home environment.
http://www.petnet.com.au/dogs-n-kids-booklet/
http://blogs.rch.org.au/news/2009/12/02/helping-dogs-n-kids-get-along/

RIP to this little baby and love and healing thoughts to the family at this terrible time.