Should we Ban Certain Breeds of Dogs?

It is a natural reaction following any tragedy to wonder “what could I have done to prevent this?” This sort of hindsight can provide some good, hopefully we never revisist USSR style communism or eugenics. I also think some hindsight is bad. John Stossel has done a great job researching various safety measures and found out that child safety caps on medicines have resulted in 3000 more deaths than would have happened had medicine been stored without safety caps. Stossel has also found out that wearing a bicycle helmet can actually put you in more danger than riding a bike without one. Knee jerk reactions to tragedies often have unintended consequences. (Often unintended consequences are counterintuitive, like the ones Stossel and others have researched over the years.)

This is based on a very simple principle involving the seen and unseen. We see people get mauled by dogs. What we don’t see are the crimes prevented by large agressive dogs. When was the last time you heard about a woman walking a pit bull or a german shepherd getting raped? Salvage yards and many businesses rely on these animals to prevent crime. We don’t see crime that doesn’t happen. We don’t get to measure the negative consequences (dog attacks) to the positive consequences (prevented rapes and companionship).

It is an ongoing battle to hold subjective experience in check and focus on the objective facts. Dog maulings are very rare and are typically a consequence of numerous factors including breed, training, situation, abuse and owner treatment. Almost 40 breeds of dogs have been involved in fatal maulings since 1960 in the U.S. There are typically 15-20 fatal dog maulings a year from a population of 65-80 million dogs. This is, at best, 1 death per year per 3 million animals. That’s a risk factor of .0000003% per year. Your risk of death by lightning, bee stings or accidental drownings in a bucket of water (seriously) far exceeds the risks associated by dogs.

Imagine trying to tell a single woman or a family living Minneapolis in a high crime area that they can’t have what is one of their best lines of household defense? A dog is the one self defense measure people can take that can’t be used against them. Dogs have been bred for their traits for thousands of years by humans and sometimes those traits don’t quite fit into the modern life. It’s inconvenient for us to deal with the negative consequences of anything nowadays, but we don’t get to see the unintended consequences until it’s too late. Let’s not go down another road which leads to the victimization of more people than it prevents.