Yes, I realized when I posted them that they might not be authoritative. I spent about 5 minutes Googling and could find nothing suitable. I realized that they were not "professional" sites, but that is what I could find in a short time, and due to other matters at hand at the time, that was the amount of time I could give it. If you could provide me with those scientific sources, I would be happy to bookmark them and use them only in the future. I am a dog lover and I'm not interested in propagating misinformation (intentionally or not), and I am comfortable with large breeds with "reputations". I have owned a pit-mix, and we loved her and she us for 16 years. She was a good dog. I've owned a ridgeback (best breed on the planet, IMHO), and have been on friendly terms with dobies and rottweilers. Every pitbull I've ever met has been a friendly and happy-go-lucky kind of doggie. My current dog is a boxer/lab mix, and my son has an 85 lb male boxer. Both are such goofballs that it is hard to believe there are people who are specifically afraid of boxers, but every once in a while, somebody expresses exactly such a fear. I believe that there is no such thing as a "bad" breed.....only stupid and/or bad people who screw up good dogs or are otherwise irresponsible owners.....and only occasionally an individual dog with the equivalent of doggie psychiatric issues.TVGuy wrote:FYI, your source material is unscientific and incorrect. There is no source info on puppytoob.com, dogsbite.org is a website created as propaganda by one woman that was bitten by a dog, and dognotebook.com is another unscientific site with no source info.
There are a number of scientific studies to the contrary of these points and using these mentioned above as fact is as bad as what Moms Demand Action uses for source material.
I did work in a large ER for several years, and saw the occasional dog-bite victim, but my guess is that I probably only saw 1 in 100s, since most probably never required anything beyond slapping a bandaid on it, and the victim never went to an ER. The ones I did see were caused by larger breeds with a reputation, and in a couple of cases, the injuries were fairly significant—as in, requiring plastic surgery to repair a hand or something. But, I never saw someone who had been mauled with multiple injuries over their bodies.
I believe that the entire reason we see stories in the news of people mauled and torn apart by loose dogs, especially in packs, is because the events are SO rare that they are newsworthy. And of course, if it bleeds, it leads, so when one story happens, reporters get out their lemming-powered microscopes and start trying to dig up more stories like it. The stories lead because they appeal to some kind of atavistic terror in our genetic memory of being pursued and torn apart by wild beasts. But in reality, they bear little resemblance to modern reality. Do they happen? Yes. But this is not life on the Serengeti 25,000 years ago, and while dog-bites are fairly common, serious maulings and killings are actually fairly rare.
The quandary for the CHL holder is trying to figure out if the dog rushing at him is doing anything more than a territorial threat display. My personal standard requires discernment, and includes other factors like whether or not I have my granddaughter in my arms, whether I'm walking alone or with my wife, whether I am carrying a walking stick or not, etc., etc. I'm not going to shoot a dog for threatening me. Some "attacks" are actually just threat displays, and nobody needs to die for that reason. It does place me at somewhat of a disadvantage. My self-imposed standard means that I will not shoot until actually attacked. However, if you stop and think about it, that is the same standard that we all operate under with other human beings. I'm not allowed to shoot someone because he told me......from 10-20 feet away......that he was going to whip my butt. He has to actually make moves to start carrying that out before I can shoot him. That's generalized, of course, but that is essentially what is happening when a dog puts on a threat display.......it's just the doggie version of "I'm going to whip your butt" until the moment he actually rushes me. And I am NOT going to shoot a dog that I am fully capable of punting across the street, no matter how vicious its intentions. A Chihuahua simply is unable to do much worse than get ahold of the hem of my jeans and bullyrag it. I can kick a dog that size into next week. I don't have to shoot it.
True Story:
Like Abraham, I have been chased by dogs on my bicycle back in the day, but never bitten. Oddly, in the closest call I ever had, a large dog of undetermined breed (it was midnight at the time on an otherwise deserted street) got his open maw THIS close to my left ankle. The odd part was how I responded. I worked the 3:00pm-11:30pm shift in the ER, and for the first couple of years I worked there, I bicycled to and from work.....a distance of perhaps 5 miles each way. Anyway, when that dog was about to clamp down on my ankle, I reacted so instinctively that it surprised even me. Instead of redoubling my efforts to flee (which were futile anyway at the rate that he was overtaking me), or trying to take a swing at him with my left hand, I turned to face the left side, bent my face down closer to his, bared my own teeth and bellowed a growl back at him really loud right in his face, which kind of stunned him out of attack mode and he broke off the chase. Meanwhile of course, I found myself heading straight for the curb instead of going down the middle of the street, and I had to way over-correct to keep from crashing the bike. But I never did fall off, and I remember kind of replaying in my mind what had happened as I rode the rest of the way home. It was such a primal reaction, and I had never planned out any such thing before. That growl of mine came from somewhere deep in the Limbic System of my brain, and it was pure angry-caveman. It just erupted out of me. This happened sometime around 1980-81, so I was roughly 28 years old. 35 years later, that memory has stayed with me in great detail......so it was significant to me on some level.
But even that dog wasn't a "bad" dog. He was just out at night patrolling what he thought of as his territory, and an interloper on two wheels came blasting through. His owners were bad owners, but he was just a dog being a dog. I actually think that if I had been on foot instead of a bike, it might have played out differently; with him barking at me and making a threat display, but not actually charging me. The faster moving bike triggered his prey response and he gave chase. But at the moment when I growled, hunter became potential prey, and he broke off the attack.