It’s National Dog Bite Prevention week, and a perfect time to share a bit of useful information that might help protect a human and a dog. Most dog bite incidences are not what you might imagine: a human getting bitten by a dog they have just met or are unfamiliar with. In fact, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association, the vast majority of dog bites involve a familiar dog. A majority of those bites involves a child. These unfortunate statistics show that early education could have prevented most harm done by dog bites. The brunt of these cases are not rogue dogs running around biting strangers, they are kids missing signs to stop, give space, or find an adult. These signs are shown almost exclusively through body language, which has to be explained to be understood. Most of the kids injured by their family dog simply don’t know how to safely interact with a dog, or they are too young to be taught and should only interact with their dog under the watchful eye of an adult. If a dog is scared, stressed, threatened, easily startled, sick, or sore, it’s especially important for the adults in the equation to observe all interactions with kids.
Of course, the rest of the dog bites that occur annually happen under different circumstances. A dog who lacked socialization as a puppy might have issues with boundaries as a grown dog. A puppy who was encouraged to play by nipping hands rather than by redirection to an appropriate toy is practicing nipping behavior with humans so biting might become a natural extension. Some dogs who are sick or injured might bite in an effort to get a human to stop handling them because it hurts. Plenty of cases fall under the old adage: “let a sleeping dog lie.” When dogs are startled out of sleep, they can be scared and might react rather than respond. Dogs with a long history of maltreatment and abuse might learn that the only way to protect themselves is with their teeth. Dogs trained with the intention of them biting, like police dogs and guard dogs cannot be discussed under the same umbrella. There are outliers in any curve, but the bulk of dog bites have the same few causes. Just like humans, dogs pushed past their threshold of bearable stress and fear may lash out.
Without an understanding of dog body language, things get lost in translation. It’s important to remove stressors to our dogs when they first show signs of discomfort or fear, and not to allow that stress to build to the breaking point. Tense muscles, squared shoulders, curled lips, panting with no relation to temperature, trembling, cowering, and hiding are all signs that your dog is having a bad time! It’s your responsibility to find out what it is that is causing distress and to remove the dog from that situation as soon as possible. Some stressors can be very subtle, and so can the body language signs from your dog. “Calming signals” are signs that a dog is attempting to calm themselves down, and they can be as subtle as a head turned intentionally away from someone trying to interact with them, or an eye open extra wide and bugging out. The stressor might not be bothering you at all. It might be loud music, too many people in the house, too many dogs at the dog park, a kid with a nerf gun, or even a kid armed with nothing but enthusiasm. When a normally friendly dog is chased and cornered with no escape, their demeanor might change suddenly. They are scared! Each dog is different, and each day is different. Reading dog body language to the best of our abilities is a constant responsibility as dog owners and we owe it to our dogs to not set them up to fail. Listen to quiet signs that your dog is stressed and do not allow them to escalate to loud signs like growling, barking, lunging, or biting.
There are a few scenarios that can often increase stress and pose a much greater risk. A dog having a resource such as food or a toy is one such situation with a higher bite potential. We are lucky that we have so many dogs as house pets that do not display resource guarding (manifested in protective behaviors around food, beds, toys, etc) and we should do our best to understand those who do display the undesirable behavior. There are many training options that might help your resource-guarding dog, but the best practice from when you first notice the behavior is to manage it carefully. Do not give your kids the chance to accidentally take a valuable resource from your dog and get hurt in the process. Resource-guarding dogs should be fed on their own and toys should be carefully managed.
Along the same lines as resource guarding is barrier reactivity. Some dogs are happy to interact with others when there is no physical barrier between them but the presence of a barrier can change their behavior about a greeting. It can be unsafe for a kid (or an adult!) to reach over a fence to pet a dog. Further, everyone ought to know that dogs are only safely approached with permission from their owner and from the dog themselves. Some of the dog bites that occur each year happen while the owner isn’t present, and the dog is scared by a stranger approaching. Owners also often “force” their dogs to “say hi” to people when the dog is showing signs of stress. Those were missed opportunities for the humans to practice good verbal communication. For instance: “My dog doesn’t look like he feels like a greeting right now. Maybe another day.” If dog owners don’t communicate verbally, they miss opportunities to protect themselves, their dogs, and others. And, if people don’t learn to speak the language their dog speaks, misunderstanding is almost inevitable!
It’s the hope that dog bite incidences will decrease as education on the issue increases. Dog bites can cause serious damage to people and most can be prevented! The consequences for dogs who have bitten a human are sometimes deadly, and it’s sad to know that it’s usually humans that failed the dog in those scenarios. We take our pups into our homes and our hearts and we ought to bring them into our conversations and classrooms as well. A bit of free education can go a long way in protecting harm on either side: human or canine.
Blog post by Emily Jacobs, Summit Admin & Content Specialist
Graphic by Amber Quann KPA-CTP, CPDT-KSA