On its website, HSUS says that, “Every year, an estimated 4.7 million people are bitten by dogs.” (Not to be outdone, the ASPCA has the following on its website: “50 percent of all children will be bitten by a dog before their 12th birthday.”) But is this true? And are we reduced to a choice between dogs and children?

There is little doubt that some dogs are too dangerous for shelters to safely adopt out. The maiming or death of anyone at the hands of a truly vicious dog is a tragedy. No Kill advocates understand this. But what we have been asking for is rigor in making those determinations, not a system of evaluations based on overkill which is the norm. A system built on protecting dogs and protecting children need not be mutually exclusive. At the end of the day, shelters can save upwards of 93% of dogs and more, without endangering the welfare of children by adopting out aggressive dogs.

In fact, the experiences of shelters who have embraced the culture of lifesaving that No Kill represents prove that the vast majority of dogs who enter shelters are friendly. If we take this as a representative sample of dogs in society, then we do not have either an epidemic or even a significant problem of dangerous dogs in the United States that would justify a further clamp-down. If, on the other hand, we take dogs who enter shelters to be at higher risk of aggression (say, for the sake of argument, we can show that they have less training, spend more time isolated outdoors, have less care than dogs who do not enter shelters), then the situation is actually of less concern since we would expect to see more aggression in shelter dogs than dogs who live with their families their whole lives. And given that 93% of shelter dogs are friendly to kids, cats and dogs—the number is higher if we just isolate aggression to people (about 96-97%)—the fear-based hysteria of dangerous dogs becomes demonstrably false.

What is true, however, is that public health authorities, dog bite lawyers, the Centers for Disease Control, legislators, animal control shelters, police departments, humane societies, and even national animal welfare groups argue that millions of people are bitten every year by dogs. Some of these groups call for a ban on certain breeds, others claim we need to teach or enforce “responsible pet ownership;” others seek more and tougher laws. But just because they say it is so doesn’t make it so. We have to ask the questions: Is any of this justified? And are the claims of a “dog bite epidemic” true?

In fact, they are not. And while our hearts go out to the victims of serious dog bite attacks, there is little in the way of evidence that more regulation, more laws, further crackdowns on dogs is justified as a way to prevent these. At the end of the day, the vast majority of dogs are friendly and will never act aggressively, dogs are already heavily regulated, and there is little by way of additional public policy initiatives (e.g., legislation) that is needed in trying to prevent a “dog bite epidemic” that simply does not exist. HSUS should stop focusing on this type of fear-based advocacy, stop perpetuating myths, and start educating the public about the truth regarding the dogs they theoretically exist to protect, who they fundraise off of, and who they claim they are working to save.

This type of fear mongering stands the HSUS mission on its head. It is not the job of an animal protection group to mimic the claims of a dog bite lawyer. Where there is fear and misinformation which would call for a crackdown on dogs and dog lovers, with little justification and through methods that provide little in the way of actual protection, it is HSUS’ job to quell that, not fan the flames of distortion, as they do in this article.

Despite an explosion in the number of dogs in the U.S. and their greater integration in society, the number of fatal dog attacks has remained relatively constant for decades. You are “five times more likely to be killed by a bolt of lightning” and “four times more likely to be killed by a forklift, even though a very small number of people come into contact with these machines.” [Bradley, Janis, Dogs Bite (2005: James & Kenneth Publishers)] In other words, comparatively speaking, it is exceedingly rare.

Despite this, dogs remain heavily regulated: they must be licensed with local authorities, they cannot go in public places without a leash (if at all), they must be vaccinated against rabies, you can’t live with more than a small number of them, animal control officers can seize and destroy them if they determine that they are a nuisance, and the threshold of making a determination that they are dangerous and subject to extermination puts dogs at a disadvantage, even when the facts show otherwise. Together, license laws, leash laws, vaccination laws, pet limit laws, nuisance laws, health codes, property laws, and dangerous dog laws control dogs, in concert with an animal sheltering system built on overkill, that there is little justification to tighten the noose even further.

We will never eliminate risk in society. We can minimize it, but in the case of dogs, there is little more that can and should be done. And, in many ways, we need to undo some of the laws and regulations because they allow friendly dogs to be killed without making anyone safer (such as breed bans).

Banning Pit Bulls or any breed of dog is geared to overkill by definition because—media hysteria to the contrary—the vast majority of dog bites occur within the home by many breeds, with the dog biting a member of the family after some provocation, a different causal mechanism than the false image presented: an epidemic of free roaming Pit Bulls attacking unknown children or the elderly. As a result, a breed ban won’t stop the vast majority of dog bites. On top of that, roughly 20% of those bites are a result of the dog defending him or her-self from being attacked.

And although HSUS-through-Jon Katz says that “Millions of Americans seek medical attention every year for animal bites or attacks,” what they don’t say is that over 92% of dog bites result in no injuries. Let me repeat, over nine out of ten bites that do occur result in no one getting hurt. And of those which do result in injury, 7.5% are minor. In fact, they are less severe than any other class of injury. That leaves less than 1% (0.08% to be exact) of all bites ranking at moderate or above.

Even if HSUS is correct that 4.7 million people are bitten by dogs each year (they are not), only 0.0002% result in death. And over 4.66 million people don’t actually have anything to really show for it. On top of that, of the 92% which do not result in any injury, the vast majority of those don’t constitute force, in that they do not result in pain or restraint. (I am not downplaying even the death or maiming of a single person. It is tragic. And as an animal control director, I had no tolerance for the adoption of aggressive dogs. But creating public policy—and shelter standards—needs careful and thoughtful deliberation, not incendiary fanaticism that reduces everything to a meaningless debate about the value of dogs vs. children).

So where did this notion come from that the U.S. has a dog bite epidemic? The numbers are simply flawed extrapolations from two government studies which took a poorly formulated and overly restrictive sample of the population (one reported six dog bites, the other 38) and then simply multiplied those numbers by how many people live in the U.S. That’s correct. It is an extrapolation of six dog bites! This is the same unscientific method used by HSUS in the past to demonize feral cats by claiming they are killing hundreds of millions of songbirds, when the facts show otherwise.

When we argue in extremes (the child or the dog), when we set up the problem as a battle of absolutes (no dog should be killed vs. all dogs can be killed), when we demonize people who think we kill too much (dogs are “quasi-religious objects of veneration”), when we pretend to be animal welfare yet profess the beliefs of a system based on killing, we do a disservice to our movement, our kids, and our dogs. And while Jon Katz (wrongly) believes that “for every troubled or aggressive animal kept alive for months or years, healthy and adoptable animals go wanting for homes and often lose their lives,” the truth once again is more sobering. “Healthy and adoptable animals” are being killed in shelters because many shelters cling to regressive, archaic policies that allow them to kill dogs; and, because HSUS provides them the political cover which allows them to continue. And as long as we allow that as a society and as a movement, dogs will continue to be unfairly blamed and unnecessarily killed because of it.

PART 3 POSTED SOON