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that number does seem high, i guess it's worldwide?? I worked insurance claims and dog bites were scary. sooo many cases of kids being bitten on the hands, legs, face, some pretty bad stuff. People don't talk about it but some say "there are two kinds of dog; those that have bitten and those that will." but, fuck cats! dogs rule.
↩ replying to Low Information Voter
Let’s use our common sense here and think about which one of these is more likely to kill a child. Pitbulls were specifically bred for aggression. Now dog fatalities are relatively rare only 72 occurred last year. That said 57 of those attacks were pitbulls of pitbull mixes. Genetics are more important than nurture. Look all you want and you will never find a report of a west highland terrier killing a person. Why? Because they simply don’t have the capacity. Pitbulls do. Now is your pitbull gonna kill your child? Probably not, but 50 families every year find out that their β€œwell trained / sweet” pitbulls mauled their 3 year old to death.
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↩ replying to HODL
DNA test or it wasn't a Pit Bull. I do strongly agree, though, that size and capacity for harm matter. Before the 2000s moral panic around "Pit Bulls", the #1 breed reported in dog attacks was the Labrador. Labs are big enough to cause serious harm, and bred for prey drive. Popular and photogenic, though, so the moral panic fizzled quickly. Before that, German Shepherds were the moral panic breed of the 1980s - but since fashion among bad people moved on long ago, the breed's reputation has improved.
In regions such as SE Asia, dogs tend to be problematic because large numbers are routinely rejected by their owners (perhaps they can no longer afford to feed them) and those dogs end up running free, which in turn means they end up living in packs; reverting back to the lifestyle of their ancestors (i.e., wolves). I once lived in a building that was near to an area of open ground where such a pack lived. So I've seen it all with my own eyes. Rabies is not exactly commonplace in SE Asia, but there's no wild dog you can trust. You have to be constantly on your guard if approached by a pack dog. And many deaths due to Rabies are reported annually. I think they have a similar problem in Australia's Outback. Pack dogs often loiter near to roads, and as a result, traffic accidents can be caused by them. I have known of local people riding motors-scooters, and being bitten by a dog simply due to riding past too close. This is why dogs, in any meaningful survey, can and should be classified as dangerous. And in North Africa, where I once worked, packs of Dogs were a known danger out in the Oil Fields. In such barren areas they become far more aggressive. You'd be a complete idiot to try and pet one of them!
Further research says rabies is the direct link especially in Asia which calls all of that into question. So, it would appear that it’s the transmission from a bite and not actually being mauled to death. If that’s true, then it calls all those figures into question.