Dogs threatened by click-bait
A letter from No Kill Advocacy Center director Nathan Winograd
Dear colleagues:
A USA Today article claims that “More and more in recent years, dogs have bitten, mauled and killed in America.” But there is no evidence to support this claim.
The author writes that dog bites have increased “from the most recent estimate 20 years ago of 4.5 million to untold millions today.” “Untold” is not an estimate. It is not evidence. It isn’t even a number. And it certainly isn’t falsifiable. That makes it unreliable, at best. In truth, it appears to be junk.
Buried beneath the click-bait headline and some tragic case examples, the article’s author admits real numbers are impossible to come by. The article cites experts who track dog bite data, including research associates at Harvard University’s Canine Aggression Project, who confessed that “There's no way to tell how many dog bites happen each year in the United States.”
Admittedly, the number of dogs living with people in the U.S. has dramatically increased in the last 20 years, so one should not be surprised if dog bites have likewise increased. But one should not be surprised if they haven’t either, as our relationship with dogs has gotten better in the last two decades, including most dogs living in our homes, going on walks, joining us on errands and outings, and even coming with us to work. This means more socialization and more socialization means fewer bites.
Moreover, the salient question is whether dog bite rates have increased. And in cases where numbers are available, the trend appears to be in the opposite direction. For example, the author writes that “Emergency room visits due to dog bites decreased from almost 363,000 in 2012 to 317,000 in 2021,” according to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), despite millions more dogs in the U.S.
While it appears the number of fatal dog attacks has increased, they remain under 100, roughly the same number as are killed by forklifts, and 99% of the population do not interact with forklifts. By comparison, most Americans come into regular contact with dogs. While fatal dog attacks are tragic, the CDC notes that they remain “rare,” involving roughly 0.0001% of the dog population. Moreover, “Experts say the number of annual fatalities from a dog bite is small enough that measuring year-to-year trends becomes difficult.”
“The numbers are just too small to crunch… What that means is that there’s nothing meaningful statistically that you can do with that if it changes somewhat from year to year, even if there appears to be a trend.”
Given the lack of meaningful data and countervailing trends where such data exists — such as emergency room visits — it is premature to declare a crisis and even more premature to call for the killing of dogs, as many of those the author relied on and cited in the article do. This includes a woman who started a dog bites website after a dog bit her. Before pivoting to dog-killing advocacy, she ran a fortune-telling business as a “clairvoyant,” calling herself “divine lady” and claiming she could speak to the dead and predict the future.
For the animals,
Nathan Winograd
Executive Director