Merritt Clifton list: updated, still with chox-mix goodness

The latest version [as far as I know] of Merritt Clifton's list of selected dog attacks has been posted here, at Scribd, by someone who sucks at Photoshop.

The chox mix is still listed, along with the buff mastiff, the Dauschund, the East Highland Terrier and the Weimaeaner. The Australian cattle dog, the Australian blue heeler, the Blue heeler and the Queensland heeler are still listed as separate breeds.

One big change: the Analysis section of the report has been removed. And in his brief introduction, Clifton adds a paragraph defending his numbers. Click for big:


Seriously, I could beat my head on rocks. Merritt Clifton has no idea how many dog attacks there are each year by any given breed. No one does. The last time I checked, not one state kept track of dog attacks by breed. We do know that over 6,000 people were hospitalized as a result of dog attacks in the US in one year:

From the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report: “Of an estimated 333,700 patients treated for dog bites in emergency departments (EDs) in 1994, approximately 6,000 were hospitalized.”

For the record, Clifton's latest report states that "Pit bulls, Rottweilers, Presa Canarios, and their mixes" were responsible for a total of 1894 attacks "doing bodily harm" in the US and Canada from 1982 to 2008. Clifton still lumps every sort of mixed breed with "purebreds" [while stating that "only attacks by dogs of clearly identified breed type or ancestry are included"]. This approach has no basis in science or anything else.

Related — I think:

Law enforcement officials classified the dog in the Jan. 3 attack as a pit bull, boxer and black lab mix.

One magazine editor simplified this classification of dog.

“It’s a mongrel basically,” Wash.-based Animal People editor Merritt Clifton said.

He also said insurance representatives and dog wardens will often classify the dog by what type of dog it looks like. This classification has little to do with genetics, he said, because often shelter operators are simply attempting to determine the risk the dog will fight with other dogs.

Though some might label pit bulls as aggressive, Clifton said pit bulls are often reactive because of the fact they were originally trained to hunt rats on ships. However, because of their size and their inability to pull large amounts of cargo from ships, they were not considered apt for either job and instead began being bred for dogfighting on the docks.

This rat-killing, he said, has made them more reactive.

He also talked about the head-shaking mechanism pit bulls would use to kill the rat, which in bites causes the tearing of skin, causing more damage than other dog bites. However, he said this can be combated by pushing the arm or other appendage further into the dog’s mouth, which will force a release. [Source]

Inconceivable. Really. Big hat tip to the most excellent Caveat for the link to that, er... fascinating article.

Indifference to the truth is worse than lying: BSL and the curse of false equivalencies

The truth is not "somewhere in the middle."

Here is the truth about breed-specific legislation, from veterinary animal behaviorist Dr. Karen Overall: "Breed specific laws are not based in science. [Laws] banning breeds will not make you safer, and the illusion that they will do so is dangerous to humans and unfair to dogs."

The facts back her up. So why are various city councils so determined to ignore the science? Because it's easier to imagine that the truth is somewhere in the middle. It requires less courage and a lot less work. Russell Baker — quoted by the late, great Molly Ivins back in 1987, so help me, and things haven't gotten better — explains how "balance" works. Boldface is mine:

In the classic example, a refugee from Nazi Germany who appears on television saying monstrous things are happening in his homeland must be followed by a Nazi spokesman saying Adolf Hitler is the greatest boon to humanity since pasteurized milk. Real objectivity would require not only hard work by news people to determine which report was accurate, but also a willingness to put up with the abuse certain to follow publication of an objectively formed judgment. To escape the hard work or the abuse, if one man says Hitler is an ogre, we instantly give you another to say Hitler is a prince. A man says the rockets won't work? We give you another who says they will.

The public may not learn much about these fairly sensitive matters, but neither does it get another excuse to denounce the media for unfairness and lack of objectivity. In brief, society is teeming with people who become furious if told what the score is.

And here is Ivins herself [both quotes from her book Who Let the Dogs In?]:

The American press has always had a tendency to assume that the truth must lie exactly halfway between any two opposing points of view. Thus, if the press presents the man who says Hitler is an ogre and the man who says Hitler is a prince, it believes it has done the full measure of its journalistic duty.

This tendency has been aggravated in recent years by a noticeable trend to substitute people who speak from a right-wing ideological perspective for those who know something about a given subject. Thus, we see, night after night, on MacNeil/Lehrer or Nightline, people who don't know jack about Iran or Nicaragua or arms control, but who are ready to tear up the pea patch in defense of the proposition that Ronald Reagan is a Great Leader beset by comsymps. They have nothing to offer in the way of facts or insight; they are presented as a way of keeping the networks from being charged with bias by people who are replete with bias and resistant to fact. The justification for putting them on the air is that "they represent a point of view."

The odd thing about these television discussions designed to "get all sides of the issue" is that they do not feature a spectrum of people with different views on reality: Rather, they frequently give us a face-off between those who see reality and those who have missed it entirely. In the name of objectivity, we are getting fantasyland.

Now imagine a city council meeting, which shouldn't be too much of a leap. Members of the city council are 1) debating whether to ban certain dogs based not on their behavior or temperament but on their physical appearance, and 2) turning their backs on the concerns of law-abiding citizens whose good dogs have never harmed or threatened to harm anyone.

There are two opposing points of view.

• Strongly opposed to breed bans are the real experts at the CDC; the AVMA; the authors of A Community Approach to Dog Bite Prevention; and virtually every competent dog-trainer, veterinary animal behaviorist and humane organization in North America.


• In favor of breed banning: someone who quotes an odd "study" lacking citations and footnotes and filled with misspellings, misstatements and some of the nuttiest dog behavior analysis since Thurber's mother.

And the city council, if it is sufficiently replete with bias and resistant to fact [not all of them are, thank God], will pat itself on the back for its "balance" and cast its deciding vote in favor of those who have missed reality entirely.

"We create our own reality," as the man said. The truth is somewhere in the middle! So we ignore science, we fill law-abiding citizens with anguish, and when we feel like it, we confiscate and kill their good dogs.

*************

Those who like to keep their bullshit detectors honed might want to check out the links in the Vagabond Scholar's posts on Faulty Argument Patterns and False Equivalencies. H/T to Batocchio for the Molly Ivins lead.

[Universal B.S. Detector Watch from Gizmodo.]

Nitwit

Not a "chox mix." Not a "buff mastiff," either: a "shred of historical evidence" for Merritt Clifton. Click on photos to enlarge.

How unnerving it must seem, how humiliating, to be a professional breed-basher this week! Spend years stoking the urban legend machine, and what happens? Famous athlete gets busted for dogfighting, his "ticking time bombs" turn out to be good dogs, and the news is all about friendly pit bulls nestled in the loving arms of their foster moms and dads, or playing happily with other dogs. Playing with children, even.

It's almost enough to make a person feel sorry for Merritt Clifton. Almost.

Clifton is the editor, and I use the term loosely, who lists the "chox mix," the “Dauschund," the “East Highland terrier,” the “Weimaeaner,” the “Buff Mastiff,” etc. among dogs that bite: these are "clearly identified" animals, he states, labeled by people "with evident expertise." ["Clearly identified" and "evident expertise" also mean that the blue heeler, the Australian blue heeler, the Queensland heeler and the Australian cattle dog are described as separate breeds in Clifton's odd tabulation of dog bites, and mixes are lumped together with dogs labeled purebreds.]

No MLA format for Clifton: no footnotes, no in-text citations, no pages of works cited. And because some editors, reporters and columnists can't tell a peer-reviewed study from a pig in a poke, Clifton enjoys a certain amount of air time. Here he is on CNN, talking about pit bulls in general and the Vick dogs in particular:

Considering the risk the fighting dogs pose to shelters, potential owners and other animals, "they just don't have a chance," Clifton said.

"You can compare it to what happens with exotic cats and people who keep tigers in their backyard. It's not the tiger's fault, but you are still on the menu. They are victims, but you do have to treat them as animals that belong in maximum security."

Imagine how ignorant and how biased you'd have to be to make that sort of remark.

Now that the wheel of Karma is bearing down on him, Clifton is beginning to sound shrill:

Merritt Clifton, editor of Animal People, takes issue with my previous post, in which I wrote: "Remember that only a generation or two ago, pit bulls were renowned as 'America's family dog.'"

He promptly e-mails me, saying:

This is a total fiction. There isn't a shred of historical evidence that pit bulls ever amounted to more than 1% of the total U.S. dog population until under 15 years ago, or that they were ever commonly kept as family pets (or indeed by anyone except dogfighters) until then.

Clifton says that between 1900 and 1950 [according to search results on the NewspaperArchive.com website] 35 breeds of dog accounted for 3.5 million newspaper articles or ads which included the word "dog" and a mention of the breed's name.

Pit bull terriers, Staffordshires, and American bulldogs account for 34,770 results, roughly 1% of the 3.5 million, leading Clifton to believe that from 1900 to 1950 "pit bulls" made up no more than 1% of the U.S. dog population.

There are so many things wrong with this, it's hard to tell where to start.

Forget duplicate ads. Forget multiple references to Lassie and Rin-Tin-Tin and Balto. Forget short stories, movie and book reviews, and breed names used figuratively or used in advertising. Forget the regional, racial and socioeconomic factors that affect what goes into a newspaper. And most of all, forget that Clifton failed to search for bulldogs and bull terriers: the two names most closely associated with the "pit bull" breed in the first half of the 20th century. Set all that aside, and the bias and ignorance still loom large. "Not a shred of historical evidence!" Not a shred, dammit!

To digress just a bit, how is it that people who don't know anything about dogs become dog experts? How is it that Jon Katz -- who allows his dogs to worry sheep and calls it "herding," who believes stockdogs are trained with a clicker, who views the no-kill sheltering movement as a threat to America's children, who [as far as anyone knows] has never trained a dog to do much of anything and has never attended a real sheepdog trial even as a spectator -- how is it that Jon Katz has become, in his publisher's words, "one of the country's most respected" writers on dogs?

How is it that Merritt Clifton -- who wouldn't recognize scientific research if he tripped over it, who thinks German shepherds are bred to "herd," who can't be troubled to edit his spelling errors or find out what dogs are really bred for, who has [as far as anyone knows] never cared for or trained or even patted a pit bull, who has written about "the custom" [known only to him, apparently] "of docking pit bulls' tails so that warning signals are not easily recognized," and who writes that "temperament is not the issue, nor is it even relevant," since virtually all pit bulls are "bad moments" waiting to happen -- how is it that Clifton has become an "expert" on the breed?


"There isn't a shred of historical evidence" [Clifton writes] that pit bulls "were ever commonly kept as family pets (or indeed by anyone except dogfighters)" until the 1980s.

Wrong. Again.

On the left: one example of a pit bull on a citrus crate label. I grew up in a region famous for its citrus crops, and love historic crate labels. Lots of the old ones feature popular breeds -- Airedales, Saint Bernards -- and these days modern breeds are occasionally photoshopped into old citrus labels. The Pup Brand label is an authentic oldie. This facsimile is for sale here.

At the top of this post is a photo of a book called The Dog Album. From the dust jacket: "For the nineteenth-century businessman, newly engaged couple, or Victorian family dressed in their Sunday best, a photo session was indeed a special occasion. Which makes it all the more fascinating to see how often the family dog participated in the event." The Dog Album includes a dozen or so photos of pit bull type dogs with their people. There are more pit bulls in this book than collies. More pit bulls than pugs, in fact. Even more pit bulls than Saint Bernards.

Vintage photos of people and their pit bulls are a staple on eBay. Here's a link to the photo below.


And here's a shot of a handsome pit bull with a group of railroad engineers:



On the right, a postcard of a lady. No, Zelig fans, it's not the same dog ;~)

A pit bull is the subject of New Yorker icon James Thurber's classic Snapshot of a Dog. "'An American bull terrier,' we used to say, proudly; none of your English bulls." "American bull terrier" was one of many names given to the dog now called a pit bull, according to American Kennel Gazette editor Arthur Frederick Jones. Jones wrote a chapter on terriers for the National Geographic Book of Dogs, and began the chapter with an appreciation of Joffre, the Staffordshire terrier his family owned when Jones was a boy.

Anyone familiar with pit bulls knows that these dogs have always been called bulldogs in rural areas and in southern parts of the U.S. When Laura Ingalls Wilder writes about the family bulldog, Jack, she's writing about a dog we would recognize as a pit bull. In the great children's book Sounder the dog of the title is half hound, half bulldog: that is, half pit bull.

Listen to Texan Jim Crainer of Hawgs, Dawgs, and Hunting:

Hello David,

I appreciate you taking the time to write. Your question is "Do I hunt with pitbulls and do I presently have any pups I'm selling or giving away". First, Do I hunt with Bull dogs? Yes, but I only use them in a catch dog capacity. When the hog is bayed up, I get as close as I can and release a protected vest covered and cut collar wearing bull dog to go catch the hog. I dont have bull dogs that I let hunt for me, but know of some people who do. Its just a personal preference on type of dogs is the reason I dont. Suprisingly to alot of people, some strains of bull dogs are good hunters and have a good nose especially for rig or hood hunting. But its like any breed of dog, you have to find the right dog to do it with. Such as, just because a fella has a blackmouth cur or a catahoula doesnt mean he will bay cattle or hogs. Or just because a person has a walker hound doesnt mean he will tree a coon. You have to go thru a number of them or get them from reputible breeders to find one that will work for you. Second, Do I have any bull dogs puppies to sell or give away? I usually raise one litter of bull dog pups a year, there is a picture of the two I kept on the baydog pictures, Under Dogs, picture #3. I do sell them occasionally when I raise a litter. Thanks again for your question.

Good Hunting,

Jim

[Crainer writes elsewhere that he favors the Carver line of pit bulls -- a fighting strain --and won't bother with a pit bull unless it's people friendly and can ride loose in the rig with other dogs.]

If Merritt Clifton actually knew much about dogs, or cared enough to study the history of dogs in the U.S., he would know all this. Pit bulls -- bulldogs -- have been common for the better part of a century and a half, though not as ubiquitous as they are today. They were, and are, kept and loved by all sorts of people.

The photo below was taken in the 1890s. The toddler is my maternal great-aunt [a wonderful woman who loved dogs, and owned some legendary ones -- legendary in our household, anyway] and her uncle Albert. Albert was crippled: the dog in the photo is helping to hide Albert's legs in addition to providing support for the child. Seventy years after this photo was taken, my great-aunt remembered the dog's name and spoke of him fondly as "our bulldog." Her parents were hard-working, pragmatic Iowa farmers who liked good dogs and didn't keep bad ones. They were not dogfighters.



(Thanks to EmilyS for the note that prompted this post.)

Pit bulls, dog bite statistics, and the Merritt Clifton report

"Our bad: two Rottweilers, actually, and they were malnourished and abused. Whatever." Top-notch reporting there, WTKR.

Part II:
Clifton’s “Analysis”

In Part 1 of my look at Merritt Clifton’s study of dog bites [“Dangerous breeds,” dog bite statistics, and the Merritt Clifton report: Numbers] I showed that Clifton’s tabulation of press accounts is incomplete, inaccurate, badly edited and misleading. Readers have no way to access the original news stories and follow-up articles; breeds of dogs aren’t accurately recorded; and there is a huge discrepancy between press accounts of dog attacks and hospital data.

Clifton follows his list of severe bites with a brief section of comments on selected attacks. No footnotes or links are provided: in fact, there are no citations anywhere in the report.

In the Analysis section Clifton writes:

The tallies of attacks, attacks on children, attacks on adults, fatalities, and maimings on the above data sheet must be evaluated in three different contexts. The first pertains to breed-specific characteristic behavior, the second to bite frequency as opposed to the frequency of severe injuries, and the third to degree of relative risk.

In other words, Clifton is turning his back on everything known about the cause and prevention of dog bites, and is choosing instead to evaluate severe bites and attacks on the basis of “breed–specific characteristics”: an approach with no grounds in science, and one that has been discredited and rejected by the CDC, the AVMA, veterinary behaviorists, trainers, humane organizations and ACOs.

Neither Merritt Clifton nor I nor anyone else can speak about any breed’s “bite frequency,” or compare “bite frequency” to “the frequency of severe injuries,” because no one knows how often dogs of any breed bite. It is possible, for instance, that most pit bull “bites” are nips or bruises, and that none of those bites are recorded by the press because the bites cause neither real injury nor concern. No one knows. No one knows how often dogs of a particular breed bite or what percentage of those bites are severe, and no one knows the number of dogs of each breed in the overall population. Bite frequency and relative risk are impossible to determine.

These facts are evident, or should be evident, to anyone. As the AVMA task force on dog aggression states:

Dog bite statistics are not really statistics, and they do not give an accurate picture of dogs that bite. Invariably the numbers will show that dogs from popular large breeds are a problem. This should be expected, because big dogs can physically do more damage if they do bite.

The AVMA task force needed less than a paragraph in its Community approach to dog bite prevention to kick the Clifton study to the curb, but I’m going to spend a bit more time on his Analysis section. Frankly, it’s such a train wreck I can’t look away.

Clifton’s comments are in green --- mine are in red.

Of the breeds most often involved in incidents of sufficient severity to be listed, pit bull terriers are noteworthy for attacking adults almost as frequently as children. Numbers again: Clifton doesn’t know how often pit bulls bite children or how frequently they bite adults. He has no idea how often they bite at all. No one does. This is a very rare pattern […] What pattern? Without knowing anything about a biting dog’s health, care or condition, its quality of ownership, victim behavior and so forth, there are no patterns. Captain Arthur Haggerty, a well-known dog trainer, wrote that in cases where a pit bull bites, the owner almost always has a criminal record. That might be a pattern worth investigating. Pit bulls seem to differ behaviorally from other dogs in having far less inhibition about attacking people who are larger than they are. Which pit bulls? Out of the country’s three million or more pit bulls, which ones “differ behaviorally”? Mr. Clifton, meet Mr. Gladwell. Once again, Clifton refuses to acknowledge that other factors may be involved when a pit bull bites: abuse, starvation, life on a chain. They are also notorious for attacking seemingly without warning, “Notorious?” According to whom? Barring health problems and/or abuse, all dogs exhibit a pattern of negative or abnormal behavior before a bite. a tendency exacerbated by the custom of docking pit bulls' tails so that warning signals are not easily recognized. Where on earth is it “the custom” to dock pit bulls’ tails? Seriously. Is there any substantiating evidence for this statement? Because no one docks pit bulls’ tails. Ears, sometimes --- tails, never [unless the tail is injured]. Thus the adult victim of a pit bull attack may have had little or no opportunity to read the warning signals that would avert an attack from any other dog. How many of the pit bulls involved in this list of attacks had docked tails? “We have no idea”? I thought so.

Rottweilers […] seem to show up disproportionately often in the mauling, killing, and maiming statistics simply because they are both quite popular and very powerful[...] A “large, popular breed,” in other words --- as opposed to those notorious pit bulls with their rare behavioral patterns.

German shepherds are herding dogs, bred for generations to guide and protect sheep. Please. German shepherds are show and companion dogs, and no, they have not been bred for generations to work sheep. For the last century they have been bred for conformation; for police work and protection sports; and to be pets. Most modern GSDs have as much “herding instinct” as a bulldog, and based on what I’ve seen at AKC “herding trials,” as much talent on stock. In modern society, they are among the dogs of choice for families with small children because of their extremely strong protective instinct. How does he know? They have three distinctively different kinds of bite [I can’t believe I’m reading this]: the guiding nip, which is gentle and does not break the skin; the grab-and-drag, to pull a puppy or lamb or child away from danger, which is as gentle as emergency circumstances allow; and the reactive bite, usually in defense of territory, a child, or someone else the dog is inclined to guard. The reactive bite usually comes only after many warning barks, growls, and other exhibitions intended to avert a conflict. When it does come, it is typically accompanied by a frontal leap for the wrist or throat. Unbelievable. There is not a shred of evidence for these statements, and I’m speaking 1) as a former owner of both American-bred and Schutzhund-bred German shepherds, and 2) as one with a fair amount of literature in my possession relating to this breed. If German shepherds are bred for any sort of bite, it’s the full-mouthed protection-sport bite, and that same type of bite is admired by the relatively tiny but dedicated group of GSD boundary-style herding enthusiasts here and in Germany. “Three distinctively different kinds of bite”? I thought I’d seen it all after reading a few years’ worth of AKC Gazette breed columns [“Collies must have an oblique eye set in order to scan the horizon for sheep”], and then something like this comes along. The “three different bites” concept has nothing to do with the millions of GSDs in North America and even less to do with the realities of stockwork. Seriously, where did this “three distinctive bites” business come from? Is it from the Gazette? Enlighten us. Because it sounds as if it was made up out of whole cloth.

Because German shepherds often use the guiding nip and the grab-and-drag with children, who sometimes misread the dogs' intentions and pull away in panic, they are involved in biting incidents at almost twice the rate that their numbers alone would predict: approximately 28% of all bite cases, according to a recent five-year compilation of Minneapolis animal control data. Yet none of the Minneapolis bites by German shepherds involved a serious injury: hurting someone is almost never the dogs' intent.

Again: I can’t believe I’m reading this.

GSDs “are involved in biting incidents at almost twice the rate that their numbers alone would predict” --- because they are trying to lead or pull children out of danger? There is nothing to support this claim: zero, zip, nada. And what’s up with the reference to Minneapolis AC data? Is this a “Look! Something shiny!” gambit? Because in Clifton’s own study, GSD attacks result in a higher percentage of maimings [60%] than pit bull attacks do [55%]. And yet -- again with no supporting evidence –Clifton states that when German shepherds bite, “hurting someone is almost never the dogs' intent.” He knows all the GSDs in the country, apparently, and reads their minds, too.

In the German shepherd mauling, killing, and maiming cases I have recorded, there have almost always been circumstances of duress: the dog was deranged from being kept alone on a chain for prolonged periods without human contract, was starving, was otherwise severely abused, was protecting puppies, or was part of a pack including other dangerous dogs. None of the German shepherd attacks have involved predatory behavior on the part of an otherwise healthy dog.

Neither Clifton nor [as far as anyone can tell] the press accounts he tabulated see fit to acknowledge “circumstances of duress” when a pit bull or other breed bites. Apparently pit bulls are never chained, never turned loose or abandoned to run in packs, never abused, always well fed and correctly socialized --- unlike those misunderstood German shepherds.

Seriously, it’s unbelievable – unconscionable – that anyone writing about dog attacks would fail to acknowledge the abusive conditions surrounding most pit bulls that bite, and yet make such a raft of excuses for another breed, claiming, “There have almost always been circumstances of duress.” Is this intentional, or simply drawn from the press accounts themselves? Either way, the lack of objectivity is remarkable.

Clifton goes on to stress “the need for some sort of strong breed-specific regulation to deal with pit bulls and Rottweilers,” and chastises the “humane community” for refusing to see that adopting a pit bull is no different from adopting a mountain lion. He states that pit bulls and Rottweilers should be strictly regulated “if they are to be kept at all.”

And that’s just stupid.

Ban all dogs over 30 lb, and children (and adults) will still be maimed and killed by dachshunds and cocker spaniels. But the statement that will make knowledgeable, informed dog people beat their heads on rocks is this one:

Temperament is not the issue, nor is it even relevant. What is relevant is actuarial risk. If almost any other dog has a bad moment, someone may get bitten, but will not be maimed for life or killed, and the actuarial risk is accordingly reasonable. If a pit bull terrier or a Rottweiler has a bad moment, often someone is maimed or killed--and that has now created off-the-chart actuarial risk, for which the dogs as well as their victims are paying the price.

I think Clifton wants very much to say, “They’ll turn on you.” But a dog with a good temperament won’t do that. If your dog is elderly and confused, suffering from a brain tumor or seizure disorder or terrible thyroid problem, or is injured and in pain, he may bite regardless of a terrific temperament. Dogs aren’t robots. But dogs with good temperaments don’t turn on people. They don’t have chainsaw-massacre “bad moments.”

Dogs with unsound temperaments? Especially if they are unsocialized, untrained and badly managed, everyone around them is always at risk.

The bulk of dogs that bite are somewhere in the middle. One may have a sound temperament but was never socialized to children. Another may be a nice dog whose resource-guarding habit was never addressed. Some have just had all they’re going to take, like the Dalmatian who bit a boy that jumped from his bed onto the sleeping dog. And because children are small, many of these injuries are terrible.

“Bad moment” isn’t a scientific term. It’s a euphemism for something only “those breeds” do. It implies that no one really has to worry about “safe breeds,” and the trouble with this particular implication is that “safe breeds” already send hundreds of thousands of children – and adults -- to hospital emergency rooms each year. The choice of phrase reflects all the misleading, inaccurate figures and statements that make the Clifton report such a hot mess: another sad measure of the general public’s “boundless, staggering ignorance about dogs.”

“Dangerous breeds,” dog bite statistics, and the Merritt Clifton report

Slow news day. [Click to enlarge.]

Part 1: Numbers

Which breeds bite most often? Which breeds do the most damage when they attack?

Don’t ask the Centers for Disease Control.

Breed "is no longer considered to be of discernible value" when addressing dog bite prevention, according to a CDC spokesperson.

The most important factors affecting the odds of a dog bite or attack have always been the ones any dog person can rattle off: Puppy socialization. Training. Pack behavior. The dog's health. The dog's care and condition. Something as simple as never leaving a small child unattended with any dog. Size of the dog: when big dogs bite they generally do more damage than little dogs --- although that's a moot point if you're six weeks old.

If you want facts on dog aggression, read A Community Approach to Dog Bite Prevention, the AVMA’s groundbreaking 2001 task force report. [You’ll find it in the sidebar, under More Dog Links]. Seminal quote:

Dog bite statistics are not really statistics, and they do not give an accurate picture of dogs that bite.

For the record, the AVMA task force included representatives from the American Veterinary Medical Association; the American Academy of Pediatrics; the American College of Emergency Physicians; the Professional Liability Insurance Trust; the American College of Veterinary Behaviorists; the American Medical Association; the National Animal Control Association; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and the Humane Society of the United States. There are actual footnotes, too.

Is there a bite report for the footnote-averse? Given the boundless, staggering ignorance that influences so much public debate on the subject of dog bite prevention, you know there is. For those convinced that pit bulls send more people to the hospital than all other breeds combined – because "you never read about Lab attacks in the paper" -- the Clifton report is the go-to reference.

I’m embarrassed for people who cite it. It’s that bad.

Merritt Clifton’s study is actually a list of severe dog bites. The title itself ["Dog attack deaths and maimings"] is misleading, since the list is a compilation of "dog attacks doing bodily harm," including some that are fatal or disabling. Clifton’s only source is the press: specifically, press accounts of dog bites requiring “extensive hospitalization” [never defined, so this might include anything from treatment of sepsis to multiple surgeries] and caused by “clearly identified” animals. [“[T]his table covers only attacks by dogs of clearly identified breed type or ancestry, as designated by animal control officers or others with evident expertise, who have been kept as pets.”] The numbers aren’t organized by year or location, and readers have no way to access the original press accounts and follow-up articles. There is a disclaimer of sorts --- “dogs whose breed type may be uncertain” are excluded, as are police and security dogs and dogs trained to fight --- leading logical readers to assume that the list must include virtually all severe bites by dogs of identifiable breeds.

Clifton’s report never mentions that there is a huge discrepancy between actual hospital records and press accounts of dog attacks --- between relatively objective data, in other words, and highly subjective reporting and editing with an eye to selling papers. The report fails to acknowledge that a number of factors are involved whenever any dog bites. The report includes statements about dog behavior which have no basis in science, and statements about breed-specific traits which bear no relation to the actual history, behavior or modern development of the breed being discussed [in this case, the German shepherd]. Clifton’s concluding statements regarding the inevitability of attacks by certain dogs are impossible to substantiate, and as a result seem simply prejudiced and inflammatory.

***

Here’s an important CDC number to keep in mind: based on hospital records, each year some 6,000 people in the United States are hospitalized as a result of a dog bite or attack. [From the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report: “Of an estimated 333,700 patients treated for dog bites in emergency departments (EDs) in 1994, approximately 6,000 were hospitalized.” I imagine that number has increased, but for the purposes of this post I’ll stick with 6,000.] 6,000 hospitalized each year: not simply treated in the ED, but requiring hospitalization due to the severity of the dog bite or attack.

According to Clifton's report [which, once again, is based entirely on press accounts], during the 24-year period covered by his study there were a total of 2,209 “[dog] attacks doing bodily harm” in the U.S. and Canada. 1,182 of those attacks were by pit bulls and pit bull mixes. (Lumping mixes together with so-called purebreds makes no sense from any standpoint, but Mr. Clifton lumps them together --- so I will, too, again for the purposes of this post.)

1,182 severe attacks by pit bulls and pit mixes in the U.S. and Canada over a 24-year period [according to the Clifton statistics] works out to an average of just over 49 severe attacks by pit bulls and pit bull mixes in North America per year.

If Clifton’s pit bull numbers are correct, and no more than 49 of the 6,000 or so hospitalizations due to severe dog bites in the U.S. each year are a result of pit bull bites or attacks, then pit bulls and pit mixes are responsible for less than one percent of those hospitalizations.

.82%. Eighty-two hundredths of a percent of hospitalizations due to dog bites in the U.S. each year are a result of pit bull bites or attacks, if the press has accurately represented the number of serious attacks by pit bulls and pit mixes.

This might be a good place to mention that the pit bull is one of the most popular breeds [or types] in the country. Using shelter numbers as a very rough means of estimating the number of pit bulls [registered and unregistered] in the general population, even low estimates end up in the millions. A board member of the California Animal Control Directors Association [CACDA] told me in 2005 that only labs and lab mixes are more common in California shelters. On sites like this, out of a total U.S. population of over 70 million dogs you’ll find estimates of 3 million to 10 million pit bulls.

Could the press be failing to report severe attacks by pit bulls?

While I struggle to get my face under control, check out the screen cap at the top of this post. “East Lubbock, Texas: Elderly man shaken by pit bull.”

Terrifying headline. But he wasn’t actually hurt, you understand, just… shaken.

What about other breeds? Let’s take a look. The only state that has attempted to track dog bites statewide by breed, using hospital records, is Texas. The Texas Severe Animal Bite Summaries were posted online by the Texas Department of Health Zoonosis Control Group from 1996 through 2002. No reports have been issued since then, for a couple reasons: the recorded information had never been complete [some counties didn’t report] and the Texas Department of Health believed the numbers were being misused and misinterpreted. (How do I know this? I phoned them and asked.)

Look at blue heelers: in one year, “blue heelers” and “heeler mixes” caused injuries that required six people to be hospitalized in Texas, according to the 2000 Severe Bite Summary provided by the Texas Department of Health.

Clifton seems unaware that the blue heeler, the Australian blue heeler, the Queensland heeler and the Australian cattle dog are all names that refer to the same breed. They are listed separately in his tabulation. In any event, according to Clifton’s list of press accounts, all of them were apparently responsible for a total of just six severe bites throughout North America over the 24 years covered by his study. (If I didn’t know the breed better – and I like heelers – I might assume that only the ones in Texas bite.)

Take chows. [Please. I still can’t process that Jean Donaldson went from border collies to Buffy ;~)] Based on the numbers provided by the Texas Department of Health, chows and chow mixes accounted for 54 hospitalizations in the state from 1996 through 2000.

According to press accounts tabulated in the Clifton report, there were 57 severe attacks by chows and chow mixes over a 24-year period throughout the entire U.S. and Canada.

Or 66 severe attacks, if you count the mixes with “chow” listed last, as in “Akita/Chow mix.”

And what determines the predominant breed in a mix for the purposes of this report? Why does the Clifton report use “akita/chow mix” rather than “chow/akita mix”? And what is a “chox mix”? What is a “Dauschund”? What is an “East Highland terrier”? I live across the river from East Highland, and I never knew they had their own terrier. “Great Pyranees,” “Weimaeaner,” “Fila Brasiero,” “Doge de Bordeaux,” “Buff Mastiff”… Stop, you’re killing me.

As proof of media bias, the Clifton report has value. The media have done a bang-up job convincing the public that only "dangerous breeds" hurt people. Editors in a shrinking market know that it's more lucrative to rail against pit bulls than talk about the importance of puppy socialization and parent supervision and how to prevent resource guarding. Clifton’s list illustrates perfectly what the AVMA Task Force on Canine Aggression calls “media-driven portrayals of a specific breed as ‘dangerous.’”

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In Part II of my look at Merritt Clifton’s dog bite study I’ll review his “Analysis.” Clifton writes that misunderstood German shepherds bite often, but only to pull children from harm’s way; that the GSD has developed “three distinctly different kinds of bite” to control sheep, and uses the same bites on people; that chows are not a common breed; that it is the “custom” to dock pit bulls’ tails; and that “temperament is not the issue, nor is it even relevant,” since the great majority of “dangerous breeds” maim or kill whenever they have “a bad moment.”

Stay tuned.

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As an addendum, here is an account of a severe dog bite that, like most, received no press coverage.

I heard about the attack from a student -- a friend of the girl who was injured -- and I sent my phone number to the family with a request that the girl’s mother call me if she wouldn’t mind discussing the incident. The girl’s mother gave me the details that follow.

The girl, who was twelve at the time, was staying at her aunt’s house for the night. The families were close and the children all loved the friendly, thirteen year old family dog. That night the girl went into the guest bedroom and reached down to give an affectionate pat to the dog, which was sleeping near the door to the room. The dog lunged up and bit the girl’s face, and didn’t let go. “The dog shook her like a rag doll,” the girl’s mother told me. That tired phrase doesn't sound nearly so hackneyed when it comes from a parent struggling to describe a violent attack on her child.

The girl’s upper lip and part of her nose were torn away, hanging in shreds.

The girl underwent reconstructive surgery at a local hospital where her aunt worked as a nurse. A few days after the attack, the aunt saw the plastic surgeon in a hallway. She introduced herself as a relative of the injured girl and said to the surgeon, “I bet you never saw anything like that before.” The surgeon laughed out loud. “I stitch up five dog bites a week,” he said.

The girl’s mother told me that her daughter’s reconstructive surgery was successful and that no scars would be visible after a few years, though the girl’s lip remained numb: a special concern, since she had played the flute. The dog, a yellow lab, was euthanized.