Dogs Bite: But Balloons and Slippers Are More Dangerous by Janis Bradley

Author:Janis Bradley
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Published: 2011-05-21T22:41:00+00:00

et's say you want to know whether some people are more likely to get divorced than others. So you call a bunch of people and ask them a lot of questions about their best friends, including, naturally, whether they've been divorced and a lot of other stuff that you happen to think might be likely to incline people toward divorcing, including astrological signs. You discover that among the friends of the people you called, more Virgos seem to be getting divorced than say, Pisces.

Now, of course, you have no idea how many of the people you interviewed don't actually know where various signs fall on the calendar, or have forgotten when the friend's birthday is, or don't know when the friend's birthday is but think they remember somebody referring to the friend as a Virgo, or are having some fun with you, or are just plain guessing. In fact, if they're not sure, you ask for their best guess. You make no effort to verify their identification of the hapless Virgos.

You also don't know how many Virgos there are out there relative to people born under other signs. Nevertheless, you begin merrily speculating that since you already know from various authorities that Virgos are very meticulous, it must be that their poor spouses probably just can't put up with all that compulsive neatness and throw them over.

This is pretty much the state of research on the rate of dog bites by breed. Since in addition to being the most egregiously flawed category of dog-bite research, it's arguably the one that results in the most harm, it's worth considering first.

Breed Identification Follies

One such attempt to identify biting dogs by breed was conducted by studying dog bites reported to authorities in Denver in 1991. The researchers' most widely reported finding was that Chow Chows and German Shepherds were at increased risk for delivering an injurious bite relative to other breeds in the study.

The breed identification process used, however, is problematic. First, it was based on owner identification of the breed. It requires no more than a few trips to the local dog park to realize that people's identification of their dogs' breeds is haphazard at best. Even people with registered, pedigreed dogs often get it wrong, e.g., the woman in one of my classes recently who thought her American Eskimo was a Shi Tzu, or the people down the street who refer to their Shar Peis as Pit Bulls.

Figure 12. People Confuse Breeds

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