What is a dog bite?
While the question seems simple enough, the answer is not often what we imagine.
Dog bite numbers offer little useful information about canine behavior. Dog bite numbers are simply a tally of the number of people who sought medical treatment and/or reported a break in skin after exposure to a dog’s nail or tooth, –or in other words, the number of people reported to have been injured interacting with a dog, which interaction may or may not have involved aggression.
During the past three decades, increased awareness of the importance of humane care and control of dogs, the enactment and enforcement of leash laws, and dog bite prevention education, have all been instrumental in significantly lowering the number of reported dog-related injuries throughout the country.
Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston
In 2006, 1,299 children aged from 1 day to 18 years were admitted to Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston for all types of unintentional injuries.
The third most frequent cause of injury-related hospitalization was for animal bites or stings, with 119 patient admissions, including:
- non-venomous arthropods bite: 55
- dog bites: 22
- venomous snake bite: 21
Thus, more than twice as many children were admitted to Texas Children’s for arthropod bites (spiders, scorpions, etc.) as were admitted for injuries from dogs.
Source: Unintentional Injury Surveillance Report: Texas Children’s Hospital, 2006
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Study on cases of severe bites as reported by 83 (out of 254) Texas counties. This is not a report of the number of bites in Texas, only of severe bites in 83 counties: texas-bite-study
National Canine Research Council