Looking for safety in all the wrong places: India’s new ban on 23 dog breeds cannot succeed
Thankfully, banning dogs of certain breeds is increasingly rare. But when this choice is made, as with the recent national BSL legislation in India, we are reminded of some of the reasons that it simply cannot help prevent dog bite injuries: Behavioral genetic science shows conclusively that a dog’s breed simply cannot predict anything about […]
Words Matter 101: Let’s get rid of the A word
I have a personal litmus test for dog knowledge among humans. If someone asks, “is that dog aggressive?” I understand immediately that we are starting from zero. Karen Overall, the noted behaviorist, once said that as far as she could tell, the word “aggression” simply meant anything a person didn’t like. She was speaking to […]
Canine public policies shouldn’t be created from media reports
Dr. Gary Patronek and his colleagues, the authors of a ten-year study of dog bite-related fatalities (DBRF) did something not attempted before or since—they gathered their data from massive accumulations of reports and interviews done by officials, from investigating officers to coroners and pathologists. Previous work on the subject had always been based on collections […]
The QAnon of Canine Behavior Science
A story on NPR reports that the most popular facebook post on the brief suspension of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine in April was not CNN or NYT or ABC News or Fox News. They were all in the top five, but number one was a conspiracy theorist called An0maly who describes himself as a “news […]