From: rhh@alice.att.com (r hardin)
Newsgroups: rec.pets.dogs
Subject: Re: Dog & Protection
Summary: a thousand kinds of bites
Date: 5 Oct 92 17:38:39 GMT
Article-I.D.: alice.23811
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill NJ



Kathleen Brewer writes:
>NO CHILD DESERVES WHAT HE GETS!! If a toddler wanders into your yard and
>the dog attacks the child, you will be held accountable for your dogs
>actions and in all probabilty the dog will be put down as vicious. You
>need to re-think your priorities, no child deserves to be bitten because
>of an error in judgement.

Laws of a few states take the trouble to say that a dog is not vicious
if he is responding to tormenting, or to other things like a crime
in progress.

No doubt written long ago by someone who understood people and dogs, and how
dogs guarded the happiness of their neighborhoods.
---

   Dog bites are caused by - .  This is where the analogy breaks
   down, because we expect a noun phrase to appear after the
   preposition.  But dog bites are a social phenomenon, a function
   of complex interactions, agreements and disagreements between
   people and dogs.  A dog bite may be a form of communication.
   It may also be a breakdown in communication.  It is, in part,
   a grammatical problem, like divorce.

   I could say that the cure for dog bites is community, social
   enrichment, flexibility, public trust, and I could mean something
   by it, but it would take a book or two to talk about what I
   mean by it, since the cure for dog bites is: happiness.

---

   The whole idea of people owning dogs and dogs owning people
   is coming into disrepute these days.  When a dog protects
   master or property he or she is ``vicious,'' and when a person
   protects a dog he or she is either insensitive to public welfare
   (if the dog is a pit bull) or an exploitative, ``dominionistic''
   slave owner (if the dog is a hound or bird dog).

   Bandit's inability to tumble to Marxist insights about the
   unsoundness of his attitute to property - he thinks there is
   such a thing and that it is good - creates awkwardness for people
   who want to love dogs and get rid of property-based relations
   between people and dogs, which I guess is how it turns out that
   the best way to love dogs is to spay, neuter, and euthanize
   them.

---

   [Are you going to jump in the cage with him?]  It was always a man
   who had the idea that that is what you would do to see if a dog
   is vicious, to jump into the cage.


   And that is what small boys do with dogs, they jump at them.
   A typical scenario goes like this.  The small boy is brought by
   his grandmother in the dog's presence.  The boy stiffens, hides
   behind a chair or Grandma's coat, peers at the dog from an upside-
   down position, darts back and forth if the dog does something alarming
   such as wag her tail or pant, and then:  jumps straight at the
   dog and pokes his finger into her eye.  Or waits until the dog
   is asleep and then creeps up and blows in her ear.

   And gets snapped at, once in a while gets the skin broken.

   Once in a long while needs stitches.

   Once in a very, very long while dies.

   Now, some small boys, after getting bitten or snapped at, will
   report in later years, ``So that's how I learned that you don't
   do that to dogs.''  Others grow up and become dogcatchers who
   carry snare poles in sweating palms.  For the moment, the important
   fact about a snare pole is that it is a pole, and that it is
   often used the way small boys use their fingers

(quotes from Bandit, Vicki Hearne, 1991)
Newsgroups: rec.pets.dogs