Dogs Bite: But Balloons and Slippers Are More Dangerous | 
 enlarge | Author: Janis Bradley
Publisher: James & Kenneth Publishers
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  15 reviews
Sales Rank: 418643
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 184
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.5
ISBN: 1888047186
Dewey Decimal Number: 636
EAN: 9781888047189
ASIN: 1888047186
Publication Date: September 1, 2005
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Product Description
Dogs are dangerous. And they are more dangerous to children than to adults. Not as dangerous of course, as kitchen utensils, drapery cords, five-gallon water buckets, horses, or cows. Not nearly as dangerous as playground equipment, swimming pools, skateboards, or bikes. And not remotely as dangerous as family, friends, guns, or cars. Heres the reality. Dogs almost never kill people. A child is more likely to die choking on a marble or a balloon, and an adult is more likely to die in a bedroom slipper related accident. Your chances of being killed by a dog are roughly one in 18 million. You are twice as likely to win a super lotto jackpot on a single ticket than be killed by a dog. You are five times as likely to be killed by a bolt of lightning than be killed by a dog. Because it is so extraordinary, lightning is often regarded as a universal cliché for an Act of God. Dog-attack deaths are even more extraordinaryfive times more extraordinary. The supposed epidemic numbers of dog bites splashed across the media are absurdly inflated by dubious research and by counting bites that dont actually hurt anyone. Even when dogs do injure people, the vast majority of injuries are at the Band-Aid level. Dogs enhance the lives of millions more people than even the most inflated estimates of dog-bite victims. Search-and-rescue and cancer-detecting dogs save significant numbers of human lives, and assistance dogs enormously improve the quality of many more. Infants who live with dogs have fewer allergies. People with dogs have less cardiovascular disease, better heart attack survival, and fewer backaches, headaches, and flu symptoms. Petting your dog lowers stress and people who live with dogs just plain feel better than people who dont. Yet lawmakers, litigators, and insurers press for less dog ownership. This must stop. We must maintain perspective. Yes, dogs bite. But even party balloons and bedroom slippers are more dangerous. A tour-de-force examination of dog bites. Among other persuasive appeals for sanity, Janis Bradley has outed lumping: the erroneous connection between kitchen-injury level bites and maiming or fatal dog attacks. She dares to be rational. Her rationality willhopefullyraise the level of discussion in a topic mired in hysteria. Why do we get so excited about this particular class of injury? Enter the irrational. Human brains are organs that evolved for a single over-arching purpose: to maximize the representation of genes possessed by an individual brains owner in subsequent generations. We evolved in a different environment than the one we currently inhabit, however. Because of this, we are genetically predisposed to learn to fear animals with pointy teeth much more than to fear, say, hurtling along in hunks of metal at sixty-five miles per hour. Our brains are also not reliable truth detection devices. Any instances of truth detection are lucky by-products of selection for reproductive success. Scientific method was developed because of the chronic, abysmal failure of our brains to dope out reality, coupled with a fascination to know truth. Our intuitions are flat-footed much of the time. Stephen Jay Gould once mused, the invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning." If one searches the backgrounds of that small minority of dogs that kill people, lo and behold, many of them will have previously engaged in species-normal ritualized aggression: growls, snarls and kitchen-injury or less level bites in predictable contexts. This then becomes the foundation for the faulty causal leap, a slippery slope argument that says: if a dog is growly around his food dish, he will someday seriously hurt or kill someone. What is omitted is that a significant percentage of all dogs engage in species-normal ritualized aggression and the overwhelming majority will never hurt, much less kill, anyone. A sign
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| Customer Reviews: Read 10 more reviews...
 A Book That Puts It in Perspective. November 14, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I think that this book is a must-read for dog trainers, home-owners' insurance salesmen, and anyone involved in dog legislation. It includes facinating graphs and statistics that put things in perspective.
Still, the author recommends training and education for people and dogs.
If you're involved in breed ban legislation you should consider reading this book.
 Enough already September 17, 2006
3 out of 64 found this review helpful
Another pro-dog diatribe, attempting to justify dog ownership by trivialising the danger to children and the elderly from unconstrained dogs. There's something rather perverse and unnatural about 'owning' a mammal, whose utter dependence and williingness to endure anything strokes the fragile ego of the owner. Whether these types of books - of the polemical pro-dog type - spring from the PR department of the large petfood industry (very likely), or they are simply self-justifying therapy by dog owners, enough is enough. There are a few billion humans on this planet who could use the thousands that dog owners waste on dumb animals each year. And an environment that could benefit by ridding it of the massive damage that millions of dogs create annually.
Hey, it really puts it in perspective ... June 10, 2006
2 out of 68 found this review helpful
It's true, as the author tells us, that more people die in wars. But with people like Saddam and Bush in the the world, whaddayagointodo?
It's true that more people die by swallowing random objects and choking on them, but with stuff like marbles and Kentucky Fried Chicken in the world, whaddahagointodo?
It's true that more people get killed and messed up in car wrecks, than get killed and messed up by dogs, but with all the cars and all those people commuting and driving to WalMart and Disneyworld and all the rest, whaddayagointodo?
Hey, dogs are all right! They just kill people, maim people, just like their owners would like to do themselves, but can't do, because they'd go to prison for it, and then get messed up themselves, bad, so the dogs rip into neighbors and passers by, and it's all right, "oh I didn't know he was out" or "what did you do, stomp at him?" or "I think you were trying to get into my yard, don't you respect private property" or "he doesn't like people who look like you, there was a [guy of your ethnic group] who used to beat him, you know some people just don't like dogs", hey you know "every dog has one bite", or maybe two or ten ...
You know, like "guns don't kill people, people kill people" just the same thing, we're just talking about dogs, this time ...
"There are no bad dogs." Right? Right. Just bad people. Like just about everybody who owns dogs. When are you people going to do something about yourselves?
Engaging review of statistics on dog bites- and more March 24, 2006
17 out of 17 found this review helpful
A couple of months ago I received a request to review for my EZine (www.behaviorlogic.com) a new book that was being published, and I'll reproduce it here. The book is called Dogs Bite But Balloons and Slippers are More Dangerous by Janis Bradley. It was published this year by James and Kenneth Publishers in Berkeley. (ISBN 1-888047-18-6).
The book reveals the reality behind the terrifying headlines about dog attacks against innocent humans. The fact of the matter is that while dogs are more likely to kill children and the elderly than hale and hearty adults, they rarely commit fatal attacks on humans of any age. A far greater risk to children is their own parents.
Bradley has produced a variety of statistics on the death and injury rates produced by various causes. More people die of fork lift accidents, balloons, and 5-gallon buckets than die of dog bites. And of the high number of reported dog bites (Some 800,000 each year in the US) remarkably few actually result in medical care.
This book is important to dog lovers right now, especially those who have certain breeds such as the dreaded pit bull or look-alikes such as the Staffordshire Terrier. The media focus on pit bull attacks has made them into pariahs, when in fact, they can be gentle, loving pets. Even a cocker spaniel or a dachshund can kill someone. In fact both breeds have. But no one is threatening to ban those breeds.
Bradley writes in an engaging and personable style about legislation, liability, breeds and appropriate strategies for managing the dogs in association with the people in our homes. If you want to get past the hype to the truth about dog attacks, this book is a wealth of information.
Every trainer should read this book February 16, 2006
15 out of 17 found this review helpful
I wish I had gotten a copy of this to the Senator that created the 'dangerous dog' law for Oregon that just went into effect this year.
This is a book that every dog trainer needs to read so they can educate their clients.
I'm looking forward to Janis' visit to CSDogBookReview (YahooGroups) as a guest author in March. It should be very interesting!
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