The statements that “any dog can turn at any time” and that you only need to go on to the dog house threads to see dogs who have attacked and when you get into the discussion it turns out there were signs all along are completely contradictory.
No, usually loving family pets with no history of aggression do not randomly turn and kill innocent children. They just don’t. However, there are often situations where an animal could be provoked into biting e.g. a small child who pulls a dog’s ears/tail or where the dog has previously shown signs of anxiety but where the owner has failed to notice them. These are not random, unprovoked attacks and people need to move away from the “any dog can turn at any time” statement because it’s not true.
Yes, any dog can bite under the right circumstances, and the reality is that we will likely never know what went before in this situation which led to this dog killing a tiny defenceless baby. perhaps the dog had previously been top dog of the house, the baby had come along and suddenly it had been anxious over its place being changed in the household. Perhaps the dog had shown anxiety before but the owners had failed to recognise the signs, and in their desparation to have the dog and baby have an amazing bond they had left them alone together resulting in this tragedy.
In almost all of these situations where a child is killed by a dog there are circumstances which could explain how it happened, and it is not as simple as that they were just left together. Sometimes it is because the child was visiting the household and the dogs were unused to children. Sometimes, as in this situation, it could because this was a new baby and the dog’s world has been changed. Either way these are not situations of the loving family pet having turned without any indication that this could happen.
That doesn’t mean you leave small babies alone with the dog, as for a dog, provocation could be as simple as a baby crying if the dog is already anxious.
The reason why labradors is higher in the list of dogs who bite is because labradors are more popular as pets. However it does need to be noted that staffies are exceptionally powerful dogs,and that while a lab may cause injury, a staff can kill much more easily.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that staffies need to be banned, and we always have these knee-jerk responses when something like this happens. But truth is that far more children are killed in cars than by dogs and yet there are no calls for banning the use of cars to drive babies under a certain age. While dog bites are not that uncommon, dogs of any breed killing a child is exceptionally rare, which is why these stories are always in the news wen they happen. You don’t see reports of car crashes in the news do you? That’s because they’re so common and the media couldn’t possibly report on all of them, yet there are no calls to ban cars....