Great Dane now on the attack - please can we do something? *Distressing content warning*

Because owning a dog as a pet & carrying a weapon are nothing like the same

1. please can we stop talking dogs everywhere and anywhere? Bar service dogs and necessary travel, it’s all gone crazy. I guarantee your dog is not enjoying your shopping trip around a busy town and would much rather be running around a field rolling in 🦊 💩 The shop/dog owner needs to take responsibility. If the dog is going to be in a public place, then you need to know it’s 💯 safe. Which they aren’t. I’d be interested in know what the business insurance says about it.
2. Teach your child not to approach strange dogs. The amount of times I’ve had my DC’s friends with me and they have gone up to a strangers dogs is ridiculous. Parents need to teach this simple lesson, the same way they’d teach them not to step in front of a moving vehicle. Dogs are not toys. My children would never do it but they know. They don’t hug and pester our own dogs, why would they think a random dog wants to be fussed over?

A lot of laws are reactive, the consequence of a problem that enough people thought needed fixing, and that self-regulation wasn’t working. I’m in my 60s, there have been a number of laws enacted since I was a child that my grandfather found odd, over-protective or just annoying. From seat belts to not hitting disobedient children to hunting bans to leads on dogs.
Dog muzzling in public will become a law if enough people are prepared to say that it’s necessary to prevent injury or death to humans and other animals. It won’t stop children being harmed by family pets in the home, but it’ll be a start to a more logical attitude to having an animal that bites able to do so at will.

Agreed.

Ban all dogs 🤣🤣

Until we are able to have a sensible discussion and people stop coming out with such ridiculous statements we are never going to get closer to a solution.

What!? Any injury is a horror injury.

I'm really interested in this, I often see people letting their children pet dogs and I'm thinking the dog doesn't look happy but I don't know enough to say anything. The pic on the left is fairly clear to me but the photo on the right is more tricky, could you elaborate on what you're seeing?

Closed mouth, facial tension (look at corners of mouth, and 'eyebrow' area, these are two easy ways to identify this), avoidance (keeping head turned away from baby), hard to tell from the snapshot but looks like the dog might be partially leaning it's top half away also.

No law gives more rights to dogs than humans

No, but the current lack of restrictions/enforcement around dogs and dog ownership is infringing on some humans' use and enjoyment of public spaces - not even just outdoor ones, any more - and in some cases, is causing humans to be seriously injured or killed. People who do not want to be around dogs are forced to self exclude from an ever-growing list of places including parks, woodland areas, cafes, restaurants, picnic areas, pubs... So while there aren't laws affording more rights to dogs, the lack of restrictive laws certainly prioritises them, in my opinion.

I think a licence /exam is needed and mandatory training course. Nothing wrong with dogs but we need actually responsible people to own them and actually train them.

I don't know about this. I have an old rescue pug, the poor chap barely has any teeth, he can't chomp a sausage. Being muzzled on his little ambles would be very distressing for him and who would it be protecting? It would just be performative, he had a tough wee life before he came to us and I would probably just restrict him to the garden rather than put him through that.

I'm not in the UK and here there are rules that certain dogs like GSDs, bull mastiffs, Dobermans(and crosses of those breeds) need to be muzzled and kept on a short lead by someone over the age of 16 at all times. Hardly anyone actually complies though, yesterday for instance I saw a GSD running loose playing ball and a bull breed of some kind not wearing a muzzle. We also have dogs licenses but I have never been asked to show a dog licence in my 15 years of dogs ownership. It's all well and good having rules but I don't think they are ever actually followed up on, I've never seen a dog warden in my life.

I didn't say they were the same. I was responding to the poster who said "teenagers stab each other. Should something be done about ALL teenagers because of the actions of a few?"

My point is that we do legislate for everyone based on the actions of a few. That's why, as I said, it's illegal to carry a knife on the street even if you don't use it. It doesn't matter if you were never going to use it. The actions of the few who do stab people have influenced the law for everyone.

So it isn't nonsensical, in my view, to pass legislation that restricts all dogs in some way (the exact details to be debated, obviously) because of the few who attack. The problem is that nobody on the street can tell which ones are going to attack and which aren't.

‘ridiculous- so people can’t have their perfectly safe and lovely dogs chase a ball in their local park, when they’re harming nobody?’

It’s when they decide to play with other people’s balls, frisbees, chase children for fun, help themselves to food, interact with people and children that would rather they stayed the fuck away from them.
That’s when there’s problems in the parks. Whilst owners squeal ‘Just being friendly’

I was mouthed by a dog while out running I shouted no get off still wouldn't get off so I kicked it. The owner said I was injuring their dog wtf if a grown human started biting me randomly I'd do the same it's self defence. Some dog owners are nuts 😳 . I hope the covid dog boom ends soon and it returns back to normal so many shit owners there.

Agree totally with this. People increasingly seem to treat dogs as pseudo-humans, not as dogs. Dogs make wonderful companions but they are at the end of the day dogs and need to be trained, disciplined and treated properly. I utterly detest the modern phrase "fur baby". It's a dog not a child.

Similarly, a dog went for my daughter once and I kicked it. I then had the police at my door because the owner called them. I explained the situation (which the owner hadn't denied, by the way) and the police were actually great, but the owner still thought I should be prosecuted for kicking his dog even though he knew and freely admitted the dog had lunged for my one year old.

How does a well-fitted muzzle worn for a few hours distress a dog?
Surely it’s a matter of training, positive reinforcement and associating wearing it with being out and about for a walk. Providing dog parks would give them the opportunity to play without one.

You said this needs to stop... have you done anything proactive other than asking MN about it?

That is actually crazy of course a human would step in and protect a baby against a dog. We are supposed to just sit back and let the dog keep attacking. The law is quite clear it's legal to protect yourself and loved ones. It's poor owners who see the dog as a pseudo human.

Change the law to what?

banning big dogs?

muzzling all dogs?

Dogs are animals, they’re not humans

I don't believe in treating dogs like children or people. They are dogs. But humans are animals too! We are arrogant enough to think that our supposed intelligence makes us better than other animals.

There are approximately 13 million dogs in the UK, and approximately 22,000 reports of out of control dogs per year - that is 0.17%. If you talk about deaths, it is 0.00002308%. There are 34 million men in the UK and approximately 1.5 million domestic violence attacks each year, mostly on women - that's 4.41%, and that is only domestic violence alone not including all violence, most of which is perpetrated by men. Theer are, on average 235 women killed by men every year - that is 0.00069118%. Men are far more dangerous than dogs. 0.16% of chidren are estimated to be abused by their parents / a close family member every year. Families are very dangerous for children.

Knee jerk reactions to isolated incidents do not make good law or policy on anything.

Or just leave your dog at home

You see this was OK in the days when there weren’t so many dogs around. You could teach kids that something they saw now and then, in the park, was not a toy. Now they’re everywhere. It’s normalised. There’ll be a dog by the next table in a restaurant. A dog walking past them in a supermarket aisle. A dog on the adjacent seat on a bus. A dog by the swings. A dog in the pub garden. A dog in the museum, soft play, school pick up. They are everywhere, making it much harder to tell kids that these things, which they can’t actually avoid, are potentially dangerous and need to be avoided. We already tell kids to stay on the pavement because of the risk from cars, but what happens when half the people on the pavement walking towards them have a dog?

Nice to see a thread for the anti dog brigade. Business owners with cafes and hotels are having a hard enough time already, if dogs were banned many would go out of business.

This is what I was going to ask.

It's unusual to hear about a Great Dane attacking someone though.

Or just leave your dog at home

We were on holiday and the pub had a great big sign saying dogs welcome. We also sat outside. My dog was on a lead asleep under our table. His dogs were walking around untethered. Did you miss the part where I was concerned about my DD?