Yesterday, my colleague Ben wrote a lengthy and comprehensive piece making the case for a breed ban on so-called “XL bully” dogs, which have been implicated in a spate of attacks on humans in Britain and Ireland over the past year. You can read that piece here.
In it, Ben talks at length about the nature versus nurture problem: He argues that since the breed was developed for first bullfighting, and then dog fighting, it has a natural aggression problem that makes it entirely unsuitable to be owned as a pet.
The piece reminded me of one of the great films of the last twenty years: Grizzly Man. That movie – documentary, really – tells the story of Timothy Treadwell, an American self-styled conservationist who spent thirteen years living amongst the Grizzly Bears of Katmai National Park in Alaska. Treadwell believed that he understood the bears, and had even made friends with them. He even used to pet them on the head. I won’t spoil the film, if you haven’t seen it, but you can probably guess how Treadwell’s story ended, one day in 2003.
There is merit, to be sure, in the nature argument when it comes to animals. They are not human, and they do not share our moral compunctions about food. Not respecting the nature of any animal with teeth and claws is a mistake, whether it be a Grizzly Bear or a dog.
Yet for all the talk about the nature of animals in Ben’s piece, I think it’s worth spending a little time talking about the nature of humans. First, our tendency to over-emphasise the shocking, and downplay the mundane.
Consider, for example, that on an average annual basis in the United States, about 30-40 people per year die in fatal dog attacks. That is only just higher than the 28 people per year who die in lightning strikes, and considerably lower than the over 30,000 deaths and injuries in the US every year that arise from chainsaw accidents. We are willing to tolerate immense danger in the name of utility, until that danger looks big and muscular and has teeth, and then a primal instinct kicks in which tends to cause us to over-estimate the danger by an enormous amount. Consider that, in your adult lifetime, you have probably read about every single fatal dog attack that has taken place in this country.
Now ask yourself honestly: How many can you remember?
Then there’s our understanding of statistics: it is true that bully breeds attack more people than any other breed – but this hugely inflates our understanding of the danger of individual dogs. The Guardian reported last month that the number of XL bullies in the UK is believed to be in the tens of thousands. The number of attacks, meanwhile, each year is less than ten. Without precise numbers on the number of dogs we cannot work out the precise percentage – but the individual risk from any single dog is a fraction of a fraction of one per cent, based on those numbers. If we made a similar argument about certain classes of people, we’d all be denounced.
When these arguments are made, the response from those who favour a ban is uniform: Even if the risk is small, they argue, why take it at all? Who really needs to own a dog like that anyway?
The first thing to be said about that is that it’s an argument you can apply to almost anything: You could solve housing overnight with a “who really needs an extra bedroom” law. And when it comes to danger and risk, it is much more an argument for banning alcohol and cigarettes and fatty foods than it is an argument for banning dogs. You would save more lives. Almost every argument made in favour of banning anything, at some stage, comes down to the “but if it just saves one life” talking point. By that logic, very few things should be legal, including most of the things we love and enjoy.
The second thing to be said is that this is, really, a debate about owners, not dogs. Examine the individual facts of almost any fatal dog attack, and you will discover a mistake made by a human being. In the most awful cases, for example, involving small babies and dogs (of any breed) it is tragically sometimes the case that the dog has been left with the impression that the newcomer has usurped its place in the household, and sees the baby as a rival. In other cases, it can be that the dog has felt threatened or in danger by a sudden movement, or an unwelcome approach not understood. Every Dog ever bred is at heart a pack animal, loyal to its own pack first. In domestic dogs, that pack is provided by the owners. Dog attacks within families are almost always the result of a dog feeling either that the pack is threatened, or that its own place in that pack is threatened.
If Dogs are potentially dangerous animals – and they are – then the focus should be on ensuring that those who own them are properly trained in their care and management. We expect this of almost every other owner of an animal: It is perfectly legal to own a bull, but it would not be responsible to take your prize bull to the local park and allow it to run around off leash where there are children. This is as true of many dog breeds.
The other, very sad, truth is that often the most dangerous dog breeds attract the worst owners – people who buy them because the danger and aggression is the very thing that they prize. A law which punishes good and responsible owners – and innocent dogs – because we as a society are too lazy to focus on those causing the problems, is a bad law.
Above all, though, this is an almost classic summer story: A small, headline friendly problem. Lots of images of scary looking monster dogs. A few tragic cases that can be highlighted. An easy, populist, “we are cracking down” statement from politicians. It is almost designed to play to the “do-somethingism” that plagues politics and media alike.
The fact remains that the overwhelming majority of these dogs – well over 99.5% – pose no threat to anybody over the course of their lives. Many have responsible, caring owners. The solution is to regulate breeding, and require a special license for owners of dangerous dogs. It is not to commence the extermination of an entire breed, simply because of an August panic.
Finally, in all of this, there is never any talk of human cruelty. The dog in the photo above is named Ghost. He was abandoned in an allotment in Burnley, England, and then thrown into a river. He was subsequently rescued, and re-homed. There’s an irony in that he’s to be punished, if people have their way, while his abusers escape scot free. T’was ever thus.