The law offices of d’Oliveira Associates have released a dog bite infographic with information on common dog bite injuries, potentially dangerous dog breeds, and fatal dog attack statistics.

(PRWEB) May 21, 2013

According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there are over 4.7 million dog bites each year. Over 800,000 of these bites require medical attention, half of these bites are to children (i). Parents should be aware of the danger that dog bites pose to their children because such bites are common among children and children may sustain more serious injuries than an adult. For example, the CDC has warned that children between the ages of 5 and 9 are at the greatest risk of a dog bite. Additionally, children who are four years old or younger are most likely to be bit in the neck or the head area. The American Humane Society estimates that dog bites among all ages cost more than $1 billion per year in insurance claims (ii). These claims represent the cost of covering the injuries associated with dog bites. Common dog bite injuries may include bruising, bleeding, infection, scarring, and disfigurement.

Severe and fatal dog attacks have caused some breeds to be labeled as “dangerous dog breeds” and have even lead states and cities to pass laws regulating the ownership of these breeds (iii). The Two breeds that have been commonly subject to such dog legislation are pit bulls and rottweilers. The ASPCA argues that negligent dog owners are the cause of dog attacks and not dog breeds. However, groups like DogsBite.org have advocated for regulation of these breeds because of fatal dog attack statistics (iv). One study showed that between 1982 and 2012 pitbulls, rottweilers, and their mixes caused 333 of the 497 fatal dog attacks in the United States and Canada (v).

The dog bite infographic illustrates the areas where dog bites commonly occur such as the arms, hands, legs, and feet. Additionally, it provides information on dog bites and children, dangerous dog breeds, and fatal dog attacks. Learn more about dog bites by visiting the webpage and viewing the infographic: Dog Bite Infographic.

If you or a loved one has been bitten by a dog, you may want to contact a personal injury lawyer about a potential dog bite claim. d’Oliveira Associates has over 24 years of experience handling dog bite lawsuits. Our dog bite lawyers will fight to get you the compensation you deserve. Feel free to contact our law offices at 1-800-992-6878.

Sources:

(i) http://www.cdc.gov/homeandrecreationalsafety/dog-bites/dogbite-factsheet.html

(ii) http://www.americanhumane.org/animals/stop-animal-abuse/fact-sheets/dog-bites.html

(iii) http://www.aspca.org/fight-animal-cruelty/dog-fighting/breed-specific-legislation.aspx

(iv) http://www.dogsbite.org/dangerous-dogs.php

(v) http://www.dogsbite.org/pdf/dog-attack-deaths-maimings-merritt-clifton-2012.pdf

For the original version on PRWeb visit: http://www.prweb.com/releases/prweb2013/5/prweb10750128.htm

The city task force considering measures to limit dog attacks in Peoria heard a lot about pit bulls Monday.

Headed by at-large Councilwoman Beth Akeson, the 17-member group held the first of a series of meetings at City Hall with comments from city and county officials as well as members of the public.

“Citizens need to be able to walk on city streets knowing they are not going to have to worry about a random stray dog,” said Akeson, calling for more meetings and additional citizen input before bringing the matter to the council floor.

Some dogs pose a greater threat than others, said Peoria Police Chief Steve Settingsgaard, noting that his officers face a lot of dogs in the course of their duties.

“Talk to the SWAT teams. They’ll tell you that the last dog they want to face is the pit bull. The pit bull hangs on with its bite, with more severe injuries as a result,” he said.

“The pit bull is also difficult to put down when it’s in attack mode.”

Kevin Taylor, president of the Peoria Veterinary Association, defended the breed, adding that “there are nasty dogs of all breeds.”

“People are not buying these dogs as companions,” he said of pit bulls that cause problems. “They’re buying them for protection.”

Of the 332 dog bites reported in Peoria County last year, 102 were administered by pit bulls, said Lauren Malmberg, director of Peoria County Animal Protection Services.

The number of dog bites in the county has remained about the same for the past several years, she said, pointing out that pit bulls are the second most licensed dog breed in the county — behind labs.

The pit bull also is a breed that turns up at the animal shelter a lot.

“Of the 3,000 dogs we get each year, 1,000 are pit bulls,” said Taylor.

Jessica Benassi, a Peoria business owner, said she owns five dogs, one of them an English mastiff, often mistaken for a pit bull.

“I’m concerned about the misidentification of dogs and the banning of specific breeds,” she said.

Matt Colgan of Peoria, co-owner of The Main Statement gift shop on Main Street, suggested raising fines on owners when their dogs misbehave.

“Hold people accountable for their dog,” he said.  

Among the suggestions made to beef up dog control ordinances was the elimination of tethering, tying up dogs throughout the day. Malmberg said the tethering issue was a big one.

“Once a child or person wanders within reach, they can become victims of a serious attack simply because a dog (that’s been tethered) is frustrated,” she said.

While putting teeth into enforcement measures might address the problem among law-abiding citizens, Settingsgaard said any measure passed would have little effect on “drug houses or gangbangers that are keeping dogs to protect turf.”

Steve Tarter can be reached at 686-3260 or starter@pjstar.com. Follow his blog, Minding Business, on pjstar.com and follow him on Twitter @SteveTarter.
 

Home security is something that everyone thinks about on occasion. It seems like there are crimes reported every morning, often involving home invasion. And the idea of a big, burly protection dog might sound like a great solution.

But finding one that will not only protect but also be safe around family and friends can be a tall order. Indiscriminate breeding, bad training, poor environment or uneducated/unprepared owners can turn these wonderful animals into truly dangerous beasts.

Factor in the media coverage when one breed of dogs bites a human (though thousands of dog bites occur every year without the media blitz), and the population of an entire breed unfairly can be labeled unsafe. Just look at the poor pit bull.

There are several things to consider before buying one of the “dangerous” breeds.

(I put dangerous in quotes because I find the label inaccurate, ignorant, discriminatory and akin to human profiling).

First, are you truly prepared to own one of these breeds? Stigmas aside, they were originally bred to have protection as one of their jobs. This means that they tend to be more dominant, intelligent and have higher levels of aggression. Plan on doing a fair amount of training with one so that you have a well-mannered, safe and obedient companion.

Second, you will have to check your homeowner’s or renter’s policy to see if they will allow you to own one of these breeds.

Third, any dog is a deterrent to bad guys, even the mighty Chihuahua! The Chi can’t do much physical damage, but he will raise a ruckus that will wake everyone nearby. Criminals don’t like that.

Lastly, don’t look for a mean dog. Rescues are full of poor souls whose owners tried to make them mean and tough, only to find out that the dog didn’t differentiate between bad guys and the family or you in the middle of the night.

Choose a dog that fits in with the family, regardless of the breed. Give it tons of love, and your safety will increase exponentially.

-

Jim Beinlich and his wife, Bianca, own
Cool K9′s Dog Training in Colorado Springs.
Find them at www.coolk9s.com or
www.facebook.com/coolk9s.

The City of New Westminster is no longer designating specific breeds of dogs as vicious or dangerous.

For many years, the city’s bylaw has deemed certain dogs to be vicious based on their breed, including pit bull, pit bull terrier, American pit bull terrier, Staffordshire bull terrier, American Staffordshire terrier, cane corso, Italian mastiff, presa canarios, fila Brasileiro and Argentinian dogo.

Those designations have been eliminated in the updated bylaw, which is now called the animal care and control bylaw.

“This classification system is not entirely effective,” stated a staff report.

In addition to a community consultation process that included surveys and a public meeting, city staff surveyed other municipalities to consider “innovative ways” to deal with some of the challenges of managing dogs in the city.

The new bylaw, which has received three readings by council, eliminated the designation of certain breeds as being vicious and adds new definitions of aggressive, vicious and dangerous dogs to the bylaw.

Under the new bylaw, aggressive dogs, which are those that have displayed aggressive behav-ior toward a person or domestic animal or have caused a minor injury to another domestic animal or human being, would need to be kept on a leash of maximum one metre in length, be muzzled when in off-leash areas and must have permanent identification.

Vicious dogs, which are animals that have caused serious injury or are known to attack without provocation, are not permitted to enter off-leash areas at any time and must have permanent identification. Their owners must post a warning sign on their premises about the vicious dog.

Dangerous dogs, which are dogs that have killed or seriously injured a person or a domestic animal (other than on the owner’s property) or believed to be likely to kill or seriously injure a person, must abide by the same leash, muzzle, warning sign and identification restrictions as dogs classified as aggressive or vicious.

In addition, dogs classified as dangerous must be kept in an enclosure when on their owner’s property, must be photographed for identification purposes, and their owners must have liability insurance of $1 million.

“Staff believe the proposed animal care and control bylaw will result in significant benefit to the residents of New Westminster and the animals in the community,” stated the report. “Ensuring a safer com” munity is part of the mandate of animal services; and the new bylaw will increase compliance and will enhance public safety while placing greater responsibility for animal behavior on their owners.”

The Pacific Volunteer Education and Assistance Team for Animals Society, a New Westminster based society that advocates for animal issues, supports the bylaw.

“One of the things we like off the top is the new name – animal care and control bylaw,” said Cheryl Rogers, one of the group’s founders. “Care is in there – that’s new. I think it’s important it’s in the bylaw.”

Like several other animal rights groups that advocated for changes to the bylaw, the society opposed breed specific designations in the city’s bylaw.

Posted: Wednesday, May 8, 2013 11:46 am

House bars towns from banning dog breeds

AP

The Hour Publishing Company

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HARTFORD — Connecticut cities and towns would be barred from banning particular dog breeds under legislation moving through the General Assembly.

The House of Representatives voted 142-0 Tuesday in favor of forbidding the adoption of breed-specific dog ordinances. Proponents claim such ordinances lead to the unfair labeling of well-behaved pets as “bully breeds,” hurting the families that love them.

The Humane Society of the United States has testified that breed-specific legislation does not enhance public safety or reduce dog bite incidents. Also, some proponents said such ordinances can lead to a large amount of certain dogs showing up in shelters that can’t be adopted.

East Hartford Rep. Jason Rojas (ROH’-hahs) said no Connecticut municipalities have passed such ordinances, but some exist in other parts of the country.

The bill awaits Senate action.

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Dog brains, as I wrote last month in The New York Times, have become exquisitely tuned to our own. Scientists are now zeroing in on some of the genes that were crucial to the rewiring of dog brains.

Their results are fascinating, and not only because they can help us understand how dogs turned into man’s best friend. They may also teach us something about the evolution of our own brains: Some of the genes that evolved in dogs are the same ones that evolved in us.

To trace the change in dog brains, scientists have first had to work out how dog breeds are related to one another, and how they’re all related to wolves. Ya-Ping Zhang, a geneticist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has led an international network of scientists who have compared pieces of DNA from different canines. They’ve come to the conclusion that wolves started their transformation into dogs in East Asia.

Those early dogs then spread to other parts of the world. Many of the breeds we’re most familiar with, like German shepherds and golden retrievers, emerged only in the past few centuries.

Meanwhile, back in China, those early dogs lingered on for thousands of years. Today, they’re known as Chinese native dogs. “The Chinese native dogs live in rural villages, helping humans to guard homes,” Dr. Zhang explained in an e-mail.

Dr. Zhang and his colleagues see Chinese native dogs as the key to better understanding how dogs evolved. Recently, they sequenced the entire genome of Chinese native dogs and compared them with the genomes of Asian wolves and modern breeds like German shepherds. By comparing the mutations in the genomes, they’ve been able to estimate when wolves and dogs diverged.

As they reported on Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, they found that the split started 32,000 years ago. Those early dogs would have encountered small bands of hunter-gatherers. People didn’t settle in villages to farm in East Asia until about 10,000 years ago.

After dogs split from wolves, their genes began to evolve in a new direction. Dr. Zhang and his colleagues were able to identify some of these evolving genes. A number of them, it turned out, are active in dog brains. (Dr. Zhang and some of his colleagues published some of these results last week in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.)

Some of the genes that evolved early in dog evolution are involved in smell or hearing. Others are active in a region called the prefrontal cortex, where mammals make decisions about how to behave. Some genes are involved in growing connections between neurons. One gene, called SLC6A4, transports a neurotransmitter called serotonin into neurons.

The results offer some tantalizing hints about how wolves first turned doglike. “The conventional view is that the hunter-gatherers go out and get a puppy,” said Chung-I Wu of the University of Chicago, an author of the Nature Communications study. If humans actually did breed early dogs this way, then dogs would have descended from a very small population.

That’s not what Dr. Wu and his colleagues have found, though. Instead, it appears that a large population of wolves started lingering around humans — perhaps scavenging the carcasses that hunters left behind.

In this situation, aggressive wolves would have fared badly, because humans would kill them off. Mellower wolves, by contrast, would thrive. If this notion turns out to be true, it means that we didn’t domesticate wolves — they domesticated themselves. SLC6A4 may have played a crucial part in this change, because serotonin influences aggression.

To test these ideas, Dr. Zhang and his colleagues are gathering DNA from more dogs and wolves. They also hope to collaborate with cognitive scientists to see how variants of genes like SLC6A4 affect the behavior of dogs today. Their results may also help explain human evolution, because Dr. Zhang and his colleagues found that some of the same genes that evolved in dog brains, such as SLC6A4, also experienced natural selection in human brains.

“Humans have had to tame themselves,” said Adam Boyko of Cornell University, one of Dr. Zhang’s collaborators on the Molecular Biology and Evolution study. “The process is probably similar to dogs — you have to tolerate the presence of others.”

Carl Zimmer’s “Matter” column appears on Thursdays. Follow him on Twitter: @carlzimmer.

We subscribe to the belief that dogs are man’s best friend.
But we are also aware that not all dogs are that friendly, and that certain dog breeds — such as pit bulls, Rottweilers and German Shepherds for example — although loyal to a fault to their owners, are more likely to be threatening or potentially dangerous when around strangers.
The state House of Representatives this week passed a bill that will, if enacted, ban “dog discrimination” in Connecticut. The measure, now awaiting action in the state Senate, would prohibit communities from passing local ordinances that would ban specific dog breeds or require owners of specific breeds to purchase liability insurance, or keep them muzzled or in enclosed areas.
It’s a bad piece of legislation and we urge senators to reject this proposal. If not, we call upon the governor to veto the measure if it reaches his desk.
Statistics bear out the rationale of why a community might consider a ban, or restrictions and requirements of owners of potentially dangerous breeds.
Each year, more than 4.5 million people in the United States are bitten by dogs, one in five requiring medical attention, according to the American Veterinarian Medical Association.
Pit bulls are particularly dangerous if not trained or treated properly. According to dogbite.com, pit bulls were responsible for 23 of 38 fatal dog attacks in the U.S. last year; 22 of 31 fatalities in 2011.
In the last 30 years, according to Merritt Clifton, editor of Animal People, pit bull attacks killed 233 in the U.S. and Canada; Rottweilers, 81, Huskies, 24, German Shepherds, 14, and Doberman, 7.
We are not endorsing a ban on certain dog breeds or the imposition of restrictions on dog owners, but we strongly believe that individual cities and towns should have that choice if the community feels that such actions are in its own best interests.
The state’s attempt to forbid communities from acting in their own best interests goes well beyond the state’s authority under Home Rule. It’s also bad public policy and doesn’t deserve support.
That’s our opinion. We’d like to hear yours. Email us your thoughts at letters@norwichbulletin.com