Be aware: All dogs can bite

Today’s issue of the Frontiersman contains an account of a dog attack that hospitalized a Meadow Lakes man. Everyone involved seems to think that had a neighbor not rescued him, the three American bulldogs attacking the man would not have stopped until he was dead.

An Animal Care and Regulation officer in these pages not too long ago urged readers to keep their dogs restrained, especially now that the weather is warmer and more people are outside.

Apparently, the message didn’t sink in.

There are, of course, less dramatic reasons it’s a bad idea to let Fido roam free. Dogs not on leashes or in kennels are much more likely to dig in the neighbor’s yard or be hit by vehicles or cause car accidents.

And we know that attacks of this sort are rare. We can’t think of any others, at least not any this severe, in the Valley in the past five years.

But one thing all dog attacks we’ve read about have in common is how surprising they are. Nobody ever expects his pet to act this way. Dogs trained to be vicious are few and far between.

Statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are just as surprising. Those numbers indicate that this is a much larger problem than we suspected. The CDC says 4.5 million people are bitten each year and 885,000 have to seek medical attention. In 2006, more than 31,000 of those people needed reconstructive surgery.

So essentially what we’re looking at is a common phenomenon that is impossible to predict. It sounds to us a lot like house fires. We have smoke detectors in our homes for a reason — the same reason, we would argue, that we need to keep our animals restrained.

The consequences are just too much to risk.

The consequences for the victim, of course, are readily apparent to anyone he meets. He will likely retain numerous scars from the attack.

The consequences for the animals are even more severe. The dogs in question were voluntarily surrendered to the borough and are about to be put down.

As for the owners, their consequences are a bit less clear. They’ve lost three companions.

There has not been a civil lawsuit filed, but we wouldn’t be surprised if one was in the works. In 2001, the CDC prepared a study of dog bites. In it, the insurance industry estimated the number of claims resulting from dog bites at $1 billion annually.

Finally, we’d like to say a word about breeds. That same 2001 study dealt with the idea of which dogs are more dangerous and concluded that there is really no way to know, and bans on particular breeds are misguided. It’s true that large, popular breeds are involved in more instances. But large breeds are also physically more capable of doing damage and probability would dictate that popular breeds would be involved in more incidents.

“Singling out one or two breeds for control results is a false sense of accomplishment. Doing so ignores the true scope of the problem and will not result in a responsible approach to protecting a community’s citizens,” according to the report.

So please, do yourself and your neighbors a favor and keep Fido under control. It’s the law. And even if Fido is a Pomeranian — all dogs are capable of biting.