Dog Guards Bone And Bites Child – Phoenix Dog Training – Dog Trainer – Behaviorist
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Sam Basso
PHOENIX , AZ AREA: (602) 708-4531
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I received a call early this morning. A man and his wife had brought their 2 year old Lab mix to their kid’s ballgame. To occupy the dog, they gave the dog a bone to chew on. While the dog was working away at the bone, a friend’s 6 year old boy came over to the dog, laid on top of the dog, the dog spun around and bit the kid, tearing off a portion of the kid’s earlobe. Now the parents there want the dog put to death, calling the dog vicious. The owner of the dog has apologized, knows now that they shouldn’t have given the dog a bone in such a place, and are planning on paying a settlement to the parents of the kid. The man called me for my opinion.
I told him the dog was doing what mammal carnivores do: they guard their prey. It isn’t an abnormal behavior, and is not an indication of the dog being vicious. Most of the large mammals do this: leopards, lions, wolves… and dogs. I also told him if they took 20 dogs owned by these parents, and put their dogs in the same situation, that a percentage of their dogs would have bitten the kid, too. People put dogs in impossible situations and then expect them to not act like dogs.
I advised him to get an attorney and find out what the law required in his town.
He thanked me, and that was that. The dog will probably pay for the mistakes of the dog’s owner and the parents of that kid with his life. The bite was provoked. That may not be how the law, his friends, or his insurance will view it. I wonder if the parents of the kid apologized to the dog owner for being negligent in supervising their kid? If that had happened to my kid, I would have taken responsibility and paid for the medical costs myself. I wouldn’t blame the owner of the dog. If you let your kid wander into the street, do you sue the car driver that runs over your kid? No. We blame dogs because we somehow think they are furry little humans.
What if this kid was allowed to wander into a horse barn, went up to a horse, hugged it on the leg, and got kicked… would you kill the horse for being a horse? It reminds me of a lawsuit I heard about in the news… a man sent a text message to someone. The person who received the text was driving, looked down at the message, and got in a car wreck. So, they are suing the sender of the text message for the car accident. I thought to myself: anything to get a buck, and to pass the buck, I guess.
