cordelli

Why on earth does it matter if the dog was provoked or not? Unless the handler gives the dog the order to attack somebody, provoked or not, that dog has no business attacking somebody.

Really, it's OK if the woman held a dog for this one to bite her?

That's gonna be right up there with some of the silliest posts ever in Flyertalk.

There is no excuse what so ever for a police dog to bite somebody unless they are told to bite somebody.

WillCAD

That dog does NOT need to be put down. But the handler needs remedial training on how to properly restrain his animal in crowded places.

Dogs don't bite without threat or provocation. SOMETHING triggered the dog's aggressive response.

As I said before, a dog isn't a sentient being. It doesn't act randomly or emotionally, it acts on instinct and training. Dogs don't "just bite" any more than guns "just go off" or cars "just explode." SOMETHING triggers it.

We don't know what triggered this dog, but something did.

1) SOMETHING provoked the bite. Dogs don't just bite for no reason.

2) We don't know what kind of training the dog may have had. The news story says it's a DHS explosives sniffing dog, loaned to APD for use at the airport. There was no further mention of the dog's background or training. We can assume that, as a sniffer dog, it has been trained to sniff for particular scents; we can further assume that, as an explosives detection dog, it was trained to sniff for explosives. Beyond that, we don't know what training the dog may have had in behaving in crowded places.

3) I couldn't care less if this is a harmless Snoopy or a vicious former fighting dog that attacks everyone and everything around it - the ultimate responsibility for the dogs behavior lies with the human trainer who didn't stop the attack. Just like ultimate responsibility for a child's behavior lies with its adult supervision.

It is most certainly not the dog's fault.

If the dogs temperament is not suited to crowds, this should have been detected by the trainers who trained the dog. Certainly, if this is the case, then the dog should be removed from service in public places. But this is not the dogs fault - it's the fault of the trainers who improperly certified the dog to work in public places.

If the dog has a specific issue with a particular stimulus, the trainers should have detected that and trained it out. If they didn't detect it, it's their fault. If they detected it weren't able to train it out, they shouldn't have certified the dog to work in crowded places, and it's their fault if they did.

If the dog was not certified to work in crowded places, the trainers knew that and informed APD, but APD put the dog in the airport anyway, then it's APDs fault.

But all of that aside, the final responsibility lies with the handler for not picking up on his animal's behavioral queues and properly restraining the animal when it did become aggressive. It's quite simple - dog lunges, handler pulls dog back. No bite. Handler didn't pull dog back, dog bit, handler is at fault.

And by the way, I have had family members who have been bitten by dogs.

IrishDoesntFlyNow

The standard of care for animal bites by dogs, cats and ferrets is: if the animal is apparently healthy and available for quarantine, the animal is observed for ten days and no post-exposure prophylaxis is begun. Only if the animal develops clinical signs of rabies during the quarantine period will it be sacrificed for testing and prophylaxis begun on the exposed person. There is no reason to euthanize a dog, cat or ferret for testing absent clinical signs of rabies in the animal.

~~ Irish

Investor 11

I pretty much agree with everything you said. I'll add just a couple thoughts.

The dog is maintained by APD. It was procured through the TSA program and in all likelihood the APD handler and dog went through school together at the Lackland AFB training facility. During that time, and probably before the handler ever was paired with the dog it was put through temperament tests to determine its suitability for pedestrian detection work. Presumably, he passed the temperament tests and was put in the field.

These dogs are trained to search for their toy or "reward." it's possible that the dog mistook something on the woman for its reward and went after it. In this case, it's really hard to blame the dog for doing what it was trained to do.

Alternatively, maybe the dog has a high guard or protection drive. Drives in dogs can be enhanced or diminished through training but never completely eliminated. And as you said, this would fall onto the handler. In the handlers defense, it is near impossible to work a dog in a dynamic pedestrian environment and not be placed in a situation in which a bite could happen given the perfect storm of events.

It's an unfortunate situation for all involved.

CPT Trips

As soon as "provoked" is used, aroused emotions on the part of the entity provoked come into play. That gets right back to sentience, a characteristic that dogs don't possess. Any one of the folks here can provoke an Airport Security Screener, yes they are sentient, into ignoring their training and performing some retaliatory action, such as an aggressive grope, that the screener knows in wrong according to their training.

Dog training on the other hand is all about conditioning, stimulus and response. They don't know right from wrong. I'm certain that the DHS sniffer dogs are not conditioned to bite. And I would trust that the dog was exposed to a host of animal scent stimuli and crowd situations during it's training

Since there has yet to be any indication that the woman physically threatened either the dog or the handler, there is no reason to assert that she acted in any manner to provoke the dog to bite. It's not her fault and nothing she did, short of an assault on the handler/dog, should justify the bite. If the possibility of a little dog piss or discharge related to estrus will distract a sniffer dog, then we might as well stop using them.

At the least, both elements of the handler dog dyad need to be permanently removed from duty.

Scubatooth

That is not a guarantee either on the vaccine, as a friend of mine found out 2 years ago with 2 of his dogs.

Somethings not right with the dog, but the handlers is DTD for pulling "lets go check on the lady the dog just bit by taking the dog with them" move. The dog going after the lady a second time confirms both the dog and the handler need a check up from the neck up.

WillCAD

I agree completely. I tried to use the work "trigger" rather than "provoke".

I don't know what triggered the aggressive response from the dog. As I suggested earlier, it may well have to do with the scent of the woman's own dog on her clothing. If that's the case, then I agree with you that the dog's training and conditioning is woefully inadequate; no working dog should be so distracted by such a scent that an aggressive response is triggered.

Always Flyin

An unprovoked bite is past the realm of re-training. At the very least, both animal and trainer need to be PERMANENTLY removed from working in the animal services.

Yet, here, the dog and trainer are back working. Insane and a basis for a huge lawsuit with punitive damages should the dog bite again.

Yeah, maybe it had a bad day at the office.

That is absurd psychobable. You can't differentiate between a random action and an instinct. Not 100% of the time.

In any event, guns and cars are mechanical devices. You apparently want to believe that dogs are as predictable as machines. That is insupportable and preposterous. We all know dogs have different temperaments and behavioral traits. Two dogs do not act exactly alike as a machine would.

And there are those who would argue dogs are sentient beings. They would argue that sentience has degrees and humans are just at a higher level than dogs.

I don't really care. What I do care about is that if there is an unprovoked bite, that dog is done.

No, we don't.

That doesn't mean we have the ability ascertain the "reasoning" going on in a dog's brain.

Tell that to a parent when the child is having a temper tantrum.

The dog bit when he shouldn't have? That is the dog's fault.

Sounds great in theory and unworkable in reality. When the dog is already in the vicinity of the victim, the dog easily has the ability to bite before the handler can pull the dog back.

Unprovoked attacks? And you kept the dogs?

I care about my family more than that.

Ridiculous. Dogs, except trained attack dogs, do not bite when finding their "toy" and biting a human is never the reward.

The woman was standing there minding her own business. Under no set of circumstances can that constitute a perfect storm.

Your argument leads to the conclusion that dogs should never be working around the public.

No, it's an unfortunate situation for the woman who was bit.

Investor 11

The dog will most certainly attempt to bite and grab its reward, that is what I was referring to.


We know that the woman says she was standing there minding her own business. Without video we do not know what was currently going on in that environment at the time and we are all just speculating. That's not to say in any way she is at fault.

I do believe dogs should be working around people. My comments regarding the perfect storm were more akin to your statement that in some cases there is nothing a handler can do to stop a bite if the dog has already made that decision while working in close proximity to people.

Ari

Condoms aren't 100% either; they can fail. That doesn't mean a woman needs to take the morning after pill every time after protected sex on the off chance that the condom was defective.

The medical protocol is pretty straightforward; if the animal is vaccinated and doesn't have any signs of rabies, you don't treat the bite victim for rabies nor do you kill the dog for the express purpose of cutting the brain open. If the animal's vaccination status is unknown, you do one or both.

IrishDoesntFlyNow

If the animal is available and apparently healthy (which this one was), it's quarantined and observed for ten days, regardless of its vaccination status. Human prophylaxis is deferred unless the animal exhibits clinical signs of any sort of illness during the quarantine period, at which time we simultaneously euthanize the animal for testing and begin human prophylaxis pending the test results.

We have nearly 150 years of experience with human rabies prophylaxis. It's 100% effective as long as it's initiated promptly when warranted, and before symptoms occur in the human. The whole rabies discussion is pretty silly - there have been less than a dozen cases of human rabies attributable to dog bites in the US in the last 17 years reported. Of those, at least four are positively related to dog bite exposure in a foreign county, and all of the remaining exposures were positive for dog rabies virus variants predominantly found in foreign countries. Over all, there average only two or three cases of human rabies in the US per year, and almost all of those are bat exposures.

Even IF the dog was rabid (unlikely in a vaccinated animal, but possible if the vaccinated animal was exposed to rabid wildlife during a period of waning immunity), there is ~0~ likelihood of human death by rabies infection if prophy is initiated within ten days of the bite.


~~ Irish

WillCAD

I disagree, for two reasons.

1) You keep saying, "unprovoked bite." But we don't know that it was an unprovoked bite; just because the woman says she was standing there minding her own business doesn't mean it's true, and even if it is true, we have no way of knowing whether or not there was some other factor at work that triggered the dog's aggressive response.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS AN UNPROVOKED BITE. Something always triggers an aggressive response from a dog.

It's entirely the responsibility of the handler to know his dog well enough and be situationally aware enough to anticipate and avoid situations that trigger an aggressive response. Failing that, if a triggr gets by the handler due to circumstances beyond his control, it's his responsibility to restrain the animal properly to prevent it from harming anyone without a direct order to do so.

In this, we are in complete agreement. The handler screwed up and should not be allowed to take his animal back to work until a complete investigation figures out A) what triggered the dog's aggressive response, and B) why the handler didn't prevent it or stop it.

You're anthropomorphising. It's a dog, not a human.

Sure you can. 100% of the time, a dog's behavior is based on either instinct or learned responses. Dogs don't act randomly due to unpredictable emotive responses like humans do. Any claim to the contrary is absurd anthropomorphising. It's a dog, not a human.

Dogs aren't machines, but they are predictable. The amount of predictability varies; for example, I know enough about dog psychology to generally predict that if I poke a dog in the eye, I'll have about a 60% chance that the dog will bite me and a 40% chance that the dog will run away from me. That prediction could be made more accurate if I knew the dog's history and training.

In the case of a trained sniffer dog, the animal's history is entirely known from birth by the trainers, and should be known by the handlers, as is its training. Dog training is all about using learned responses to override instinct. The better the training, the more predictable the animal's behavior is.

Hogwash. More absurd anthropomorphism. It's a dog, not a human. It's not even a chimp. It's a dog. There is no sentience involved, only instinct and learned responses from training and past experience.

Again, THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS AN UNPROVOKED BITE. Something triggered the aggressive response. I believe the woman when she says she was just standing at baggage claim waiting for an arriving passenger (there is no reason not to), but that doesn't mean there was no trigger.

Cowflop. It's a dog, not a human. There is no reasoning going on inside it's brain, only input and output, like a computer.

I have. The response is usually, "Well, what am I supposed to do?!" To which I reply, "When he's throwing a tantrum, remove him from the situation till he calms down so you don't inflict his behavior on others."

No, it's the handler's fault. A handler is ultimately responsible for his animal's behavior at all times.

Vicinity is the key word here. Working dogs are always kept on a lead. A sniffer dog is always kept on a fairly short lead to give the handler maximum control over the animal. The fact that the APD officer walked his animal past a woman on a lead, and allowed the animal to get close enough to bite her before he could pull the animal back, is a mistake of the handler.

No, they were not "unprovoked attacks." As I said, there is no such thing as an unprovoked attack.

My dad was bitten rather badly after he tried to render aid to an injured dog which had been hit by a car and was in great pain. The bite was really his fault; he exercised compassion but forgot that an animal in pain will lash out at any unknown people around it in an instinctive defensive reaction. The animal died from its injuries.

One of my cousins was bitten (not seriously, fortunately) by her own dog. Again, it wasn't an unprovoked attack; she was doing something (I didn't get the whole story, I think she was trying to groom him, clip his nails or something), and he reacted defensively. She now knows better and hasn't experienced a defensive response since. And yes, she kept the dog, who is a real sweetheart for the most part and fiercely protective of his human family.

Wally Bird

Shout all you want. If the victim did nothing at all to provoke the dog then it was an unprovoked bite. I don't care what the dog was "thinking" .

jcwoman

I agree with most of your argument, but for different reasons. You have a major flaw in your reasoning:

Cartesian behavior theory was hogwash and is being rapidly debunked now with new scientific studies in a field called Cognitive Ethology. There are many documented cases of evidence pointing to the fact that animals do have emotions and varying levels of rational thinking processes - and the experiential data is now being backed up by studies using things like functional MRI. In a tiny nutshell, the researchers observe a behavior that seems very much like our own behaviors based on love, jealousy, anger, fear, etc. Using fMRI, they are documenting that the same locations in the animal brain are firing/activating as they would in the human brain. Now that we can study brain function without killing the test subject, we are making lightspeed progress to debunk Decarte. If you'd like to educate yourself some more about this, many authors have written about it in lay-terms. A very good one is The Emotional Lives of Animals by Marc Bekoff.

But coming back to why your argument is correct even though your basis is wrong, here's an example (See Pit Bull Placebo, also a good book):

It's been documented that dogs that are kept chained in the yard with little shade in summer, no warmth in winter, little or no water or food tend to become "unpredictable" and vicious. True they are vicious, but it's not true that they are unpredictable. Depriving them of their basic biological needs, which includes social connections since they are pack animals, is the cause of the viciousness. Any child, adult or other animal who unwittingly wanders within it's chain-range may get a nasty surprise. In decades past this was fairly well known and dogs were kept this way for exactly that reason, to protect the property.

Pit Bull Placebo also makes a great statement about why training dogs to guard things is a dangerous thing to do. Dogs do have rational thought, but they don't rationalize with as much complexity as humans do. So when I teach my dog that strangers are bad and must be warned off or attacked, that is exactly what he will do - with utterly no understanding that he should make an exception for Aunt Betty who tries to visit unexpectedly.

gsoltso

I think that some of us may be talking past each other. Some (myself included) have stated that there is no such thing as an unprovoked attack/bite by a dog. Some have stated that because the female that was bitten did nothing to provoke the dog directly, it is an unprovoked attack. Something triggered the dog to bite, something, somewhere, made this dog think that a bite was needed. It could be a scent on the female, a scent in the vicinity of her, a sound in the vicinity of her, or other events in that vicinity that (based on the dogs instinct and history) indicated that a bite needed to be dealt. Based on the accounts by the female, she did not directly trigger this response, she did not make boogie, boogie faces at the dog, or take a swing or kick at the dog or even poke the dog in the eye. This is not an indicator that it was an "unprovoked" attack, it simply means that she did nothing wrong, did not knowingly do anything to trigger the dog - which means she was completely not at fault in this scenario, she was an innocent caught in an unfortunate situation that caused her pain. The fact still remains that something triggered an aggressive response from the dog, meaning that something, provoked the aggressive reaction. As mentioned before, it could be any myriad of reasons or actions on the part of someone else that could be the provocation.

Personally, I place the blame on the handler for not applying proper techniques in a crowded area, as the handler is always ultimately responsible for the dogs behavior.