Camping with dog breeds considered dangerous

dturm wrote:

ONG wrote:
Back in the day I drove a delivery truck for 18 years making deliveries to farms, bushiness and homes. From that experience I can assure you that there are NO nice breeds of dogs...

Being a practicing small animal veterinarian for 37 years, I've probably seen more individual dogs than most. I totally agree with most of the observations made above, including the one quoted. While there are behavioral tendencies within breeds, blanket condemnation because of breed is only valuable to insurance underwriters and politicians trying to score points.

Also, breed bans and restrictions may give us a false feeling of security in that if a breed isn't on the list, it must be OK. Given the right circumstances ANY dog can bite, even the nicest most even tempered and trained individual.

Doug, DVM

Yes, any dog can bite, but based on the pure physics involved an attack by a pit bull is going to be much more serious than an attack by a Pomeranian. It is very easy to research the bite force of various dog breeds. It is also very easy to research the breed tendencies of various dogs. I suppose it is very possible to have a Great Dane that is a terrific herding dog, but if you were looking for a herding dog a border collie would be a much more likely candidate. Same with unknown dogs that are potentially dangerous.

The owner of a specific dog is likely to be well versed in it's behavior. The management of a park and the guests of that park are not. Before we had to make the difficult decision to no longer accept certain breeds we would often receive calls from guests who were upset that those certain breeds of dogs were in the park. It was not unusual for those concerned guests to leave early due to their concerns, whether factually based or not. Any policy we would have would displease a certain segment of the market. We took the policy that appeared to offer the lowest risk.