Dog Bite Prevention (though sometimes, you can't)

We've all heard about cases where a dog has bitten a child. Arguably, too many cases. Funny for me to say, perhaps, being a Dog Person™, but obviously, I can explain.

Lots of dog bites you hear about seem, from the outside, to have been completely unavoidable. Small child left alone with dog, child starts crying, dog has attacked the child. No adults there to see what happened. These cases are, in my mind, the fault of the adults. Dogs should not be left alone with tiny children. Tiny children do unreliable, misunderstandable things. Tiny children have little to no intent in their actions. Dogs, in general, have a specific set of reactions to stimuli.

Oh yeah, and last week was Dog Bite Prevention Week.

(drawn by Lil Chin)

Shelter dogs making nursing home visits

I was surprised and pleased to see a positive dog-related article in my local rag yesterday: Pooches pay visits to area nursing home. This was not "just" a story about therapy dogs; this was a story about a shelter called by a local nursing home to see if they had any dogs that could come and visit! The shelter director, Kerrie Colin, performed her own tests to see how dogs would be around walkers, wheelchairs, etc. and brought two miniature schnauzers over, with great success.

(picture from Wikimedia Commons, not one of the Miniature Schnauzers in question)