[jholman]

> The amount of children killed or injured by poorly restrained dogs is very high.

This claim is interesting, if true. Can you back it up? I spent 15 minutes on research, and my preliminary findings, using US statistics (I'm not American but it's just easier to google American stuff) suggest that:

a) about 42 Americans die to dog attacks per year (about 0.13 per 100k population) (very high confidence)

b) it looks like about half of those are kids under 17, with ages 1-4 over-represented (very high confidence)

c) most of those kids-dying-to-dogs deaths are not due to unrestrained dogs in public, but rather infants in their family homes, dying to dogs owned by the child's parents (low to medium confidence)

For example, WP gathers media/journal reports on dog fatalities, and has 16 records for 2023 (so presumably about 1/3 of the fatalities for that year). 6 of those are children. Of those 6 children, 4 died to the family pet, the other 2 died to neighbours' dogs while in their own home. Extrapolating from that that suggests that the number of American children killed by poorly restrained dogs, other than their own family, is roughly 6. Out of around 10k child fatalities per year in the US.

That doesn't seem "very high" to me, but that's just a matter of opinion. Do you have data that shows a different pattern?

[vundercind]

Injuries are way more common than death.

[edit] Forbes: an estimated 800,000 people each year must seek medical attention after a bite. Hospital bills can be very expensive, and an ER visit could necessitate a dog bite lawsuit in order to recover monetary compensation for damages.

https://www.forbes.com/advisor/legal/dog-attack-statistics-b...

My sister in law was one of them, when she was five or so. Unprovoked run-up-and-bite from an off-leash dog. Had to have a tear duct rerouted and other work on her face. Messed up their finances really bad for a couple years, like “parents not eating dinner tonight, because there’s only one can of spaghetti-o’s” bad (they were fairly poor to begin with)

[jholman]

Yikes, that's a grim story.

Yeah, the injury stats are way higher than death. I just couldn't find a fast way to disambiguate serious injuries from not-so-serious-but-we-still-care injuries from the sort of bite that really just merits a fake apology and everyone gets on with their lives.

At the other extreme, I've had first-hand knowledge of a case where someone taunted a dog repeatedly over many months (stupid kid, stupid dog-owners, lots of mistakes were made), eventually the kid got bit, didn't even need stitches, but they called animal control.

So. Non-fatal dog-attacks have a very wide range of impact, and I had no idea how to disentangle those.

Oh, after all that writing I just did, I went back and re-read your source. In 2022 there were 17,500 home insurance claims related to dog bites, at an average cost of $64k. That sounds like a pretty reasonable proxy for serious injury due to injuries from dog bites from pets, the sort of pets that could plausibly have been inappropriately not-on-leash (remember we're discussing whether or not it's "incredibly dangerous and irresponsible" to ever have your dog unrestrained).

[vundercind]

Sure, I agree that 800,000-hospital-visits number isn’t really a great picture of what’s going on. The deaths number was just so very far under what I was sure was the serious-harm figure that I thought it worth bringing in the non-death attacks, and a (probably reasonable-ish) estimate of cases that prompted treatment was first thing I saw that looked close to what I was looking for.

The 17.5k stat’s interesting—I think you’re right that it may at least be in the ballpark for an estimate of unrestrained dog attacks. Some would generate a claim, some wouldn’t, some claims wouldn’t be for unrestrained dogs… yeah, probably a good starting point. I like that one, good eye.

I’d guess most attacks of that 800k aren’t from strangers’ dogs at all, but friends and family’s dogs. Simple matter of opportunity and time exposed.

[snozolli]

I'm not the other guy, and I don't have data, but the risk might be far higher outside the US.

These days, Americans mostly treat their dog like a family member. If you travel to developing nations, you're far more likely to run into packs of dogs roaming around. Packs of dogs will do things that a solo dog might never consider.

It still happens in developed countries, but it's far more common these days to see it in poor, developing countries. They probably don't have the infrastructure to collect relevant statistics, either.

[jholman]

Yes, I agree with you, and poorly-fed dogs might do things that a privileged pet might never consider. And, a fortiori, packs of poorly-fed dogs.

But the comment I was responding to was from a commenter whose bio says they're in Philidelphia, responding to a comment that I think was probably pretty developed-country, on a story from a Brit living in America. So I think we're talking about the developed-country context.

I'm not disagreeing with the text of what you wrote, though.