Child Safety Around Dogs - Part 2

Recently, in Northern Alabama, there were multiple kids bitten by dogs in various cities. I was on the news again last week, talking on WHNT News Channel 19 and giving tips on dog safety and working with reactive dogs. It's become such a problem. The story that I did was in reference to a girl who got bitten at her apartment complex when another dog, that's a neighbor's dog, was on a leash and approaching her. It got off-leash and got excited, ran to her, bit her in multiple locations on her face and neck, and the girl was airlifted to the hospital. The girl knew the dog and the dog's owner.  The dog had to be euthanized, and the child may probably never like dogs again. 

This is the sixth time I have been on the news in the last 18 months here in Northern Alabama, giving tips to dog owners and parents of children about what they should and should not do around dogs. The previous article was published in April of 2024.

Tips for Dog Owners

1. Always keep your dog on a leash, period, no exceptions. I talked about this in another article, Five Reasons Why Your Dog Should Stay on Leash. It’s for safety. Your dog has to be on a leash, a good harness, and wearing a good collar that they can't get out of. You don't want a dog that can escape and run towards a stimulus when it gets distracted and overstimulated. This is the real problem, and this is what happened to that 9-year-old girl locally here who got bitten in the face by the dog. It got off-leash. Dogs should never get off-leash and run towards people or other dogs. That isn't good. 

2. Never allow your dog to bark and lunge at any stimuli, including another dog or people. The first thing you should do as a responsible dog owner, if your dog starts to react to any stimulus, is create distance. Go the other direction, leave the scene, and calm your dog down. You might have to bring the dog home to get them to calm down. Generally, when dogs are very overstimulated and have a trigger that sets them off, you have to bring them home, and then they have to decompress for a while before they come back down to reality. So your job as the owner is to create distance.

3. Work with a dog trainer to prevent reactivity. 70% of the dogs I work with have leash reactivity and have either bitten someone or reacted so severely that the owners think they're going to bite someone eventually. We work with this with dogs all the time, and I do this in the group training. I do this with one-on-one training, and it's very successful. My leash reactivity program is highly successful, a hundred percent successful generally. We teach the dog when it starts to get a little bit excited, when it sees any stimulus, usually another dog or people, to relax. We teach them to sit and wait and watch me, which is to watch the owner, the handler, whoever has the leash. And this is exactly what I talked about on the news last week. These are the tips I gave on the news story.

4. Teach the dog to sit, wait, watch me, and stay calm so it doesn't react to triggers and stimuli. These are alternative behaviors to responding to any stimulus. What you don't want to do when they're reacting is to start pulling back on the leash, or the collar and harness, and calling their name and telling them all kinds of things like, 'no, stop.' No, because that's just reinforcing the behavior.  That's just making it worse. That's not solving a problem. They shouldn't be reacting to it in the first place. So the training is to prevent the reactivity, not to correct it while it's happening. 

Tips for Parents

1. Never allow the child to pet the dog unless the dog is on a leash and calm. That's first and foremost. That should be a given. That's just common sense. If the dog is jumping, hyper, and really out of control, the child does not go near it. You leave the scene and go the other direction. Don't go near the dog. You can see the dog from a distance. That's good enough. 

2. Never have your child reach out to a dog with their hand going towards the dog's face, and never have your child put their face up to a dog's face, ever. I don't care if they know the dog. I don't care if it's your dog. I don't care if they've interacted with that dog a thousand times. Never do that, because if the dog isn't feeling well, hasn't had enough sleep, and is already overstimulated, it could snap at the child at the slightest trigger. Most dog bites happen to children this way, and suddenly, the dog is labeled aggressive. So you don't want to do that to the child. Do not pet a dog that way.

3. The dog owner holds the dog calmly on a leash, and the child goes to the side of the dog to pet it. The child slowly and evenly pets the dog's body while the owner holds the dog's collar. The dog's head cannot reach around, even to lick the child's hand or arm. You don't even want the mouth going anywhere near the child's body at all. I learned this in Therapy Dog Training. During therapy dog sessions, Dixie will approach somebody who’s very elderly in a wheelchair or on a walker. I pick her up and hold her to the side so they can pet her there. They don't come near her face because in therapy dog work, dogs aren't allowed to lick anybody. They're not allowed to kiss another human being. That's not part of a dog's therapy. Dixie's a big kisser. She likes to do that. So I don't want her making a mistake that way. 

4. With children, we have them pet the dog on the side of the body, long soft strokes, not fast, slow so that the dog doesn't get aroused and wound up, and they only need to do it two or three times, and then it's done. The child got their fix for petting the dog. The dog's happy, everybody wins. This doesn't need to go on for 10 minutes where the child's constantly petting the dog. The dog will eventually get irritated, and it might snap, and that's a big mistake.

Also Important

Another thing that will set a dog off with children is children running very fast toward or away from them, or in any direction, and making high-pitched noises. Children need to stay calm around dogs. I said this in part one about 18 months ago on podcast number 97. You don't want a child screaming, yelling, and running away from a dog, or in the dog's vicinity, because the dog could get very excited and accidentally play-bite the child. That could be detrimental; it could actually be fatal. So we don't want that at all.

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