Love-A-Bull Challenges University Hospital for Delving into Animal Control Policy

You gotta love Texas for the sheer bravado. Evidently, it's even infected doctors at the University Hospital in San Antonio. Here, some docs weighed in on animal control policy where normal docs would fear to tread, since it's outside their scope of practice.

In a report entitled "Mortality, Mauling, and Maiming by Vicious Dogs," Dr. John Bini and friends decided to embarked on a crusade to justify canine profiling. The admitted "objective" of their report was that the gravest injuries would be caused by "pit bulls." And what was their conclusion? "These breeds (pit bulls) should be regulated in the same way in which other dangerous species, such as leopards, are regulated."

Have these docs been hitting the pharmacy? Surely, educated surgeons wouldn't have the audacity to make such an inane statement comparing domestic dogs to wild predators, at least not without consulting some veterinary behaviorists or veterinarians, right? Guess again. It is Texas after all.

The authors claimed they examined 15 years of medical reports. Just the reports — they didn't do any physical examination of the dogs implicated in the bites, let alone DNA testing to determine the true heritage of the dogs. I bet they didn't dig deeply enough to find Dr. Victoria Voith's paper about the problems in trying to determine the heritage of a mixed breed dog. Her research showed that  animal shelter folks (who, unlike doctors, work with dogs every day) are only right in 25 percent of the cases when trying to guess a dog's heritage.

Breed information wasn't even available for nearly two-thirds of the bite cases they examined, but that didn't stop the doctors from coming up with a breed-based conclusion.

The National Canine Research Council is calling the conclusions of the report into question. One glaring example of the report's shoddy work that they cite is that the authors state that one in every five children visits an emergency room because of a dog bite. However, the database for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicates that dog bite victims constitute less than 2 percent of kids aged 0 to 14 who go to an emergency room as a result of an injury. (For an in-depth look at the many ways the San Antonio report is flawed, also see KC Dog Blog.)

But like all profiling, humane or canine, the real flaw is that race or breed really doesn't matter; it's behavior that counts. The reality is that dog bite-related injuries stem from complex societal issues, caused by a variety of factors, including reckless owners.

Other medical studies have shown that breed discriminatory laws fail to protect the public, which makes this report not only misleading, but dangerous. Indeed, a recent Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association article by Dr. Gary Patronek demonstrated  the limitations of breed-specific legislation in decreasing the risk of dog bite-related injury.

Bini and his co-authors admit that "our study is limited by its restrospective nature and the limited number of cases in which the breed of dog responsible for the attack could be determined. This lack of information may compromise the validity of our results implicating the pit bull as a major culprit in severe dog bites admitted to our trama center."

So why publish it at all? University Hospital should be embarrassed to have its name associated with such blatant propaganda posing as "research."

Love-A -Bull, a wonderful Texas humane organization formed to educate folks about pit bull terrier type dogs, is rightly taking the doctors and the Hospital to task. Maybe they can convince the surgeons to stick to their specialty: fixing humans, not designing public policy in a vacuum.

Sign the petition to join Love-A-Bull in urging the hospital to disavow this study.

Photo Credit: Melissa Lipani, Best Friends Animal Society