[ SHOWGSD-L ] FW: [ New Study Explains Why

From: "Ginger Cleary" <cleary1414@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "'showgsd L list'" <showgsd-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 8 Oct 2010 12:26:07 -0400
 

Ginger Cleary, Rome, GA

 <http://craftyk9-gingerc.blogspot.com/> My Blog

Men fight for freedom, then they begin to accumulate laws to take it away
from themselves.  ~Author Unknown

 

  


Dog News


New Study Explains Why Breed Specific Legislation Does Not Reduce Dog Bites*

Important article now available from JAVMA website.

October 1, 2010 - For years, evidence has mounted that breed specific
legislation (BSL) fails to reduce dog bite incidents. The data supporting
this conclusion has come from cities and counties all over North America,
and from four European countries.

An insightful new analysis, recently published in the Journal of the
American Veterinary Medical Association, explains why BSL has consistently
failed to reduce dog bites. The authors, Gary J. Patronek, VMD, PhD, and Amy
Marder, VMD, CAAB, of the Center for Shelter Dogs, Animal Rescue League of
Boston; and Margaret Slater, DVM, PhD, of the ASPCA, have applied one of the
most valuable and well-recognized tools of evidence-based medicine to this
question.

Number needed to treat (called NNT) measures the effectiveness of new
medicines or treatments. It asks the question: How many patients have to
take the medicine or get the treatment in order for one patient to avoid a
bad outcome? The fewer patients that have to be treated in order to avoid a
bad outcome, the more effective scientists consider a medicine or treatment
to be.

But what if we had to treat thousands of patients to avoid even one bad
outcome? Would we bother with a new medicine if the number of people we
needed to treat to prevent one bad outcome, was 10,000? If we could only
identify 9,900 people suffering from the disease, we could not treat enough
people with the new medicine to be sure that even one of them would avoid
the dreaded symptom.

This is precisely the result that Patronek and his colleagues obtained when
they applied this evidence-based method to estimating how many dogs a
community would have to ban to prevent a single, serious dog bite. They
called their mystery number the number needed to ban (NNB). Using dog bite
injury data from the Centers for Disease Control, the State of Colorado, and
other, smaller jurisdictions, along with guestimates of the population of
various breeds or kinds of dogs, the authors calculated the absurdly large
numbers of dogs of targeted breeds who would have to be completely removed
from a community, in order to prevent even one serious dog bite. For
example, in order to prevent a single hospitalization resulting from a dog
bite, the authors calculate that a city or town would have to ban more than
100,000 dogs of a targeted breed.

To prevent a second hospitalization, double that number.

Dog-bite related fatalities are so extremely rare that not even a state
could ban enough dogs to insure that they had prevented even one. (Consider:
in Denver, Colorado, after they banned pit bull dogs in 1989, they had
another dog bite related fatality in the Denver area, involving another type
of dog.)

Spain, Italy, Great Britain and the Netherlands have all reported that their
breed specific regulations have not produced a reduction in dog bite
incidents. The Toronto Humane Society surveyed health departments throughout
the province of Ontario, and reported that the breed ban enacted in 2005 had
not produced a reduction in dog bites. In Winnipeg, Manitoba, after the city
banned one type of dog, dog bites actually rose, just involving other types
of dogs. Reports from Denver, Colorado, Miami-Dade, Florida, Prince George's
County, Maryland, and Omaha, Nebraska all tell the same story.

While there is no scientific evidence that one kind of dog is more likely to
injure a person than another kind of dog and BSL's documented record is one
of ineffectiveness, BSL remains a policy that some find attractive.
Patronek, Marder and Slater explain why.

"It is our belief," they write in their conclusion, "that BSL is based
largely on fear, and it has been emphasized that appeals to fear have their
greatest influence when coupled with messages about the high efficacy of the
proposed fear-based solution."

The documented failures of BSL, now combined with the NNB analysis, can be
marshaled to undermine such fear-based appeals. BSL proponents will be
unable to show "high efficacy of the fear-based solution" or that BSL is
rationally related to the public safety issues communities are typically
attempting to address when implementing BSL.

The complete article can be purchased from the Journal of American
Veterinary Medical Association at
http://avmajournals.avma.org/doi/full/10.2460/javma.237.7.788

*Patronek, G., Slater, M., Marder, A., "Use of a number-need-to-ban
calculation to illustrate limitations of breed-specific legislation in
decreasing the risk of dog bite-related injury," JAVMA, vol 237, Number 7,
October 1, 2010.

.

 
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[ SHOWGSD-L ] FW: [ New Study Explains Why

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