The Dog Park -- Where Evolved Human Fears Come Unleashed

Among the arguments made by those who oppose off-leash access to dogs in San Francisco parks and on GGNRA lands is that there is a safety issue, i.e. that unrestrained dogs pose a threat to citizens. This is not supported by any evidence, which, interestingly (and sadly for dogs and their guardians), may not matter at all when it comes to assuaging fear in humans. But first, the facts.

1) Serious dog attacks are rare events, so rare that they are front page news when they happen. The fatality incidence nationwide has remained steady at between twelve and twenty per year since statistics have been kept. If you consider the increased compression of dogs and people in urban settings each year, as both human and dog populations climb, and the resulting rate of exposure, this is a spectacularly low – and getting ever lower - incidence. Any epidemiologist will tell you that twelve to twenty per year in a country with three hundred million people and an estimated 60-73 million dogs could very well be as low as such a number can get.

2) Dog bites that inflict no damage at all or damage comparable to a minor kitchen injury, or injury a child might get playing a non-contact sport, are much more prevalent. There has been no attempt in the popular press, however, to make a distinction between these and the rare, spectacular, serious dog attacks. However, failing to do so is very much like lumping human arguments in with felony assault and murder.

3) Off-leash access has not proven to be a factor in dog bites. According to the CDC, the majority of bites take place on the guardian’s property. The remaining incidents involve dogs that are either restrained (i.e. leashed) or at large (dogs who have escaped confinement).

Consider, for example, the three highest profile serious dog attack cases in the history of San Francisco, those of Diane Whipple (2001), Shawn Jones (2001) and Nicholas Faibish (2005). In the first, the (un-neutered) dogs were on leash; in the second, the (un-neutered) dogs had escaped confinement in the backyard and were at large; in the third, the (un-neutered) dog was confined in the guardian’s home.

Ironically, it could very well be that the safest dogs are those that attend off-leash dog parks. Shyan et al. published a research paper in 2003 in the Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science, which looked at the prevalence of inter-dog aggression in dog parks. Dog-dog problems turned out to be minimal and of a non-serious nature. While the paper did not consider the question of dog to human aggression, the authors’ interpretation of this low dog-dog aggression incidence was interesting and, I think, relevant. They floated the idea that self-selection and peer pressure both operated strongly: People who take the time to get in the car or walk to a designated off-leash area to exercise their dog tend not to be the type who are derelict in other areas of dog guardianship, such as training, socialization or appropriate containment. And, people whose dogs are anti-social tend to be informally expelled from off-leash communities.

But here’s the rub. When it comes to fear, facts seldom carry much weight. This is because just as we inherited a craving for fat and sugar that served us well in our distant past amidst dietary scarcity and now is maladaptive, we inherited a preparedness for fearing certain environmental elements, notably animals with pointy teeth. Predators were genuine and prevalent threats back during the bottlenecks of human evolution. Those prone to react first and think later out-reproduced those who paused to consider the facts before reacting. We are all descended from people who were inclined to freak out at pointy-toothed animals. For most of us today, predators are no longer much of a concern but we can’t shake the feeling, nor replace it with one that would be more adaptive, such as, say, a fear of traveling in motor vehicles at high speed, which is statistically ten thousand times more likely to kill you than a dog. Because we didn’t evolve with the latter, we can think about the cost-benefit ratio of riding in cars and make decisions based on what we find out.

Not only do animals with pointy teeth push evolutionary buttons, but, for the same reasons, mechanical containment – fences, houses and leashes – feels like the only way to keep safe. Concepts such as “socialization,” “training” or, worse, statistics about likelihood, however much the real key to minimizing or understanding our risk, fall flat emotionally, abandoning us still to the mental picture of a toothy animal, a toothy loose animal. To set rational – and therefore effective - policy, we’ll need to trump an evolved fear module with the fancier thinking part of our brains, no small feat.

For more reading:

Preparedness of fear-evoking stimuli:
Preparedness Theory: The Boy Scout of Fear
Preparedness and Phobia: Specific Evolved Associations or a Generalized Expectancy Bias?
Fear and Fitness: An Evolutionary Analysis of Anxiety Disorders

Fundamental attribution error (a great example of distorted thinking governing behavior):
Affective Forcasting...OR...The Big Wombassa

Misperception of risk:
Development of Peril Resource

Social amplification of risk:
Perception of Risk Posed by Extreme Events

Modularity of minds and summary of the evidence that our brains are not tabula rasa:
The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker (Penguin, 2003)