In a report published in this week’s influential British Medical Journal (BMJ), pediatricians said parents bringing a dog into the family home should also undertake mandatory classes to teach them the “responsibilities of dog ownership” while children must attend education programs designed to instill “precautionary behavior” around dogs. (To read the article, click here.)
These are two of the strategies that I have been proposing in Preventing Dog Bites. It is no coincidence that they are being endorsed in Great Britain, the home of the infamous “one-bite rule.”
And it is no coincidence that the same report says that the UK’s Dangerous Dogs Act is not working. Maybe our mother country will soon admit that the “one-bite rule” and breed specific laws are the wrong approach to curtailing the dog bite epidemic.
The “one-bite rule” is wrong for the world — not just America, not just Tennessee, and not just Texas.