Rottweillers kill baby...

Full story here

Its a terrible news story.

But there is also some terrible news reporting about it.

Perhaps unsuprisingly GMTV made a muddled, amateur, half-cocked mess of things this morning when the reporter bumbled her way through the few facts at her fingertips and described the dogs as "trained guard dogs" and insisted that the dogs be "placed back on the dangerous dogs list".

Two small pedantic points maybe, but you don't, can't, "train" dogs to be "guard dogs", and rottweillers were never on the dangerous dogs list so cannot be "put back" on it - the definitive description of what is a dangerous breed of dog and what isn't is here, and it includes only four breeds, all of whom were specifically bred for dog fighting.

Its being pedantic in what is still a tragedy which ever way you look at it but the point needs to be made that dogs, all dogs, are capable of killing babies, young children and even adults - but they don't do so as a matter of course and there is nothing in the Rottweiller breed that makes them more likely to do so than for instance a Doberman, German Shepherd, or a Chihuahua - once again, the 1991 Dangerous Dogs Act specifically made the possesion of four breeds of fighting dogs a criminal offence, and its been very difficult to police ever since.

We're a dog family, always have been. We had a German Shepherd bitch when we first got married who was a lovely dog to live with but who had a very protective nature (its natural in most dogs but especially in GSD's) and would bark like crazy and look very ferocious when anyone knocked at the door. We didn't teach her to do this, it was her instinct.

All of which was fine and dandy, in her twelve years with us she never attacked anyone, she would look fierce but if you came into the house she'd relax as soon as she realised that we had let you in and accepted you as part of "our pack" - and that is the secret of owning a dog, you have to understand that you are their family pack in the same way that a pack of wolves work.

Your responsibility when introducing a puppy into your family pack is to ensure that it knows its position in that pack, dogs are very hierachy driven animals and if you allow a puppy to have its own way then it will grow up under the impression that it is the dominant creature in the family.

We were given some simple rules to ensure that our first GSD knew that she was at the bottom of the ladder in our pack, easy stuff like she was never fed with us at meal times, we would eat in the evening and then feed her afterwards and not feed her food from our table - relate that to a pack of wolves where the weakest eats last at a kill and you start to get the picture.

Keeping them behind you is also important - walk into a room and if the dog pushes past you to be the first in there then shove it behind you and show it that you go first, and play fighting with a puppy is very important in its development (see pack of wolves example) but you always make sure that it ends with the dog submitting to you, it doesn't have to hurt the dog and its not cruel but you simply have to hold the dog to the ground until it stops struggling against you, when it does it has submitted to you and the lesson is enforced again.

When Amanda our first daughter came into the house we were very nervous about what Samantha (Sam) the GSD would do, but she simply sniffed the baby basket and then lay down next to it - we have photographs of that first meeting between baby and dog and its frightening to see how big Sam's head was in relation to Amanda, she could easily have killed her within seconds, but she was in fact very good with her especially as Amanda got older and would crawl all over her, grasping huge chunks of skin and fur to drag herself upright - when Sam had had enough she'd get up and walk away.

There is a rider to that last paragraph though - confident as we were that Sam would not do Amanda any harm we were never confident enough to leave the two in the same room together - thats a hard thing to say and do when you live in a small house like we did then, but you have to enforce it in the same way that you'd never leave a toddler in a room with an open fire burning.

I'll not mention our current dog Jake in this - Jake is a freak of a dog in that he was bred to specifically be passive, he is a gun dog and gun dogs have to stay quiet on a hunt - in the Alpha/Beta pack-dog scenario, Jake is a Delta dog and if he were in a pack of wild dogs he would be the one left asleep in the cave while the others went out to hunt and he wouldn't give a toss whether they brought any food back for him or not - Jake has never barked at anyone or anything, does not care who comes into the house, will not protect any of us against anything, is frightened of several inanimate objects, and awakens only to eat, he is the softest dog in the world bar none - but I still would not leave him alone in a room with a young child.

Its jumping to conclusions to assume that the parents inthis tragic news story left the baby alone with the dogs, but likewise its also jumping to conclusions to call for a ban on Rottweillers or any other breed of large dog just because they have the capability of killing - responsible reporting ?

Lazy reporting more like.