Look Closer: It’s Not Really Dog Aggression Says Janis Bradley on WGN Radio

Janis Bradley helped pioneer research showing that a dog’s presumed breed is not a predictor of aggression. Her classic book, Dogs Bite: But Balloons and Slippers Are More Dangerous helped to lead the charge to fight breed bans.

Bradley talks HERE on WGN radio about her latest book, Look Closer: Rethinking Dog Warning Signals.

Bradley says, that we use the word “aggression” to label dogs which even going back to 1960 but that doesn’t really tell us anything. We don’t know what the dog is truly trying to communicate; there has to be a better word, and she says she came up with the word defensive. Most defensive dogs are actually fearful.

Even some trainers will encourage punishing for growling or snarling, and they’re wrong. We want to see the stress signals – the subtle ones like yawning to the more obvious signs like growling. She explains why we don’t want to discourage dogs from expressing these signals.

Bradley says dog bite numbers are not going up – though there is data which opposes that. No matter, avoiding dog bites matters, and she speaks about that in detail. One thing we need to do is to understand what dogs are communicating.

Breed specificity or presumed breed (since so often people are wrong about the breed they target) is not correlated to whether the dog will bite or not.  And HOA’s and landlords preventing large dogs doesn’t make the community any safer.

Pets as Stressbusters

New science on how dogs and cats are natural stress buffers.