Dogs bite, but balloons and slippers are more dangerous

Dogs are dangerous and they are more dangerous to children than to adults. Not as dangerous, of course, as kitchen utensils, curtain cords, five-gallon water buckets, horses or cows. Not nearly as dangerous as playground equipment, swimming pools, skateboards or bikes. And not remotely as dangerous as family, friends, guns or cars. Here's the reality. Dogs almost never kill people.

A child is more likely to die choking on a marble or a balloon and an adult is more likely to die in a bedroom slipper-related accident. Your chances of being killed by a dog are roughly one in 18 million. You are five times more likely to be killed by a bolt of lightning. The supposed epidemic numbers of dog bites splashed across the media are absurdly inflated by dubious research and by counting bites that don't actually hurt anyone.

Even when dogs do injure people, the vast majority of injuries are at the Band-Aid level. Dogs enhance the lives of millions more people than even the most inflated estimates of dog bite victims. Infants who live with dogs have fewer allergies. People with dogs have less cardiovascular disease, better heart attack survival and fewer backaches, headaches and flu symptoms.

Petting your dog lowers stress and people who live with dogs just plain feel better than people who don't. Yet lawyers and insurers press for less dog ownership. This must stop. We must maintain perspective. Yes, dogs bite but even party balloons and bedroom slippers are more dangerous.