How sharper than dear Lassie's tooth
Read this in the Times a few days ago:
Dog bites cost American home insurers 6.4 percent more in 2009 than inthe previous year, with the average claim exceeding $24,000 for thethird straight year, an industry group said Wednesday. The injuries cost$412 million in 2009, compared with $387.2 million a year earlier, thefifth straight increase, the Insurance Information Institute said. Thenumber of claims increased 4.8 percent to 16,586.
Either dogs are biting more, or people are putting in more insurance claims. Or both. I don't know. But this statistic is not surprising. Decades of living with dogs, and several years as a semi-professional trainer of same, have taught me that the bite bone's connected to the stress bone. I think it is safe to say that our stress levels in this culture have exploded through the roof, if only because of the incredible pace of change (always a producer of stress whether the change is for the better or for the worse). Now add to that the near-unbearable weight of economic distress that has landed millions of folks in the previously-unvisited (by them) territory of the freelance artist, an unstable country in which work evaporates for reasons that have nothing to do with the worker, promised checks don't arrive, and the landlord is banging on the door. That's a lot to manage.
Our dogs are emotional animals. They read body language that we don't even know we are speaking, and they are exquisitely-tuned vibe detectors. They are much better at that than we are, because they pay attention to it, and we rarely do. When our disequilibrium travels through the air and down along the leash, they read it, and absorb it. I think it makes them more likely to bite. Stress certainly is making makes me more likely to bite.
Of course there have always been biting dogs, and those teeth can inflict catastrophic damage. I am not denying that. It's the uptick in the insurance claims that I have been pondering. This is just my opinion, dear readers. Please know that I am not minimizing the danger. I am just saying that the boat we're all in is leaking.