Why aren’t there more dogs at the doctor’s office? | Hacker News Reader

Why aren’t there more dogs at the doctor’s office?

daily.jstor.org

75 pointsAriarule161 comments

Because they are unhygienic, they trigger allergies and fears, they carry a certain risk to attack humans, and above all, they are very unreliable.

Are dogs unreliable? My highly trained Malinois is more reliable than most people.

Unreliable for use as medical sensors, at least that's what the study says. About your general sentiment: I am sorry that you feel you don't have reliable humans in your life.

Have you seen a highly trained Malinois? Even if you're surrounded by highly reliable humans, they're probably not as reliable as the dog.

It doesn't matter how well trained a dog is, a lot of people are scared of dogs.

A lot of people are scared of needles, too. And yet we still inject people all the time.

Because there are medications that "must" be administered intravenously or in the muscle. There's no test that can only be performed via canine.

Devil’s advocate: “yet”.

> There's no test that can only be performed via canine.

Because we haven't developed any.

Well yes, but clearly some tests dont't need to be performed with a needle anymore - we can use a dog

That's true, but it's not relevant here... we're talking about reliability.

Depends on how you define "reliable". I'm sure the Malinois can be relied upon to do the things it has been trained to do, but I can rely on humans to do things they have not been trained to do.

There are multiple linked studies, the first BMJ infection article at least seems to be positive in its conclusions about it.

("CONCLUSION: A trained dog was able to detect C difficile with high estimated sensitivity and specificity, both in stool samples and in hospital patients infected with C difficile.")

Haha. They're reliable as dogs, but perhaps less reliable as machines ;).

Counter argument: I've never seen any trained chihuahua. It seems that most if not all owners who want to own a chihuahua or another small "lap dog" are incapable of training them.

The sheer amount of untrained dogs is just way too high to use a trained dog as an argument. I'd guess less than 10% actually go to dog school/training.

This i tell my kids to not go near any dog they dont know, too many bad dog owners..

> The sheer amount of untrained dogs is just way too high to use a trained dog as an argument.

The sheer amount of stupid people is just way too high to use a smart person as an argument.

Have you never seen a 90s Taco Bell commercial?

No animal is 100% reliable (in the general sense, not the medical one like in the article).

Which is why a lot of the cute videos with dogs and children (especially babies) should actually not be encouraged, there's many accidents every year.

And now tell me please which doctor or test IS 100% reliable?

Highly trained is the operational word here, untrained Malinois are a nightmare. I agree with the above for most dogs, trained they are fine but most dogs are not trained and not very easy to control in unfamiliar surroundings.

Trained people are fine, but most people are not trained and not very easy to control in unfamiliar surroundings.

Reading "Guns, Germs, and Steel" (Pulitzer prize about 20 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns%2C_Germs%2C_and_Steel ) made me read your sentence and think "every clause this person wrote is well known to be plainly false".

Guess you don't have any allergies. Almost any dog or cat or furred animal will trigger a serious allergic reaction for me. If I continue to be exposed I'll have a major asthma attack.

You gonna be responsible for my medical bills? Nope I wouldn't think you'd care much considering your post.

Sorry but any tiny benefit you might gain from having a dog is not worth the danger to my health. I love peanuts but I won't eat any in a plane or other confined space because people's health is a higher priority than my taste buds.

I've got allergies galore, but the animal dander faded (no idea why) while pollen is still going strong seasonally.

So true.

I love dogs. Used to have a dog.

Not no more. Got allergies something fierce.

A dog in a waiting room would fuck me up big time.

Exactly! My first thought was "why are there any dogs at the doctor's office at all?" I've always loved dogs but I'll probably never have one again, because people in my family are allergic. Their right to breathe outranks my desire to keep an animal in the house/office/etc.

The dogs in the article at least appear to be isolated from patients, but I hope similar consideration is given to lab workers (no pun intended) who may be allergic.

Merely eating peanuts in the same general area as someone with an allergy is extremely unlikely to endanger them from airborne exposure [1]. Just wipe down your tray table and seat after you are done to avoid leaving contaminated surfaces and that should take care of even the risk of causing even a mild reaction to someone with an allergy.

[1] https://www.aaaai.org/allergist-resources/ask-the-expert/ans...

I am insanely afraid of large dogs so no thanks, please keep them away from me as much as possible

If you have a fear that materially limits your ability to move around in society (and a fear of dogs definitely falls under that, at least if you live in a western country), you need therapy. It is not on everyone else to make the world contort to accommodate your fear.

out of curiosity, why?

Hm interesting. You seem to have an aversion against dogs and many presumptions. Unreliable ... if it would be the case the police or rescue organizations wouldn't use them because life depends on their reliability. attack humans ... if you didn't know almost nothing about dogs and have made bad experiences with them in the past then yes you probably would think that. It's not the case. Attacks are in many cases explainable and very often the human causes the attack by unknowingly behaving like prey or posing a thread to the dog. fears ... right ... like you have you you mean? :) I had a lot of fears in the past because as a child I was bitten by a dog. Now I have my own and almost no fear. allergies and unhygienic ... well a dog for medical purposes don't have to be in a operating room to do their job. Many people kiss other people or shake hands ... how unhygienic is that? ;-)

Don't think he was talking personally, but rather list arguments that few people will bring up...

I love all animals, but still, the "unhygenic" argument is a thing (humans can sanitize and wash hands e.g.), that is why in a lot of food shopping places or restaurants it is forbidden to bring dogs inside (even if just more theoretical than practical).

And lastly, the allergies is also somethinng you cannot persons just talk out of, every "office dog" was always impossible because at least one guy having allergies...

Sure dogs are used in professional environments but you can only use them for short periods of time. For example drug sniffing dogs can be used only for half an hour before they need to rest. They aren't machines and need attention.

> You seem to have an aversion against dogs and many presumptions.

And you seem to have Dog Owner Reality Displacement Syndrome.

> Unreliable ... if it would be the case the police or rescue organizations wouldn't use them because life depends on their reliability.

Police doesn't give two shits about reliability, these are the same people who use polygraphs regularly. They are both useless instruments which can be interpreted however the officer desires, while letting them launder that opinion through an "unbiased" third party.

> attack humans ... if you didn't know almost nothing about dogs and have made bad experiences with them in the past then yes you probably would think that. It's not the case. Attacks are in many cases explainable and very often the human causes the attack by unknowingly behaving like prey or posing a thread to the dog.

This is just another version of "If she didn't want to be assaulted then she shouldn't have dressed like a slut!".

> fears ... right ... like you have you you mean? :) I had a lot of fears in the past because as a child I was bitten by a dog. Now I have my own and almost no fear.

And so the abused becomes the abuser, perpetuating the cycle…

> Many people kiss other people or shake hands ... how unhygienic is that? ;-)

People wash their hands, and don't typically tend to run and kiss any random stranger they meet (unlike dogs!). There's a huge difference between kissing the same person 10 times, vs kissing 10 people once.

> these are the same people who use polygraphs regularly.

No, they are not. Certainly there are places where they use a polygraph as something other than a party trick, but those places are fewer in number than the places where dogs are used to do police work.

You akin every dog owner to an abuser. This is needlessly hostile and I'd go so far as almost willfully unfriendly. There's really no call for that.

> No, they are not. Certainly there are places where they use a polygraph as something other than a party trick, but those places are fewer in number than the places where dogs are used to do police work.

Both are bad. If one's (finally!) getting reduced then that's a good thing, but that doesn't suddenly make the other one valid.

> You akin every dog owner to an abuser. This is needlessly hostile and I'd go so far as almost willfully unfriendly. There's really no call for that.

No, I'm saying that this "dogs are great and there's something wrong with anyone who doesn't like them" attitude is abusive. Not all dog owners are abusive, but I would go as far as to claim that there is an inherent selection bias where people with this attitude are more likely to own dogs. And far more likely to tell everyone they encounter that they own dogs.

> Both are bad.

One (the polygraph) is bad because it's been proven to not work at all, the other is a class of domesticated animals bred to be useful to people and to understand their body language. They are not the same thing, and comparing them as if they are is not useful.

> I'm saying that this "dogs are great and there's something wrong with anyone who doesn't like them" attitude is abusive.

It's not abusive to say that a class of helpful beings are great and that blanket disliking them is doing them a great disservice. It sucks that you see it as abusive, but you don't establish what specifically you feel is abusive. You just say "this is abuse" and you keep repeating it.

This makes it seem as if you don't like them and folks saying that this is a weird attitude to have at a domesticated animal purpose-bred to be useful in some way should be punished (at least verbally). I think this attitude is toxic, if we must speak in such terms.

> Attacks are in many cases explainable

Yeah, all the times a baby gets mauled to death by a dog, it's definitely the baby's fault. The fact that they are explainable doesn't mean they're acceptable.

I'd love to hear about just 1 case of a well-trained service dog mauling a baby to death uprovoked. The fact that an accident is technically possible if everybody in the pipeline fails at their job isn't much of an argument against anything. Just like you wouldn't leave a baby unattended with a blood testing machine, you wouldn't let it interact with the dog. In fact, if a baby poked its finger where it didn't belong, I bet a dog would show a lot more restraint than a 18k RPM lab centrifuge.

The share of dog owners is on the increase. Originally people who got dogs meant to handle them. These days people are trying to fill some kind of hole and the number of dogs per person has increased dramatically. It also means that in total you have more and more dog owners that can't handle their dogs.

From a risk management perspective it's much easier to prevent a baby even getting near to a centrifuge than it is to control actions of other people and their dogs. If a dog runs up to your baby, you have seconds to react at times.

This:

> Dogs can work through many samples quickly, at a low cost, with minimal or no interaction with patients. For example, healthcare workers can collect breath, sweat, urine, or blood samples for dogs to process, rather than having the dog examine patients directly. This allows the dogs to work with minimal environmental distraction, and bypasses the necessity to work directly with patients who may be uncomfortable around dogs.

Someone once said that dog's noses are the closest thing we have to Star Trek tricorders. In Star Trek a tricorder is a handheld sensor that can seemingly detect anything in any situation, and as a Star Trek fan this description has always stuck with me.

Perhaps one day we'll master electronic noses, but until then, dogs seem under utilized. If anyone's looking for a high difficulty, high impact way of changing the world, look at electronic noses.

Human smell is also under utilized. I had a friend with a severe peanut allergy who could enter a house and immediately tell if there were peanuts in the house. Presumably most people possess such senses, but have no reason to use them.

It's kind of strange that the first sensor that evolution built is the last sensor to be implemented in electronics (if ever).

Chemistry and electronics are difficult bedfellows. The other senses can be emulated quite nicely in pure electronics

Also, a lot of times we may not even know what to look for.

The woman who could smell Parkinson's inspired a new path of diagnosis research: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/03/23/8202745...

interesting to think about the amount of 'information' that is present in an environment (like smells) that we aren't privy too and don't understand. Its easy to assume it doesn't exist and then be surprised when a trained dog knows someone is sick immediately.

The information (in the form of chemicals etc) is there we just can't sense it via machine or otherwise, puts the idea of technological superiority into perspective.

I'd imagine single-purpose electronic noses would be a much more tractable problem than general purpose ones.

GCMS could be argued to be a generable purpose 'electronic nose' in many ways, but just isn't portable enough to throw on a smartphone.

> I'd imagine single-purpose electronic noses would be a much more tractable problem than general purpose ones.

We already have those, to a very limited extent: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_detector

A 'mass spectrometer' might be fairly close to a technological nose. I've not seen many of them though, so I imagine they're rather inefficient compared to noses.

But even if they are accurate and sensitive, how can we avoid the bias of humans? The one link I see repeated on Reddit (drugs) is a paper that iirc showed over 50% were human alerts

https://health.ucdavis.edu/welcome/features/2010-2011/02/201...

My aunt has a seeing eye dog that has led her in to traffic 0 times. My dogs reliably find game birds and ignore non-game birds in the same cover. The trick is to not put them into situation where pleasing their handler is at odds with the job they are tasked with.

I think the primary issue with drug sniffing dogs is that the handlers aren’t inclined to care about the veracity of the result and would probably prefer the dog to trigger a positive result because it gives them a free pass on probable cause. The dog is likely rewarded regardless as well which is why you get high profile cases of dogs that alert 90+% of the time. They were literally trained to do it.

The same thing can’t necessarily be said for cancer detection. There isn’t a strong motivation to skew the results by the handlers and presumably any positive response would entail further diagnostic testing. I suppose cynically you could apply the same logic so that medical providers can justify the use of more expensive diagnostic testing but I’d like to think it’s not quite that bad.

A new study shows that ants are as effective as dogs at detecting cancer, and can be trained to do so in as little as 30 minutes [0]

That doesn't explain dogs' absence, but one day it might.

[0] https://www.healthcarepackaging.com/quick-hits/article/22118...

Why aren't there more ants at the doctor's office?

There probably are, just not getting trained and utilized.

There are a lot of far-fetched claims made in the article that don't pass the smell test (heh).

For example, in the article:

> there is evidence that dogs can quickly and accurately detect COVID-19 infection

In the linked source:

> but researchers say large-scale studies are needed before the approach is scaled up.

I imagine it is similar for every other diagnosis they tout. Small scale tests under ideal conditions very rarely survive real world application.

So the article is mostly wishful thinking by a dog-loving journalist? Who would have thought.

Because it would be a dogtor office...

father... is that you?

Not sure I like where this is going, now I'm imagining dogs patrolling public areas and tagging random people for mandatory Covid quarantine.

Not being able to smoke a joint before crossing a border without risking harassment was bad enough.

This is about using dogs to help with diagnosis. Anything the medical staff would learn from the dogs would still be covered under doctor-patient confidentiality.

Training dogs to help could provide cheaper, more accurate tests that are less invasive and less painful for patients. This has nothing to do with "hassling" you.

I'd be more concerned with the ethics of using dogs for COVID-19 detection given that dogs are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection.

If we can accurately pick out which people are contagious with Covid, should they not be forced to quarantine?

No, they shouldn’t at this point. Especially in areas where everyone who wants to is vaccinated.

Government-forced quarantine was only valid - if ever - at the beginnings of a disease where little was know. It’s not valid when we know the disease poses minimal threat to the majority of the population, and only slightly above minimal to a minority.

> Especially in areas where everyone who wants to is vaccinated.

Right now that is nowhere in the world, because kids under 5 still can't get vaccinated.

https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-Focus-... indicates 347 Covid deaths in the 0-4yo category, since Jan 2020. Out of a population of around 16M in the US, ignoring churn in that category.

That's nice, but we have no idea what the long term effects of COVID infection is on young children. We do know that in adults the long term effects are lessened when they are vaccinated, and we can assume the same in children. So it's still a valid concern.

We do not know about the long term effects of the MMR vaccine is either. Will kids who received it instantly die at the age of 60? We don’t actually know.

Another valid concern.

EDIT: To reply from jounker: “said the turkey before Thanksgiving”. I picked 60 intentionally. Past performance is not indicative of future returns. Etc. etc.

I think after 50 years we have a pretty good idea of its safety.

Well, then I don’t want anybody who isn’t fully immunised against measles or meningococcus to get anywhere near my child

The prevalence of those diseases is much lower than COVID right now, so your argument doesn't really work.

They are also way more dangerous for a 5 month old baby.

Ok then keep your five month old at home (that's what you want me to say right)? And now you want to say "then keep your four year old at home"

But there is a huge difference between the socialization needs of a child under one (when they get their measles vaccine) and a child under five. Children between 3 and 5 go to pre-school and need to interact with people for their psychological well being. So it's on us as a society to make it safe for them to so.

And meningococcus usually spreads through deep kissing, so as long as your infant is French kissing an infected adult it should be fine.

> Ok then keep your five month old at home (that's what you want me to say right)? And now you want to say "then keep your four year old at home"

No, I am just going to say that now we have vaccines and treatments for covid, so we should treat it like other diseases. We don't quarantine people with measles, even though it is way more lethal and more contagious than covid.

> We don't quarantine people with measles, even though it is way more lethal and more contagious than covid.

Yes, we do.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-action...

Seeing some comments about the reliability of dogs, it’s good to keep in mind that traditional medical tests can also be quite unreliable. This link [1] explains how mammograms can have a “positive predictive value” (% alarms that are correct) of under 10% for many age groups. Maybe that’s what you want in a screening test to catch most of the bad stuff. And maybe dogs could be incorporated as one component of several.

Though, maybe similar to the sense of “unreliable” is that performance could vary a lot from dog to dog, or over time, in a way that might not be true for other tests. But Im not sure if that’s worth worrying about if the aggregate performance is quantified and comparable to other methods.

[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/40935...

A better title: Why Aren't There More Dogs in Medical Labs, Sniffing & Screening Samples?

Quick answer: What major stakeholder or gatekeeper would favor that situation? Beyond obvious regulatory issues, dogs sniffing samples is not patent-able, high-tech, high-status, nor high-profit.

Who would profit? Dog nutters. Currently they go to great lengths to introduce dogs everywhere, they even fake ESA doctor's letters to illicitly profit from service animal laws. Surely they would fake studies or write overly positive articles about studies.

If it worked, you’d get a specific training method approved and you’d be the Certified Cancer Dog authority and the health authorities would only allow a CCD in offices. You could also lobby for periodic CCD evaluations. It is totally monetizable if it worked.

In fact, I’d buy the tech off you if you could demonstrate it. I can do the other parts and I have access to capital.

If the technique is generalizable, I could build a billion dollar company out of this.

Long story short, dogs aren’t reliable enough to be medical devices.

The whole “police dog” comparison is completely misleading. Drugs dogs are hilariously unreliable and are explicitly used by some departments solely to create probable cause.

And with SAR dogs, they don’t need to be reliable at tracking as long as they are better than humans.

On the contrary, they are 100% reliable. They always detect drugs when they are present. They also detect drugs when they aren't present. But hey, probable cause is just a pesky constitutional law concept anyways.

So more like 150%-200% reliable

Has this been blind tested? That is for example simulated mules carrying well protected drugs at end of the long day?

Here, have some free citations. This is something which I believe everyone should be aware of:

"Drugs dogs are hilariously unreliable and are explicitly used by some departments solely to create probable cause."[0][1][2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_v._Harris

[1] https://www.utahcriminallaw.net/drug-sniffer-dog-false-posit...

[2] https://www.smh.com.au/environment/conservation/sniffer-dogs...

Have there actually been studies that put drug dogs to the test under controlled conditions?

Just looking at airport stats isn't enough. A drug dog might sniff trace amounts of drugs on clothing, but a search may not turn up anything because the trace amounts are from days earlier. Or maybe the contraband is too well hidden to be found, and so the drug dog's signal is labelled a "false positive" because the search failed even though it really was a true positive.

Even if a drug dog is only right 50% of the time, that's still pretty incredible odds unless literally 50% of the population is carrying illegal drugs at any given time.

I'm not saying that I don't believe drug dogs used as an excuse to manufacture probable cause, but I also don't believe the concept of an accurate drug-sniffing dog is impossible, considering blood hounds can detect and follow extremely dilute traces of a person's scent.

Something like 80% of us paper currency has trace amounts of cocaine on it. Which means anyone carrying cash is likely carrying drugs.

The article gives _good_ sensitivity and specificity numbers for dogs, under appropriate conditions.

The whole "police dog" is a supreme court approved way to subvert the fourth amendment: https://reason.com/2011/02/18/four-legged-warrants/

A: Getting stuff approved requires VC or drug patent level revenues to study, and nobody will fund rigorous study of the capability of dogs and the protocols needed to utilize them appropriately.

"OK sir, we've got your blood work, and we'd now like you to stop by the dog-detection office for a sniff test. That'll help us eliminate some of the possibilities"

We'll send your blood to the Lab(rador), and if you could get your CAT and PET scans done before your next visit we can go from there.

If medicine used dogs, wouldn't every doctor's office need x different dogs trained in detecting x different diseases? Also, there are ethical considerations in employing living creatures that can not possibly be fairly compensated. Development and use of an artificial nose would be superior, because only one (system) would be required, compared to i don't know how many dogs.

Allergies.

The title question can be answered with one sentence in the article itself: "As with all preliminary scientific findings, there is still a need for large-scale, reproducible studies before researchers make broad claims regarding the usefulness of dogs in diagnostics work."

Because some people (including myself) have animal phobia. I have been bitten by stray dog at the age of 5. I am almost 30 and still can't overcome my phobia. Upon seeing a dog or any other animal my flight instinct takes over.

Related: When your house/office/data centre/whatever has an intermittent bad smell, what's a good way to find the source?

I have a dog, but I'm not sure how to train it to locate smells I find objectionable.

If you already have a dog, there's a good chance it's responsible for the smell in the first place...

Rat poison will be the source in many cases

> what's a good way to find the source?

Binary search.

I use computer algorithms in many non-computing tasks.

Doesn't work too well when your comparison function is faulty, in particular olfactory fatigue.

Linear search works much worse with olfactory fatigue.

I would assume the two main reasons are lack of access to this sort of dog training, as well as the impracticality of having a dog at a doctors office.

Detecting disease with dogs would seem to be an O(N) process: To detect N diseases, we need N dogs in the clinic. Is this really feasible?

If there were a machine that could only detect one disease, I don’t think that automatically precludes it from being cost effective. I could see a dermatologist buying a cheap pen-sized device that solely detects skin cancer, at least.

Maybe, but dogs (or any animal, really) require constant care in a way that machines don't, and need space and staff for boarding, exercise, veterinary care, etc.

(Unless somebody is working toward a cheap pen-sized dog...)

For better or worse, we already manage large numbers of cattle and chickens. For the most part we don't feel bad for them. Treating dogs in a similar fashion would probably not be socially acceptable. What does the use of diagnostic dogs look like at scale?

It depends on the accuracy and speed. If a dog can detect cancer in a stool sample with 90% accuracy, and the dog can go through 1k+ samples a day, then that sounds like a good deal. The value proposition is in high volume and low invasive tests that can reduce the need for slower or more invasive tests. If we could screen everyone for colon cancer from a stool sample with a trained dog, then we could reduce the recommended frequency for a colonoscopy and still catch as much or more cancer. There is a lot of money saved if the average person without colon cancer only needs 1-2 colonoscopies in a lifetime instead of 4-5.

In part because this. Nobody wants to deal with this people if avoidable

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_Dog_affair

If you keep a dog in a lab you became a target for cruelty animal groups that will see your demise as an opportunity to spread their stance.

And in part because dogs made difficult to keep the clean space that is expected in this places.

Answer: Dogs kill 25 thousand people a year - they are not safe and people are allergic.

Edit: It isn’t rabies that makes them unsafe - just in the USA about 4.5 million Americans are attacked by dogs every year resulting in thousands of hospitalizations.

https://www.wemjournal.org/article/S1080-6032(09)70079-1/ful...

This is highly misleading without context. Humans kill roughly 475,000 humans every year [0]. Should we avoid having humans at the doctor's office?

[0] https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-animals-that-kill-mo...

What is so misleading about that number? That's 8 times 9/11, every year! Your comment is whataboutism.

What kind of take is this? You need to interact with humans.....

So if something kills less than 475k people we should consider it safe? What kind of reasoning is that?

I think thats a fantastic idea +1

Well, the chance that your doctor would intentionally murder you is likely higher than the chance your doctor would be using a rabid feral dog from a 3rd world country, which are responsible for nearly all of the "kill 25 thousand people a year" you cited.

And the 4.5 million annual attacks in the USA alone?

Break it down by dog breed - it isn't Beagles doing those attacks (with extremely rare exception). Of course, one area where total delusion enters the debate is with people who think all dog breeds are equally inherently aggressive and likely to attack and thus any dog can be substituted with any other and be equally dangerous.

Even as someone who absolutely adores dogs and always is happy when one is around, this is a pretty silly argument. It's clearly possible to operate a doctor's office with zero dogs present, but I've yet to see one successfully operate without at least one. That said, for the past two years, every time I've been to a doctor's office, there _have_ been measures in place to keep the number of humans there as small as possible, which I think is entirely reasonable.

Dogs are definitely used for palliative and mental health purposes in hospitals they are pretty trivial to manage without any danger to humans with a marginally competent handler.

Hospitals near me have a security force which prohibits humans from entering unless they have a reason to be there, and removes any human who may exhibit dangerous behavior.

The vast majority of those deaths are from dog spread rabies right?

In most non-western countries, yes. Not so in the UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_dog_attacks_in_t... A lot of those happened after an epileptic seizure. Which are not quite rare in doctors offices.

You seem to have a fear of dogs. Want to talk about it?

I'm allergic. Want to talk about it?

If you read the article and not just the title, the majority of the discussion is using dogs for diagnostics of collected samples. They (for that use) would not be around patients like you so wouldn’t trigger your allergies.

But for those applications, you would probably prefer giant pouched rats that are much cheaper to train and keep.

If they work as well or better for the purpose, then sure.

Sure, I get the allergies argument, especially if the reaction is a deadly one. It’s a good reason to avoid dogs. I have an allergy too, although not to dogs. It’s not EpiPen level, but I do keep a bottle of Benadryl handy at all times. I totally get the life or death vibe.

But calling dogs killers because one is allergic to them is a bit disingenuous no? People are allergic to many things. It’s not the thing that’s the problem, rather the individual body’s overreaction in the presence of the thing. The problem is with the body, not the allergen, wouldn’t you agree?

Well yes, I've been in far more life-or-death situations with dogs than humans, and they give me panic attacks.

On multiple occasions I had a group of dogs chasing me on a mountain road while I was on my bike with trucks on one side and a cliff on another.

Don't fault me, I had every right to be there in peace, and enjoy my bike ride. No wild animal bothered me, just the goddamn dogs.

I don't want dogs anywhere near me.

And yes, statistically they are far more dangerous than bears, mountain lions, and wolves combined, in terms of both injuries and deaths, even if you exclude rabies cases.

Dogs were bred to fearlessly attack anything unknown and that's exactly what they do.

Wild animals, on the other hand, generally fear the unknown and stay away from it.

Dogs chase people and things for many reasons. Almost always it’s for play. If a dog has its ears and tail up, it’s looking to play with you, not tear you to pieces. Dogs have clear signals and behaviours that need to be understood.

> Dogs were bred to fearlessly attack anything unknown and that's exactly what they do.

This is completely untrue and the complete opposite of how dogs evolved. Dogs were domesticated to live among humans in harmony. If you experience a poorly behaved dog, it’s the owner at fault. Some owners mistreat their dogs and/or raise them with poor social habits, causing the dog to behave aggressively towards humans. It’s learned distrust, for which you have people to blame. Good owners will treat their dogs well. Such dogs will not attack another person unless their owner is being physically harmed. I don’t know if you’re living in America, most dogs in North American society come from well-adjusted homes where people treat them as members of the family.

You can learn how to make friends with any dog. It can be taught. The fear you experience is learnt and can be unlearnt.

> Almost always it’s for play.

No, fuck that. Being chased on a mountain road is life-threatening and it's the dog's fault, not mine. Literally no other animal does this, they are nuisances.

> If a dog has its ears and tail up, it’s looking to play with you, not tear you to pieces. Dogs have clear signals and behaviours that need to be understood.

No, fuck that. In MY language:

    mellow purring = friendly
    barking = threat

Period. If it barks, I will bark back and assert my dominance, followed by pepper spray and rocks if it continues to approach and threaten.

If I move away or yell at an animal, that means NO and do NOT follow me. Almost all other animals including cats usually understand CONSENT and what "NO" means very well.

> If you experience a poorly behaved dog, it’s the owner at fault.

Well, 90% of dogs I've encountered don't have owners and many of them threatened me. Often in packs. The few dogs I've met that have owners, at least half of them were very badly behaved.

100% of bears and coyotes I've encountered don't have owners either, and to this date every single one I encountered has left me alone.

> You can learn how to make friends with any dog.

I really just do not want to. Like most cats and porcupines, I really just want to be left alone by dogs. That's my choice, and I want to be respected and dogs to respect that I do not wish to be approached, sniffed, barked at, or chased.

I'm more than happy making friends with other animals, and do not need dogs in my life at all.

It seems many people build their identity on liking dogs. So if you say anything remotely negative about dogs, these people feel personally attacked and act accordingly. One who does not like dogs is at least weird to them, if not outright evil. I hear it is the worst in the US, but it gets increasingly common here as well. Some of them will try everything to get more dogs involved, including: classroom pets, pets in offices, fake emotional support animals. I wonder if they also manipulate studies like in TFA...

> If I move away or yell at an animal, that means NO and do NOT follow me. Almost all other animals including cats usually understand CONSENT and what "NO" means very well.

Are you seriously…expecting “packs of wild dogs without owners” to understand “consent” and “no”? I mean I get in your experience your not going to be trustworthy of the animals, but if you are encountering wild dogs, they by definition are not domesticated and likely not to be all that familiar with commands and human behaviors. They know 3 things…eat, procreate, and protect the pack. If you are barking at wild dogs and asserting your dominance in their territory, you are a threat…and it’s no wonder they would act aggressively.

> Are you seriously…expecting “packs of wild dogs without owners” to understand “consent” and “no”?

Yes. Almost EVERY other animal understands that if you stomp, roar, hiss, and yell at them that you don't consent to be approached. This is common instinctive language across all animals. Most wild animals will just leave you (and anything unknown) alone in the first place. Even the most fierce predators don't go around attacking random shit for the hell of it unless they are actually hungry.

Dogs aren't a natural species, they were bred by humans and bred to be something that evolution would have never naturally created.

> Even the most fierce predators don't go around attacking random shit for the hell of it unless they are actually hungry.

That is incorrect. Some predators do. You do, and you are not random. You are a threat on their territory and by your own admission, an aggressive threat with no respect for them as a pack or their territory.

I'm generally fine with dogs, but the typical American dog owners' entitled attitudes do get a bit grating. And when one's approaching one of my kids without a leash or a hyper-attentive owner (which is extremely common, even on kids playgrounds where they're not allowed to be off-leash), it makes my blood pressure spike. The most recent time, it was just to eat my kid's cookie, but I've heard too many direct anecdotes to just be chill about it.

I’ve been on more mountain roads and trails than I can recall, encountered plenty of dogs and not had a single threatening moment let alone an injury.

I regret to hear of your phobia, but both of our experiences are just anecdotes with no weight to argue from.

Gaslighting is not welcome here. You might be lucky. Your words come off as essentially arguing that just because you haven't experienced X that the problem is not significant. Many people attempt to use logic like this for X={racism, sexism, ...} but it applies to other things including traumatic interactions with dogs.

Also, there are plenty of people I know with the same experiences as me.

How on earth are you calling my comment gaslighting? I merely pointed out that both of our examples are a single person‘s data point, and we cannot draw broad conclusions from them.

I don't think being chased by packs of dogs on several dozen instances in at least 5 countries counts as a single data point.

Maybe dogs hate the way I smell and love the way you smell but that doesn't make it right.

I do carry defenses (rocks, pepper spray) to deal with the situation and avoid injury but having to be on guard for dogs at every second and ready to pull out these things on a moment's notice is NOT a pleasant way to cope.

I said it’s a single person‘s data point. And it is. You’re hypersensitive on this issue. Clearly you know the math and the statistics to know what one persons experiences mean to drawing conclusions.

I respect your wish not to feel threatened and I tried to show that, no need to make incorrect replies.

> You’re hypersensitive on this issue.

https://repeller.com/what-youre-too-sensitive-really-means/

I'm an American dog lover, and was surprised when all of my Vietnamese-family-by-marriage voiced similar perspectives. Stray dogs were a serious, common threat that could kill you.

You are not being gaslit - you applied a singular experience on your part as an argument in a more general sense.

That doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen to you or wasn’t meaningful, just a poor persuasive argument.

It is not gaslighting to point out that your anecdotes are not data, or that the plural of anecdote is also not data.

If we were to believe your comments, there would be wild packs of dogs all over. Do you have any stats to back this up? I hike all of the time in the US and only wild pack of animals I have encountered is coyotes. Are you confusing coyotes with dogs?

> I hike

I have to say it is less of a problem while hiking. Coyotes do leave me alone. It's much more of a problem if walking, running, or bicycling through suburban areas. Yeah, I know, Americans (especially those living in massively gentrified areas) tend to just tell me I shouldn't do these activities and get in an SUV instead, but that's not how most of the world wants to live.

> in the US

Yeah, the US isn't the world. This might be why you haven't seen how dogs can be a huge problem. The US isn't representative of the stray dog problem that plagues very large parts of the world, including eastern Europe, east and southeast Asia, Middle East, central America, and sub-saharan Africa.

> know, Americans (especially those living in massively gentrified areas) tend to just tell me I shouldn't do these activities and get in an SUV instead

Cut the shit, you don’t know anything about the US based on your own comments. I talked about hiking because animal encounters are even less of a problem when walking in neighborhoods/cities. Nobody said anything about riding in an SUV.

It sounds like your problem isn’t with domesticated dogs then and is with feral ones instead. You do know this entire conversation and article is not about wild dogs right?

I’m afraid of most of the things on this list (including plenty of humans)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deadliest_animals_to...

Worldwide or in developed countries?

This is an incredibly disingenuous statistic. The 25,000 is from rabies due to bites from feral dogs. This would not be an issue in medical settings where the canines would be vaccinated.

Dogs are not safe? As in, the therapy dog that comforts sick children in the hospital might actually bite their face off at any moment?

Where did you get your numbers? I'm so confused because the paper you linked doesn't seem to support what you're saying in the slightest. It really just seems like you hate dogs.

> [...] Dogs kill 25 thousand people a year

I don't see it in the paper and it's a HUGE discrepancy. Do you mean globally? Again where did you even get that number? The ONLY reference I see is this from a CDC paper [1]:

> From 1979 to 1994, dog attacks resulted in 279 deaths to humans in the United States, resulting in an average of 17 to 18 deaths per year.

Sooo... Less than 20 deaths per year, up-to 21 in the worst case estimate, in a country (USA) where ~34 million households have dogs. I'm seriously perplexed, dawg. Did you read the paper or just link to it assuming no one will even skim it?

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9182209/

> the paper you linked doesn't seem to support what you're saying in the slightest.

The paper was part of my edit just looking at the 4.5 million attacks in the USA alone (where rabies is essentially gone) to point out that it isn’t just rabies that makes them unsafe. Here you can read about the 25k deaths:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-36320744

> Dying from an actual dog bite is much more rare. There is no reliable worldwide data, but of the estimated 4.5 million dog bites in the US every year, only about 30 people die on average.

So you used an "estimate" as fact omitting that it's an estimate, from a BBC click-bait article, that offers NO citations. Pretty damn disingenuous, I think you should feel some shame for intentionally lying.

I'd bet that high number of households that have dogs is one reason we have lower rates of dog related injuries. Well fed pets behave quite different to street dogs

> Dogs kill 25 thousand people a year

Huh? The cited article gives US statistics. "During this 27-year time period there were 504 deaths reported. An average of 18.67 deaths occurred per year, with a range of 11 to 33 deaths." That's about the same as US deaths from lightning strikes.[1]

[1] https://www.weather.gov/safety/lightning-fatalities19

That is worldwide - I added US attack statistics as part of my edit to point out that something can be dangerous without causing death. Here you can read about the 25k deaths: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-36320744

That’s a nonsensical number from some clickbait article.

The deaths are from impoverished countries like India where rabid dogs run rampant and people are too poor to get treatments.

The 4.5 million bites (not individuals bit) is a discredited number based on some projections from ER visits and other reports where no standard protocol for reporting exists. It’s similar to the drunk driving related statistics, where if you are a drunk cab passenger and the car get into an accident it is considered “alcohol related”.

> That’s a nonsensical number from some clickbait article.

Here are three sources: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-36320744

https://www.businessinsider.com/worlds-deadliest-animals-201...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deadliest_animals_to_h...

> The 4.5 million bites (not individuals bit) is a discredited number

Care to provide a source? I provided mine but all you came in with is conjecture. In fact here is the stat again straight from the American Vetrinary Medicine Association.

https://www.avma.org/resources-tools/pet-owners/dog-bite-pre...

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