No one need ever question Grahame Allen’s affection for dogs.
“I love them! All of them! I’ve always had border collies all my life,” the 77-year-old St. Albert resident exclaimed. He still has two border collies called Kiwi and Drum. He used to train the breed for herding purposes back in his homeland of New Zealand.
Dogs are so much a part of his life that he has taken it upon himself to pen an information and safety manual that he is offering for free to the public. All Dogs Can Bite! is as much a cautionary tale as it is a very informative pamphlet on dogs, their behaviour and what people should or shouldn’t do to live in harmony with them. It has some gruesome pictures of bad bites on the cover, but there are a lot of good things to read on the inside.
There are numerous things that people do to provoke animals, Allen explained. The book even lists a few pages of such human behaviours and actions. He admits that he has been bitten himself, albeit for doing some regular pet care.
“That was my fault for provoking him. Some dogs don’t like to have their claws clipped.”
Collies, he explained, have black nails that make it more difficult to spot the vein called the quick.
“You’ve got to keep away from that area. You clip the dog’s claws up until that particular point. You don’t want to cut into that because otherwise they will bite.”
Apart from imparting some good old-fashioned common sense about dogs, he also wants to bring a spotlight to the issue of how many bites get reported or tracked over time. He said it’s impossible to know how big a problem it really is. Doctors will record dog bites in their notes but it’s very hard to retrieve that data.
“There’s people getting bitten by dogs all over the place. The amount of dog bites has very, very rarely been calculated. [The information] is not made accessible.
The last public accounting for dog bites that he can recall was a Quebec study that was published more than 30 years ago. In the book, he writes that the report found that 117,000 people in that province were bitten during 1979 alone. He extrapolated those figures to estimate that between 900,000 and 1.2 million people across the country were subject to either minor or major dog attacks in 2003.
“The amount of pets now has grown incredibly. We don’t hear about a lot of these dog bites. They can be avoided. Most of them can.”
Anyone can download the 21-page book for free via the website www.mybirdie.ca.
