Knowing when a good dog has gone bad
Since late last month, Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota has been the subject of fierce bipartisan attacks for her decision to shoot and kill her family dog, a 14-month-old German wirehaired pointer named Cricket. Noem has repeatedly defended her actions, which are detailed in her forthcoming memoir, in which she says the dog was “aggressive,” “untrainable” and “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with.”
On Sunday, she suggested that President Biden should have considered killing his own dog, Commander, a German shepherd who was banished from the White House last year after repeatedly biting Secret Service officers. “Joe Biden’s dog has attacked 24 Secret Service people,” Noem, a Republican, said in an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “So how many people is enough people to be attacked and dangerously hurt before you make a decision on a dog?”
Experts said that there were some circumstances in which dogs are so aggressive that they should be euthanised. But euthanasia should be an option of last resort, they said, used only when a dog poses a serious danger and other potential solutions have been ruled out. In the cases of both Cricket and Commander, there were plenty of reasonable, non-lethal approaches available.
“We have lots of tools in our tool belt — medication, lots of different behavioral interventions as well — before you get to the step where you’re, like, I can’t handle this dog,” said Erica Feuerbacher, an expert on dog behavior and learning at Virginia Tech. “That’s what I’d want, is that they’d really value their dog’s life and give their dog its best chance of having a full, long life.” The Guardian first reported on the excerpts from Noem’s memoir, which is set to be released on Tuesday. In it, she reportedly blames Cricket for ruining a pheasant hunt, killing another family’s chickens and biting, or trying to bite, her.
Although it may be undesirable to people, some level of aggression — growling, baring teeth and even biting — is normal in dogs, which are descended from gray wolves and share some of their predatory drive, said Clive Wynne, a canine-behavior expert at Arizona State University who is working on a book about the history of dogs. That predatory instinct, Dr. Wynne said, most likely explains why Cricket went after the chickens. But a dog that kills chickens does not necessarily pose a risk to people, he said. “That doesn’t really have any predictive value as a way of gauging whether that dog would then be harmful to you,” he said. “Because you don’t look like prey, you don’t sound like prey, and dogs form these strong emotional bonds with members of their human family.”
More often, Dr. Wynne said, dogs bite humans because they are stressed or scared. “Mostly in a human household, a dog is biting because its other attempts to communicate that it is uncomfortable or fearful have failed,” he said.
Still, even a dog that bites defensively can pose dangers and should receive a professional evaluation from a veterinarian, experts said. Dogs that are sick or in pain might be more likely to lash out; in a 2021 study of nearly 1,000 dogs exhibiting aggressive behavior, researchers found that 15 percent had an underlying medical condition that might have contributed to the misbehaviour.