Welcome to episode nineteen, part two of Get Out a Live, a podcast
where me, your host Ashley every other week comes at you with a new
animal attack story and me, your other's Nick is just here to edit and
look pretty and I'm not very good at editing, so it must be pretty
pretty. Well. That was a good one. Thanks. Can we tell
them what you said before? Sure? Okay, So we recorded the centro
a few times and the first time Nick said and me, no, what
was it? And your other host Nick, who is me? It didn't
go very well, but you loved it. You loved it. I just
stopped crying over it. It was great. Anyways, if you're on our
Patreon, you're getting this right now after episode one, if you want to
listen to it that way. If you also want to wait, who am
I to tell you how to consume content? And if not, and you're
on the regular feed, it's the next week. Hello, Hi, So
we'll just get right into it. It's part two with our interview with Jim
crosby the world's leading fatal dog attack expert, and we're going to touch on
some more serious topics. I would say, and yeah, hope you enjoy
and if you're on our Patreon, like I said, our five or fifteen
dollars level, you will also be getting a bonus episode the day that this
is released on our normal feeds, so keep an eye out for that.
I don't think we've talked about breed specific incidences. And I know pitbulls and
some shepherdy breeds get a really bad rap. Have you found any sort of
correlation between some breeds causing more attacks or it's just a crapshoot and dependent on
the situation. Yeah, that's one of those questions that's got dynamite and minds
all over it. Yep. Okay, So to start with, no,
I don't agree with judging behavior by appearance, and the scientific studies show that
visual assessment of breed is even among professionals, is highly highly inaccurate. There
was a study of UF that in identifying primary breeds in mixed breeds by sight,
even out of a huge professional population, we were right about twenty six
percent of the time. So, just like with people, you know,
we now hopefully in more situations than not, realize that we can't just look
at a person and predict their behavior from what they appear. The illustration that
I will use is that and bless his hard he's no longer with us.
But if you're walking along the street in New York City and you look down,
look at the corner, and you might have once upon a time seen
an older gentleman in a wheelchair with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, looking
like he was homeless and starving and cold, and you might have wanted to
throw a dollar on his plate or whatever, or in his lap. But
you could have been looking at doctor Stephen Hawking, who was one of the
most brilliant human beings and probably well, now that he's no longer with us,
he knows what's going on. But he probably had the best guess of
how the universe worked, and he could have been sitting on that street corner
in New York waiting for his limo. So judging a behavior by appearance doesn't
work. That said, there are a huge group of similar looking dogs that
people lumped together as pit bulls or pit bull types or bully breeds or whatever
you want to and a lot of those are mixes of various things. If
if you've ever actually physically encountered a pure bread fighting line pit bull, they're
actually small to medium dogs. They're broad in the hidden shoulders, but they're
small because they're fast, because they have to be fast to win dogfights.
They're not one hundred and twenty pounds of pit bull. That's something else.
Who knows what's in it. But I have to say that the numbers indicate
that recognizing that this is a huge group of animals, and we don't know
how many of them there really are because they're not registered, and we don't
know. There's lots we don't know. But some groups of dogs seem to
be somewhat more likely to be involved in reported dog bites and fatalities than others.
Now, part of that is a reporting problem. If you're a six
foot seven inch linebacker and your brother in law has a Chihuahua conquer spaniel mix
that bites the crap out of your ankle, even if you have to go
to the doctor, the odds are you're probably not going to report that bite
because big mister linebacker man doesn't want to admit that this little ball of fluff
just kicked his butt. On the other hand, if you have if your
neighbor that hates you has an obnoxious little child because they're poor parenting skills,
and they hate bully breathes. And your dog is walking by on the street
one day and sneezes at the neighbor's kid, they're probably dialing animal control to
say that your dog is vicious or maybe even alleging bites. And some of
the cases I've worked that were alleged dog bites we were able to prove through
physical evidence weren't dog bites. So the safest thing to say is typically the
bigger the dog, the bigger the hole they can make with their mouth,
And that kind of correlation seems to hold up. You know, little dogs
a little choo. You know, I dealt with a small dog just last
week that has some pretty severe behavior problems. It's a rescue Yorky. And
I was wearing kevlar pants, which when I do when I'm dealing with bite
cases, and this dog came over to me and it launched at my legs
and tried, you know, a bit, six or seven or eight times.
Just ah, well, it was seven pounds of Yorky and I was
wearing protective clothing, so I just weighed him out, you know, let
him expend that frantic energy and try to manipulate me by that because he doesn't
know he's only seven pounds. He thinks he's a Great Dane that weighs two
hundred pounds. Now when I let the two hundred pound great Dan chew on
me, no, I've been I've been hit by big dogs in the past
too, and I don't care how much protective year you have on. It
hurts. But big dogs make big holes. Little dogs make relatively little holes.
But for instance, a lot of my victims are kids that are especially
infants, that are small sized. So a small dog bite on a small
person, relatively speaking, is a lot is very similar to a big dog
bite to one of us who's in a normal sized adult so breed. We
can talk for the next two hours on what breed is and isn't. Judging
behavior on appearance doesn't work, and trying to put these cases into convenient pockets
like that is not supported by the data. There's way too much going on.
Yeah, and I feel like there must be something to be said too,
for the fact that pipples seem to be the breed chosen most for dog
fighting, but there's so many cases of those dogs being able to be adopted
out after they're rescued, but I feel like no one talks about that with
pitbulls. It's like, oh, they're aggressive, and it's like, well
if they were mate, Like people use them for this and then they get
rehabbed. Like I don't know, I just I feel like it's so unfair
all the time. Bothers me. True story. I was called a couple
of years up to Canada there was a dog fighting arrest. They called it
the Ontario twenty one that these were actually a group of dogs, some of
which were interrelated, that were bonafide actual fighting dogs. Many of them had
fighting records that they'd been fought this many times and won this many times.
We're talking real live pitbulls that were selected for, bred for, and trained
for the sport or the activity of illegal dog fighting. A team of behavior
people went up and ruled that due to their responses, all of them needed
to be killed. They could not be placed in society. The people involved
on the Canadian side in Ontario were able to get the court to allow me
to come up and conduct a separate evaluation. And I went in and told
them when I got there, I'm not here to save the dogs. I'm
here to see what we've got and to then give you recommendations and document the
strengths and the deficits in behavior of these individuals who have been raised in this
environment and trained, and so forth and so on. There were two dogs
that were blatantly openly human humanly dangerous that one of them I was never even
able to get out of the kennel. The other one I got out interacted
with and went nope, this one goes. There was too much going on,
There was too much of a risk of serious offensive engagement of the other
dogs. We brought them. We were able to get the court to release
them and bring them back to the States. Out of those, six of
them are now working as law enforcement detector dogs for police departments, one of
which was actually a dog called Hansel that this past year was the law Enforcement
Dog of the Year and works as the only ARSON certified pitbull type breed in
the United States. Two of those dogs that were too dangerous are bonifid Veterans'
service dogs, and there was one or two that had medical conditions that wound
up inact. One of them was horrible. The dog had been was placed,
was running around in its backyard and dropped out of a heart attack.
We had no way of knowing, but at least it was in a good
place, being treated kindly, and the rest of them were safely paced,
placed in chosen, vetted and informed homes and they've been successful. So out
of that bunch of dogs, and it would wound up being a total actually
of thirty four that I laid hands on, because there was a couple from
another case and so forth, I only had two of them put down.
The rest of them we managed to put through rehabilitation, and there were two
more whose behavior was so critical that they had to be euthanized because we could
only get them so far. But the rest of them succeeded. So,
you know, trying to make again sweeping judgments based on our perceptions instead of
individual case examinations of the individual dogs as individuals as people that they are,
those sweeping generalizations don't tend to apply. The other thing is that in all
of my researching of the cases, very very few fatal dog attacks are from
dogs that are actually used in illegal dogfighting. And it really makes sense if
you think about it. You know, a dogfight an illegal activity which is
cruel and horrible and vicious and all the bad things. You've got two dogs
facing off in a ring, which is long story, but there are also
three human beings in there. There's a handler for each dog and a judge
that are standing there next to the dogs. If those dogs redirect their negative
energy and effort towards a human, usually somebody there shoots them right off.
I mean, they're eliminated from the gene pool. Again. It's cruel,
it's horrible, it's thankfully illegal. But despite the horrible way those dogs are
treated, if you and that's one of the things I love so much about
dogs, if you give them a chance, they can be terribly almost unboundedly
forgiving of humans and the way humans have treated them in the past, and
some of them can actually be you know, the big issue is management.
Can they be taught to be less focused and responsive towards other dogs in a
negative way? Can they be helped to be you know, they're probably never
going to get to go to the dog park and be chasing around and rolling
with everybody else, But at least they can be managed, and they can
be their behavior can be changed so they can be neutral towards other dogs,
and that's a huge step forward. With those guys. Yeah, thank you
for answering that, because I know that'll be really important for a lot of
people to hear who may have misconceptions about pit bulls because and it's funny that
I get it from both sides. I get pit bull advocates who want to
say, oh, they're all wonderful dogs. Well, not all of anything
is wonderful, nor are they all evil, terrible, horrible, nasty,
aggressive dogs. And most of the physical myths that you hear, as far
as locking jaws and bite forces their garbage, the science has proven they don'tate.
There is not a mammal alive today that has a locking jaw that you
have to go down to the species tree if you will, to the heala
monsters and another lizard you know, they call it monster, but it's a
lizard two reptiles in the desert southwest and northern Mexico to find a locking jaw.
There's no mammals. There are no marsupials that have locking jaws. Maybe
the thighlasine wolf from Australia might have had an ability to alter its jaw structure,
but we don't know because there aren't any left. So when you do
have a dog that has the kind of history just talked about, what is
the rehab process, What is the training process to be able to re introduce
them to a family or to a veteran, like you said, where it's
safe for them to be around. It's a long, hard road, and
in the case of the Ontario dogs, it was an intersection of being able
to have people resources that had you know, I was able to go up
and look at them, the court was able to make allowances for that.
We had trainers here in Jacksonville that I worked with. There's a trainer named
Amy Sadler who has dogs playing for life and she took a number of the
dogs and worked with him. And we also had the resource of a benefactor
in Canada that had very large money that was able to support us through the
process, so that success was a little unusual. The rehab process itself is
first we want to give the dog positive, constructive behaviors, things like teach
them to sit, teach them to look at you, teach them to be
able to relax, teach them to focus on other things. And then we
slowly go through a process of desensitizing them to the particular triggers replacing their behaviors
with constructive behaviors that eventually not only get reinforced by things we do, such
as whether it's cookies or toys, or social contact or sniffing or running it
like, whatever reinforces, we not only get them where they can accept that,
but then we also teach them behaviors that are self reinforcing, where I
know that if I'm I'm feeling tense and I sit and I look up at
Mom or Dad, I feel better because I've been taught I don't have to
be cranked up to the max each and every time that I see another dog.
There's a lot of management that's involved along the process, and then you
know, we're dealing with dogs there they're living decision making entities that you know,
they're sentient and make choices. So with dogs that have been through a
tough time, whether it's because they're fighting dogs, or they've been abused,
or perhaps they were taken were strays that were taken away from their littermates way
too early, or any of a number of things, you know, we
have to have the patience to deal with them and the management to be able
to avoid putting them in situations where we're setting them up to fail. So
management is equally important as the training and doing our best to set them up
to succeed and to give them coping skills for those incidents or occasions where where
their own they're previously trained or reinforced or learned actions would have them do something
else. It's so funny you call it management because the second person we interviewed
for this podcast, his name's Oliver Starr. He has a malamute and then
the two wolves, and when we've talked to him about this kind of stuff,
he's like, it's not training so much as effectively managing them all the
time, which is so true because training seems like there's an end and there
is not. Yeah, well, I tell people all the time, you
can train your dog. It'll only take you ten minutes a day for the
rest of the dog's life. And you know that's and that's part of providing
a good environment for them. You know, we get stale on board if
we have nothing to do, so yeah, you know, we try to
put our dogs in as many situations that we can manage as possible so that
they get so eventually they can they can learn to accept more and be more
relaxed, and that just snowballs. But for listen to your guy with the
wolves, two of his companion animals there would really prefer to be running across
about fifty square miles of territory, and so don't put them in a backyard
with a crappy fence. They're going to act like wolves, yeah, God,
and as like a tangent. Which you don't have to answer this if
you don't want to. I'm assuming you are also very against wolfdog hybrids.
Is that something that pops up a lot in attacks like the combination of the
two. It's very rare. Okay, there have been a couple that have
been claimed to be wolf dog hybrids, but to my knowledge, there was
not a demonstrable DNA profile, And DNA is hard because remember they're the same
species. We've gotten where we can drill down deeper to even which subspecies of
wolf, the red wolf, the Asian wolf, and so forth, But
when it comes to cutting the line between where does domestic dogs stop and wolf
start, that's real iffy. And there there's been very very few of those
cases that even claim to be wolf hybrids that have been involved in human fatalities
or serious human attacks, and from a personal point, as having run a
couple of animal control agencies, most of the time, when somebody says I've
got a wolf hybrid, yeah, what you have is a meleamew shepherd mix.
And maybe it's you know, maybe it's got a genetic factor for yellow
eyes, in which case, oh, it's definitely a yeah right, maybe
not so yeah, And I think from the people that I've met in the
wolf hybrid community and the wolf communities, most of them are not real happy
with people having supposed wolf hybrids as pets because they have If they are truly
a high content hybrid of dog domestic dog and wolf, then you've got all
kinds of genetic, genetically driven behavior issues and needs that you may not be
able to address. For instance, the guy with the two wolves, Again,
those are animals that ideally in the wild, they have a forty or
fifty square mile territory, So he has to not only manage to keep them
from getting loose, but he has to fulfill their psychological and physiological needs in
such a way that it's not cruel and irresponsible for him to be keeping them.
So there's a lot of challenges there. Yeah, just the tall order.
If you want a domestic dog, go get a dog. Yeah,
you know, having an exotic does not make you better, worse, badd
meaner, whatever than the next guy, and you probably are going to have
a tough time meeting its true needs in a positive and constructive manner. And
that's what matters. I mean, you don't want your kid growing up in
a household where they keep him locked up in the bathroom all day. No,
that's not humane or proper or responsible. So you know, exotic animals
have needs too, and so it's best to leave them to the expert that
can provide for those needs. Yeah. Absolutely, So I got us a
little off track with that. But so if you are being attacked, or
you have an animal like your dog that is being attacked by another dog,
do you have tips to stop it or to you know, if an aggressive
dog is coming at you, is there a way to deter them? I
guess it's situationally dependent. Let's look at it as two prongs. If your
dog, or if you're in a position where a dog is attacking someone else,
so you're not the victim here, but it's another dog or another human
or whatever. There are several things of decreasing safety that you can do.
And the first is that simply try a loud and unexpected noise to interrupt the
incident. But when you're doing that, think ahead because the dog may wind
up having to be controlled or something. Now if, for instance, I
wrote an entire curriculum that's approved by the Department of Justice on dog encounters for
police officers, and the first thing that we teach them, for instance,
obviously is to avoid the encounter completely if you can. And for officers it's
like, okay, if you see the dog in the yard and the gate
is open and the dogs on the other side of the fence close the gate,
Dada, it's done. We don't have to shoot anything. If you
see a dog that's attacking somebody or another dog, if it's another dog,
especially if there is an owner with that dog, there is a good chance
of being able to break things up. First thing I'd look for is is
there something you can put between the two dogs? Is there a lawn chair
that you can shove between them and not lay hands on either one of them.
In some animal control and facilities where they're dealing with dogs that have horrible
reactivity, there's something called a pig board, which is basically a piece of
plywood with a couple of handles on it that you can slide between two animals.
They use them a parent. I'm not a farm kid, but apparently
when pigs get pissed off at each other, you have to put something between
them. Ergo the pig board, but something you can slide and get in
between the two dogs so that then you can separate it. If they've both
got leashes. Once you get that initial separation, then you have a means
of control. Do not reach in and try to peel them apart. That
will get you bit. I've done it myself, even though I know better.
There have been a couple of times, despite my training, despite all
my experience, I have reached my hand into a dogfight and have gotten bitten
every time. So if you've got to physically remove two dogs from each other,
the safest way, especially if you don't have leashes and collars, is
to grab each dog by the rear legs, pick them up, and slowly
back apart. If you have a dog that's on top of another person and
mauling them, grab the dog by the rear legs and back up. Don't
try to force it backwards. But if you take away number one, the
back legs and don't grab them by the tail, that's gonna just piss them
off. The back legs give you two handles where you can hold onto the
dog and it has to actually turn around to hurt you, so you're not
putting your hand in the way of damage. The other thing is that,
even though it's not nice or kind or humane, if you're pulling a dog
off of another person and you're backing it up and it decides to try to
turn and redirect towards you, you can do what we call a helicopter,
and that is you spin around and use the dog's own weight to keep the
pointy end away from you. I mean, the end you've got may may
may not be pleasant in some circumstances, but it's the pointy end that you
want to keep away from you. So literally, and again, I've seen
situations where it had to be done. You know, you back up,
and you use the dog's body weight, and if necessary, you haul off
and try to be like Ilso the shot putter and chunk the dog as far
as possible. Typically, again, you know, typically when the dog hits
the ground, it's gonna at least maintain its space or run away or something,
or you have a way of seeking shelter. That's again, that's not
nice or kind or gentle or positive or any of those things we want to
do. But if it's saving a person's life, it's better and safer than
trying to whip out your trusty pistol and start firing rounds at a dog that's
in intimate contact with a human being and doing damage. I mean, I
tell police officers, and they're trained in the use of firearms properly. If
they have to take the shop to save a human fine, I understand that,
but make sure you have gone through the process of trying to use lower
levels of force. Now, if you come around the corn corner and there's
one hundred pound dog that's got a three year old in its mouth and shaking
it, do whatever you have to do. Try to keep yourself safe,
try to save the kit. Why because we're speciests and two legs out boats
for every time. But you know there are a range of other options.
If you look around at kennels and training facilities, a lot of them will
have and I recommend strongly they have air horns like you carry on a boat.
Because you get two dogs that are fighting, or even if they're just
about to and you walk up and you blast that air horn at them.
It's loud, it's scary, they're distracted. Suddenly, things are a lot
less focused than they were a second ago. Fire extinguishers really awesome tools if
you have to enter being in either a dog fight or a dog attack on
a human, especially the carbon dioxide ones. For two reasons. Number one,
it's a great tool because it's really loud, it's really cold, and
it develops this it gives you this visible barrier. And uh, secondly because
you don't have to clean it up like you have to with the dry chemical
fire extinguishers. But fire extinguishers are a great way of intervening, especially again
if you come up on a person that is being rapidly bitten, even if
you know if you're using one of those tools, even if it hasn't gotten
to a critical situation, those tools can help interrupt. For law enforcement,
pepper spray is highly highly effective on dogs. It hurts, you know,
they're they're they're not going to fall over. You know. People think,
oh, if I spray in with the pepper spray. They're going to fall
over and not do it. No, they're probably going to run the other
direction and at least get But it gets you a way to buy some space.
For people who are out walking their dogs in neighborhoods that have a lot
of strays, especially if there's problem strays. If it's legal, get one
of those little cans of like the especially the gel pepper spray, because you
don't get this fog that gets all over everybody, and you know, a
little squirt in the face and the dog kind of backs up and goes,
excuse me. I think I heard somebody calling me over here. I've got
someplace else to be. And for police officers, I have this wonderful video
that was from body camera where an officer was being crowded up against his car
and basically attacked by two dogs. And he did all of the things right.
He used his voice, he used a baton as a way to keep
distance. He eventually applied pepper spray and the dogs ran back off into the
front yard, and then he had a a and I love this guy.
He simply opened the back door of his police car where the cage was and
said, come on, guys, let's go for a ride. And the
dogs jumped in his car and he closed the door and the encounter was over.
That's thinking on your feet and that's you know, but for a normal
person again, if you're if you're you're out walking your dog and you're worried
about you know, stray is approaching. If it's legal, pepper spray is
really effective and if you know a dog comes charging up, even dogs that
are actively coming at you are affected. The City of Baltimore did a study
twenty cases where dogs actually went offensive and were actively attacked their police officers,
and they used pepper spray and in nineteen of the cases, even fast moving
charging dogs. Nineteen of them they stopped the first time they got hit by
the pepper spray, and in the twentieth the dog got a hold of the
officer's trousers, but he hit them a second time and the dog ran off.
It works. If you don't have pepper spray, you know, find
something else. We talk about police officers using their batons, or somebody who's
using a golf club as a walking stick or something. You're not carrying that
to beat on the other dog. You're carrying that to extend, to give
an approaching dog a target that's another three or four feet away from you to
expend its energy on rather than on you or your dog. Yeah, I've
heard umbrellas work really well too, to just pop them out, pop them
out. In fact, that's that's part of the temperament testing that some groups
do, is you have your dog standing by beside you man the judge in
a non threatening manner, pops open an umbrella. You want to see what
the dog does. And also, and I've done that with evaluation, because
I want to see what the dog does, but I also want to see
if the dog can recover from a sudden impulse like that, a sudden distraction.
But yeah, an umbrella works, you know, anything to gain space
between you and another dog, or between your dog and another dog. Actually,
unfortunately our podcast is long, so long. I'm so sorry. Well
i'm sorry. As we're going through, you get going, and I just
it's been great. I have been extatic the whole time, and I'm sitting
here in my head like, how do we cut this down? This is
so perfectly well, you can cut out the quiet faces and you but yeah,
it's been great talking to you guys and so much. I hope your
listeners enjoy it, and I hope they listen because I think we've I think
that you've had good questions and their issues that we really should be looking at,
you know. You know, let's understand a little bit about making assumptions
about dogs based on what they look like. And let's understand a little bit
about preventing dog bites by understanding why dogs need or or see that there is
a purpose to be gained by using their teeth. Understanding if we could get
people got if we could get people to pay attention to and understand body language,
we could we could keep so many people say quick, funny story.
And I know this won't be a part of the regular thing, but I
have a case. I have a case that, oh God, human stupidity
is unbounded. Yep. Guy goes to a party and I'm called in as
an expert on this. Guys goes to a party in someone's backyard. One
of the other guests has a dog, very well behaved, that knows most
of the people and is very easily easy with people, socialized and so forth.
The supposed victim walks into the backyard with these other people and for whatever
reason, and the dog's on a leash with his owner on the other side
of the yard and visiting with people and they're having a wonderful The dog looks
up and sees this person. And I've told people, if your dog doesn't
like another person, trust your dog. Because the dog looks up, sees
this guy and moves between the owner and the dog and this guy and starts
by, you know, hard stare and then teep and then a growl and
then barking. Okay, so the dog is speaking very clearly, there's something
about you that I don't know or I don't like. There's something that makes
you makes me uncomfortable. Now, you know. The owner tried to blow
it off as you know, being well, you know, stay back because
you know, Fluffy's in a bad mood or Fluffy hasn't had dinner or whatever,
and tries to tell this person stay back, stay back, stay back,
and retreats as far as they can and pulls Fluffy up. The alleged
victim. I hate to say the idiot, but this dude said, dude,
I'm like a dog whisperer. It's fine, and goes up to the
dog who is now backed up as far as the dog can, who's still
giving signals, grabs the dog by the cheeks and reaches over and kisses it
on the nose. The dog predictably bites once and removes a good piece of
this person's face and mostly his nose, just the soft tissue. The dog
does not reach in and grab and rip huge hunks off. The dog doesn't
engage multiple times. It's one bite that the teeth. A couple of the
teeth happened to catch that soft tissue there. They call it the nare of
your nose. An ar but catches the nare and rips it all the crap
and then the dog backs up. Well. Rocket scientist decides later he wants
to sue the owner of the pit quote pit bull because his vicious dog bid
him well. I was on a conference with the two attorneys and basically I
we were zooming, and I looked at the person's attorney and said, I
know you can't answer this, but is your client a complete an utter moron
or what? And just like Ashley just responded there. That was the reaction
I got from the attorney on mute and that was the end. I haven't
heard anything back from that since but you know, that's a situation where human
stupidity coupled with a and the owner understood her dog was uncomfortable and there was
nowhere else to go. But if we could just teach people to stop being
stupid, you know, was the dog vicious? Hell no, the dog
was actually tolerant. And the fact that it only bit once and had a
what we call an inhibited engagement in other words, he didn't rip the guy's
face clean off all the way to the bone, that means that to me,
that was a good dog. Here, let me make sure the guy
has his shot so you don't get sick. But yeah, wait, that
was a dog that showed incredible restraint and patience and tolerance for human stupidity.
Yeah. So that's the whole basis for this podcast because as a buzz common
yep, Because as a biologist in my previous job, I used to have
to answer calls from the public where they had the same types of concerns,
but about wild animals. So like, there's a coyote in my yard.
It's gonna take my kid. And it's like, well, no, teach
your kid not to go pet a coyote and it's fine. Yeah, it's
like the comedian. There's a comedian who does a bit and it's a lady
who does this, and she goes on about if you're gonna go to the
beach, go to the beach, but don't go in the ocean because the
ocean is the shark's house. And if you go into shark's house and the
sharks bite you, it's your fault. Don't go into shark's house. Or
you know, things like you know we see the other time. You know,
well, the person was dangling their child over the tiger cage to get
her better view and drops them and then gets mad because the tiger attacked the
child. Well, duh, a tiger thought you were feeding him. Tiger's
being tiger. Or you know African wild dogs, they had a case like
that where the people did they held the the three year old over the fenced
edge of the enclosure and dropped a three or everything was up like Cleveland or
Cincinnati, somewhere up the middle of the country, and the child got it
and the child got attacked. And of course, you know the wild dogs
are painted or painted dogs. They're not domesticated dogs anyway. Yeah, they're
they're canids, but they're another branch off the left side of the the phylogenetic
tree there somewhere. But they attack the kid, well duh, And and
and then or it's like, you know, people people wind up in the
bear enclosure, and then the zoo winds up having to shoot the bear to
save the stupid person. And you know, I'm almost like, well,
just let the bear finish what he's doing and let's make sure he doesn't get
sick, because the bear didn't do anything that wasn't being a bear. You
know, I am you know, even in places like Yellowstone, I get
I understand the concerns with bears becoming habituated to people, but damn, just
a bear acts like a bear. Why do we need to necessarily whack the
bear? I yeah, we talk about Yellowstone in like every episode. You
would enjoy a lot of our episodes. It's a lot of this stuff of
hey, that person's the idiot, but like we understand why that would kill
me, and yeah, we understand it, but sucks mostly because they won't
let us put the people down. Yeah, well said, you feel for
the animal, but like, you know, you don't want to be bitten
by the shark. Don't go into shark's house. Yea, yep, yeah.
Don't want to be mobbed by the polar bear unless you're an innowit who's
out hunting and comes across one legitimately on both of your own territory. Don't
want to get bit by the polar bear. Don't go in the polar bear
cage. Don't own a chimpanzee and you won't get attacked by a chimpanzee.
Yes, don't. Don't own a chimpanzee, and you won't have two hundred
pounds a very powerful, pissed off I mad trying to rip your arms off,
which so much, Oh my, thank you. You know people have
asked me before, do you ever deal with wild anta? No? I
don't want to deal with wild animals. They're wild animals. They're fine without
me. Yeah, you know, I don't want to have you know,
I personally don't care to have a pet wolfsh because I can't meet their needs.
I don't want a chimpanzee because I'm not Michael Jackson and weird. I
I don't want a polar bear or a big cat. I applaud the experts
and the zookeeper people. Who do their best to treat these animals humanely and
kindly and to recognize their needs and to recognize their natures. But yeah,
that's not me. I've had to catch a couple of alligators working with animal
control, but that's because it was my job, and I've I'm not afraid
of snakes, although I would just assume let them go their way and me
go mine. And I've had to remove a couple, including rattlesnakes with snake
tongs and and move them because what we were doing didn't require us to necessarily
kill the snake. Does that mean I'm going to pick him up and pat
ym No. Now, I don't need I don't need the snake in my
pocket. He doesn't belong there. I'll let him go scurry off into the
palmetto brush where snakes be, and I'll stay over on the road where I
be. Thank you so much, Jim. We can talk to you forever.
Well. I appreciate you having me on, and I certainly hope we've
been able to inform infective. Let's let's give a break here click. Thank
you so much for having me on, and I appreciate the opportunity, and
I hope your listeners have enjoyed this, and anytime you want, please give
me a yellow Back and I'll be glad to talk to you. And that
was the end of our interview with Jim. Pretty pretty interesting, a lot
of stuff I'd never really thought about. That seeing enemies were aggressive, that's
badass. I love that. I mean that was right off the bat.
Makes sense though, I mean they have like like single seal organ ins that
balt each other, right, so I guess makes sense. Yeah, And
Michael Jackson having a champ. I knew that. I don't know how he
didn't know that. I don't know either. I guess I'm not like my
finger is not on the pulse with this like it is with other things.
But yeah, Michael Jackson isn't in your uh not my wheelhouse normally, No,
no, no, definitely not. But I will say the more like
after this interview. Right now, it's a few weeks after we did the
interview, and I've spent a lot of time since then. Also, if
you hear grunting noises, that Sawyer again, he's still sitting behind us watching
us record, upset that we have not spoken about him more. But I've
been doing a lot of like research into dog training, I mean for my
own dogs, but also just so, Jim was on this podcast called The
Bitey End of the Dog, which is by Mike. Yeah, I think
the host name is Mike Shikaska. I might be butchering his last name,
but I can't find it right in front of me at the moment. So
anyways, he it's a great podcast. He's a dog trainer and behavioralist.
So he had Jim on to talk about similar things that we talked about,
but you and I obviously got more to the nitty gritty of like what the
attacks look like yep. And he had a really interesting episode on this podcast,
The Byy End of the Dog, with this woman named Kim Brophy and
she's an ethologist, which is some who studies animal behavior, and she talks
about in one part which like I wanted to mention because I asked Jim the
pit bull question, are they more predisposed to being aggressive because they're pit bulls?
And there wasn't a yes or no yeah, which I think is good
because this woman Kim Brofy was saying. She was saying that she's had people
call her a breed racist before because she's said that breeds do matter sometimes,
because she was saying, you know, I mean I even experienced it with
my own dogs where I have a shepherd mix and terrier mix. They don't
learn the same because they were bred for different things. And this woman Kim
was saying, you know, sometimes I'll point out like, oh, your
dog is a this so you have to do this this way, and people
call her a breed racist, I guess because they're like, oh, it's
all about how they're raised, not about what they are. But sometimes it
is. Yeah, because we specifically bred dogs most of the time for a
purpose, so it only makes sense that some of them are more prone to
like being reactive, like I heard Australian shepherds, because they are meant to
be a herding dog out by themselves with a bunch of sheep, like,
they tend to be more dog aggressive, I guess than other dogs. And
I mean same with my terrier, who's dog aggressive. Terriers aren't meant to
be with a bunch of other dogs. They're meant to be like out in
a barn, you know. And we're as Sawyer here. I mean,
he's a Shepherd mix, but like he's supposed to be up my butt all
along and he is. Yeah, literally, he's directly behind me right now,
within like a few inches. So I just thought that was something to
point out because I didn't want to come off as like, oh it,
the breed never matters. It does, but it's not the end all be
all, is my point. I agree with that. Yeah, yeah,
yeah, the Biting End of the Dog. That's a really good podcast if
you want to get more into like dog behavior and aggression and whatnot and like
dive deeper into that. But I do at the end of this want to
include some resources for people who have experienced trauma from dogs. I want to
gather some stuff because I feel like it's pretty common that a lot of people
have had, like know someone or they themselves were attacked by a dog.
Yeah, so I'll include some resources for that, and some more resources on
how you can protect yourself when you're out on a walk if other dogs come
to fuck with you. Very cool. Yeah, I guess I have enough
much more to add, Yeah I did. It's kind of my thing.
So yeah, thank you for joining us for this little adventure we had about
dogs. I'm sure we'll revisit dogs at some point. Yeah, this is
probably the most common attack there is, right, so good question the price
I've hit that in the interview that to call them again, have another interview,
Jim, We're coming for you. But thank you so much for listening
to the entirety of episode nineteen of Get Out Alive. To see more information
links with this episode, like I was talking about, check out the episode
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Angryologists. Thank you to much good friend and second grade husband Josh Walsh Form
making our intro music. I realized I just skipped over. That's fine,
we don't need to get back to it. Great. We'll be back with
a new animal tax story next week. Peace