When a Dog Bites: Why the Answer Isn’t the Breed

In brief

Why breed lists, temperament tests, and owner competence certificates alone don’t create safety: there are four things you should know about dog bites involving children.

First: According to the largest study on the subject, breed explains only about nine percent of the behavioral differences between dogs—and it is especially weak for aggression threshold. Second: The temperament test used in Germany cannot capture behavior toward children—that is not outside criticism; it is stated in the scientific literature on the test itself. In the German state of Saxony-Anhalt, it is also the instrument listed dogs use to rebut their legally presumed dangerousness. Third: Most of the dogs that had bitten a child had never bitten a child before; fear and pain were strikingly common in this group. Fourth: The owner competence certificate tests knowledge, not behavior—and we say that as an organization that runs the mandatory course leading up to it.

Germany regulates dangerous dogs with three instruments: the breed list, the temperament test, and the owner competence certificate. We assess the breed, we assess the dog, we quiz the human. Each of these three instruments measures something other than what actually plays a role in serious bite injuries to children—and the process that matters is captured by none of them.

👉 What protects children in everyday life is covered in Children and Dogs: Safety and Respect.

1. The case currently being argued over

On the afternoon of Wednesday, July 8, 2026, in Drosa, a village in the municipality of Osternienburger Land (Anhalt-Bitterfeld district, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany), a four-year-old girl was bitten several times by the family dog and died of her injuries. Several people present tried to separate the animal from the child. An emergency physician could only pronounce the child dead.

After the incident, the dog was placed in a boarding kennel; the owner initially remained responsible for it and is also bearing the costs. The public prosecutor’s office in Dessau-Roßlau is investigating the 32-year-old mother and a 30-year-old acquaintance of the family on suspicion of negligent homicide. An autopsy was ordered, and the state’s interior ministry announced it would review and evaluate the incident in full. The investigation is ongoing.

This dog had a history. According to reports in the Mitteldeutsche Zeitung, which were also picked up by the German news agency dpa, it had previously come to the attention of the authorities and could only be kept under conditions.

So far, the details come only from tabloid reports, and we label them as such: according to these, in 2024 the dog bit and injured its own owner during an altercation. It was taken to an animal shelter. There it showed no problems; the owner campaigned for its return and met the conditions imposed. The dog reportedly completed a temperament test—“there were no objections,” the head of the shelter is quoted as saying. The owner also passed an owner competence exam. In December 2024 she got the dog back, on the condition that it wear a muzzle at all times in public. After that, it reportedly did not come to anyone’s attention again.

These details have not been confirmed by the authorities. The core, however, has: there was an earlier incident, there was an official response, and the dog was returned under conditions.

How the fatal attack came about is still unclear.

This particular case is not the subject of this article. We don’t know what happened in that household, and no one who is being honest does. We will not speculate here, assign blame, or attempt a reconstruction.

1.1 Status of the investigation (September 16, 2026)

Since the first version of this article, two points have been added.

The autopsy has been evaluated. It found that the child died of the severe bite injuries.

The dog is not to be euthanized. After the incident, it was taken to a boarding kennel in the Salzlandkreis district; the district commissioned an external expert report. According to a district spokesperson speaking to the German Press Agency, this report concludes that the dog should not be euthanized—it had shown “trained behavior” and had not wanted to kill the child. How long the dog will remain at the kennel was still open as of the reporting.

The negligent homicide investigation against the mother and a family acquaintance is ongoing. No indictment is known.

For context on the expert report’s statement: We report it here because it matters for how the case proceeds—not because we consider it professionally sound. Whether a dog “wanted” something cannot be determined from a behavioral-biology standpoint. What can be assessed is the form of the biting behavior: whether it matches the pattern of distance-increasing behavior, of a conflict, or of a predatory sequence. “Trained behavior” is also a far-reaching claim as long as no one discloses what it is based on.

So the other side repeats exactly what we criticize in the breed debate in this article: an interpretation is presented as a finding. That holds no matter which direction it points.

The case merely shows why we need to talk about the underlying mechanisms. Because in the hours after reports like this, a pattern plays out that repeats after almost every comparable incident—and it keeps us from asking the questions that would actually protect children.

2. The ritual

It follows a fixed script. The breed is in the headline. Within hours, someone calls for a ban. Within days, state parliaments are debating lists. And within weeks, everything goes quiet—until next time.

How solid that first step is, the current case itself demonstrates. Police and prosecutors gave the breed as American Staffordshire Terrier—“apparently,” in their own words, meaning it was determined by outward appearance. In tabloid headlines, this became a “pit bull.” Numerous other media outlets adopted that label.

So the breed at the center of the dispute was out in public in two versions before it had even been reliably determined.

That is not a side detail. It is the prototype of the problem: a characteristic that says little about an individual dog’s behavior becomes the central frame for interpreting a catastrophe—and isn’t even reliably determined in the process.

Something else is remarkable. The American Staffordshire Terrier is on Saxony-Anhalt’s breed list. The regulation that is routinely demanded after incidents like this already existed here.

And it goes further than many people realize. Under the state’s dog law, dangerousness is presumed for listed breeds; the owner must rebut that presumption within six months of acquiring the dog by means of a temperament test. If the dog passes, it is expressly no longer considered dangerous within the meaning of the law.

That leaves an uncomfortable pair of alternatives, and they apply regardless of what the investigation still turns up: either this dog had passed the temperament test—in which case the very instrument meant to rebut its dangerousness classified it as not dangerous. Or it had not—in which case it was being kept in violation of the applicable conditions, and the problem lay not with the test but with its enforcement.

There is no third possibility. Based on the reporting so far, much points to the first. And in either case, a stricter breed list doesn’t help.

What never comes up in this ritual is the question at the start of this text: that none of the three instruments captures the process that matters.

We are not saying this as outsiders. unterHUNDs is officially approved by the local authorities to run the owner competence courses required under regional regulations. In other words, we teach exactly what is tested afterward. That is why we know fairly precisely what this certificate can achieve—and what it can’t. What follows is also a critical look at our own instrument.

3. What breed explains—and what it doesn’t

Let’s start with what has been studied best.

The largest study to date on the relationship between breed and behavior—Morrill and colleagues, published in Science in 2022—surveyed 18,385 dogs by questionnaire and genotyped 2,155 of them. The central finding: breed explains about nine percent of the behavioral differences between individual dogs.

Nine percent.

According to the largest genetic study of its kind to date, breed therefore has only very limited power to tell you anything about an individual dog’s behavior. And for the trait that the question of dangerousness is really about—aggression threshold, meaning how easily a dog is provoked by frightening or unpleasant stimuli—breed ranks in this study among the traits with the least breed-related predictive value of all.

Anyone who concludes from this that genetics plays no role has misread the study, though. The same paper shows that most behavioral traits are heritable, with heritability estimates above 25 percent.

Genetics matters. It just isn’t the same thing as breed.

That distinction is the heart of the whole matter—and both camps in the debate ignore it equally. We have covered it in more detail elsewhere: in our guide to the “dangerous breed” myth and in our research article Breed and Behavior: Genetic Predisposition versus Individual Variation in Dogs.

German courts, incidentally, pointed this out early on. In 2004, Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court held breed lists to be justifiable and proportionate, but it expressly noted that a dog’s aggressive behavior and the resulting dangerousness are not determined by genetics alone. Lower Saxony became the first German state to abolish its breed list again, in 2003; Schleswig-Holstein followed in 2016, Thuringia in 2018. Available bite statistics show no relationship between a breed being listed and the frequency of bite incidents—including those of the state of Saxony-Anhalt.

What does this mean for you? Your dog’s breed tells you little about how they will behave in a specific situation. It tells you something about probabilities in large groups—not about your dog in your living room. The reverse also holds: a dog is not a blank slate either. Predisposition exists. It just doesn’t follow breed lines.

4. The temperament test doesn’t test the situation in which children get bitten

The temperament test is considered the most credible instrument in this field—and in some respects it is. The Lower Saxony temperament test, now governed by Section 13 of the Lower Saxony Dog Act, is standardized, fully documented on video, and carried out by veterinarians with the relevant additional training, with every task run at least twice.

And even its proponents describe it accurately for what it is: a snapshot.

How difficult it is to define and measure dog behavior in the first place is something we have described elsewhere. The temperament test shares all the limitations that apply to standardized behavior tests in general—and a few more.

This is not outside criticism. It is stated in the veterinary literature, specifically in an analysis produced at the Institute for Animal Welfare and Behavior of the University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover. In 2018, Thiesen-Moussa, Hettwer, and Hackbarth analyzed a total of 124 temperament test reports. Their finding on how far the test reaches:

The assessment refers to behavior in an unfamiliar environment and cannot, for example, describe behavior toward children—and, depending on which test persons are used, possibly not toward certain types of people either.

It is worth pausing for a moment to take in what that means.

Many serious bite incidents involving young children happen with a familiar dog in the home. That is exactly the constellation the test does not cover.

At this point, it is worth looking back at the case this text starts from—without sensationalizing, simply as a comparison. After a bite incident, the dog was placed in an animal shelter and assessed there. A shelter is about as unfamiliar an environment as you can get. The dog showed no problems and came back home, with a condition that applied to public spaces. The child died in the family’s home.

That is precisely the gap the literature describes: the testing happens where young children are rarely bitten, and the conditions regulate the space where the fewest serious bites to toddlers occur.

Territory is a different matter, and we want to be precise here: the temperament test guidelines expressly provide the option of additionally assessing the dog on its own territory. In none of the 124 cases analyzed had this option been used. As a result, only very limited statements about territorial behavior were possible. That is not a built-in design flaw but an unused option—which in a way makes it more uncomfortable.

And because honesty cuts both ways, a counter-finding belongs here too: in a study of 256 dogs, the dogs showed less aggressive behavior in their own homes than in the test situations in an unfamiliar environment. The obvious assumption that the test systematically underestimates behavior at home is therefore not supported.

Then there is a detail that amounts, on its own, to an admission by the legislature: before the temperament test, the dog undergoes a general medical examination, and a frustration and learning test checks whether learning behavior has been reduced by sedatives. If there are indications of this, the dog is excluded from the test.

Why? Because otherwise the test could be manipulated. Because people might sedate their dogs so that they pass.

Now, one could object: a pre-test like this doesn’t test behavior. It merely ensures that the testing conditions are right.

That’s correct—and that’s exactly the point.

When it comes to testing the dog, the legislature recognized that a test result is worthless if the testing situation doesn’t reflect reality. It therefore took precautions to safeguard the validity of the test. For testing the human, nothing comparable exists. Whether the knowledge being tested says anything about how someone handles their dog in everyday life remains largely open—and is not checked.

So the objection that someone may present differently in an exam than in everyday life doesn’t apply only to the human at one end of the leash. It applies to both ends. It’s just that so far, it has only been taken seriously at one end.

Remarkably, the authors of this analysis draw exactly this conclusion themselves. From a professional standpoint, they consider it unjustifiable to make permission to keep a dog dependent on passing the temperament test—partly because the owner is required to behave neutrally during the test, so the test provides precisely no representative insight into how dog and owner interact with each other. Their recommendation: tie permission to keep the dog to a practical owner competence exam instead.

That is not a side remark. It is the scientific literature saying the same thing as this article.

What does this mean for you? A passed temperament test is not a clean bill of health. It means: this dog behaved unremarkably on this day, in this unfamiliar environment, toward these test persons. It tells you nothing about how your dog behaves toward your child, in your home, at their food bowl.

5. Where children actually get bitten

This is where it gets uncomfortable—for everyone involved, ourselves included.

In 2007, Reisner, Shofer, and Nance analyzed the circumstances of 111 bites to children in dogs presented at a veterinary behavior clinic.

For children under six, the most common trigger was resource guarding—in 44 percent of cases. For older children, territorial defense was the leading factor (23 percent). Bites to familiar children happened mostly indoors, with a resting, familiar dog, during an interaction that was friendly from the child’s point of view.

👉 Dog bites and children: what the risk data show and what prevention achieves

One finding deserves particular attention because it leads directly to a practical recommendation: 18 percent of bites to children under six occurred in painful situations—the child had stepped or fallen on the dog. For older children, the figure was zero percent.

And then come the numbers that call the entire German testing system into question:

Where the history was known, 66 percent of the dogs had never bitten a child before. 19 percent had never bitten a person before.

A temperament test might well have found nothing in these dogs. Not because it would have been carried out poorly—but because at that point there may have been nothing to find.

Further: in 77 percent of the dogs, anxiety screening revealed abnormalities. In 50 percent, medical causes were identified or suspected—orthopedic problems, skin conditions. In other words, possibly: pain.

This finding doesn’t stand alone. In a considerably larger study of 830 dogs, animals with a bite history suffered significantly more often from medical problems, especially orthopedic ones.

And finally, the finding that is most uncomfortable for our own industry: two-thirds of the owners had attended a dog training school with their dog. 93 percent of the dogs were spayed or neutered. Spay/neuter and obedience training, the authors concluded, did not prove to be reliable protective measures.

This study, too, has an important limitation, and we name it explicitly because it concerns that last point in particular: these are 111 dogs that were presented to a university behavior clinic after an incident. That is not a representative sample of the dog population. Owners who find their way to a specialized clinic after a bite are probably more engaged than average—and were therefore more likely to have attended a training school beforehand as well. So the “two-thirds” figure carries less weight than it seems at first glance.

What the finding does show nonetheless: attending a training school does not reliably protect against a bite to a child. It is not an insurance policy. That holds regardless of what the exact rate in the general population would be.

We are not selling anything here. Not even ourselves.

What does this mean for you? Statistically, the most dangerous dog for a toddler is not the strange dog on the street. It is your own familiar family dog that has seemed unremarkable so far—at the bowl, at the bone, in their bed. And more likely than not a dog that is afraid or in pain.

6. The owner competence certificate tests knowledge, not behavior

That brings us to the human—and to our own instrument.

We run the course that leads up to the owner competence certificate. We think it is worthwhile. We would like to see it made mandatory for all dog owners. And we still say what it is:

An owner competence certificate is a knowledge test.

It tests whether someone knows what a turned-away head means, what appeasement signals are, what animal welfare law requires. It tests whether someone can give the right answer.

It does not test what someone does when the dog has had an accident in the house for the third time, the child is screaming, the boss has called, and their nerves are shot.

That is not a rhetorical flourish. It is the central gap, and there is empirical evidence on it.

In 2009, Herron, Shofer, and Reisner surveyed owners whose dogs had been presented to a specialty clinic for behavior problems. They wanted to know which methods had been used beforehand—and how the dog had responded. According to the owners, at least a quarter of the dogs on which confrontational techniques had been used responded aggressively:

• Growling at the dog: 41 percent
• Forcibly taking an item out of the dog’s mouth: 39 percent
• Alpha roll: 31 percent
• Staring the dog down: 30 percent
• Grabbing the dog by the jowls and shaking: 26 percent

The study has clear limitations: these were dogs that were already showing behavior problems, and the information comes from owners’ recollections. It does not prove that force creates aggression. But it shows very clearly that owners of already affected dogs frequently observed aggressive responses after confrontational methods. What force-free dog training means in concrete terms, by contrast, we have described separately.

And here is the point we have to make as a course provider, because otherwise no one will:

No owner competence certificate in the world captures whether someone will later resort to these methods. You can complete our entire course, pass the exam with a perfect score, and pin the dog to the ground the next day. We would never find out. That is not a weakness of our teaching. It is how the instrument is built.

In this case, that is no longer a thought experiment. According to the available reports, the owner took and passed an owner competence exam before she got the dog back. What happened in that home over the year and a half that followed, we don’t know—and that is exactly the point. A passed knowledge test says nothing about it. It is not a window into a household but a snapshot of a person’s knowledge.

The contrast is further up in this text: for the dog, the legislature made sure the testing situation can’t be manipulated. It has dogs tested for sedatives because it expects that people might otherwise cheat. For the human, there is no equivalent—and there wouldn’t need to be one if knowledge and behavior were the same thing. They aren’t. That is the whole reason Herron and colleagues had to ask in the first place which methods owners actually use.

What does this mean for you? The owner competence certificate is a floor, not a guarantee. It ensures that you know the basics. Whether you apply them on a bad day is up to you—not the exam.

7. And yet: this is not about blame

This is where the phrase “the problem is at the other end of the leash” becomes dangerous—because it is read as a verdict of guilt. We don’t mean it that way, and the data don’t support it either.

A dog is not a blank slate for humans to write on. For most behavioral traits, estimated heritability is above 25 percent. Three-quarters of the dogs that had bitten a child showed signs of anxiety. In half, a medical cause was in question. Two-thirds of the owners had sought help.

Anyone who turns “the breed is to blame” into “the owner is to blame” has traded one determinism for another. The second is more popular in our industry. It isn’t any more accurate.

The phrase is true in a different reading. And in that reading, it is precise:

Regulation ends at the leash. It stops exactly where human behavior begins.

We test the dog once, in an environment where children are hardly ever bitten. We quiz the human once on what they know. And then both go home—into exactly the situation no one has tested. Resources, tight spaces, pain, fatigue, a toddler hugging a sleeping dog.

8. Where the evidence ends and politics begins

We want to draw a clean line here, because hardly anyone else does.

What the evidence supports: Breed has only limited predictive value for individual behavior and is especially weak for aggression threshold. The temperament test is a snapshot that, by design, leaves out the child context and covers the territorial context only as a rarely used add-on option. Most of the dogs in the sample studied that had bitten a child had never bitten a child before. Fear and pain were strikingly common in this group. Owners of already affected dogs frequently report aggressive responses after confrontational methods.

What the evidence does not tell us: what regulation should come instead. That is a political trade-off, not a scientific one.

You could conclude that all dog owners need a mandatory, practical dog license. On the other hand: that too is a one-time test—and it mainly burdens those who are already conscientious.

You could conclude that mandatory pain diagnostics and behavioral counseling after the first incident would make more sense than a breed ban. On the other hand: that presupposes there is a first incident.

You could conclude that educating people about resource conflicts and child–dog supervision protects more children than any list. On the other hand: education rarely reaches those who need it most.

We have an opinion on this. But we consider it dishonest to pass it off as a result of the studies we have just cited. It isn’t one.

9. What actually helps now

Until politics sorts this out, this is not an abstract debate. There are four things any household can put into practice tonight.

First: resources are the most common trigger with young children. Food bowl, chew bone, sleeping spot, toys. A dog that freezes as someone approaches, lowers their head, shows the whites of their eyes, or suddenly eats faster is already guarding. The dog hasn’t “given no warning.” The warning wasn’t understood. If you can read dog body language, you can often spot the escalation long before the bite—and if you know what growling really means, you won’t try to punish it away.

Second: a resting dog is off-limits. A large share of bites to toddlers happens with a dog that is lying down, sleeping, or withdrawing; almost one in five bites to a child under six occurred after the child had stepped or fallen on the dog. A two-year-old cannot reliably learn to leave a sleeping dog alone. The environment has to do it for them. Retreat spaces must be out of children’s reach—not as a rule you practice, but as a physical fact. We have put together concrete rules for keeping children and dogs safe together.

Third: pain is a behavioral factor. In half of the dogs that had bitten children, a medical cause was suspected; in a larger study of 830 dogs, animals with a bite history suffered significantly more often from orthopedic problems. A dog that suddenly becomes grumpy belongs at the veterinarian before they belong at a training school. That is why knowing how to recognize pain in dogs is basic knowledge, not a specialist topic.

Fourth: supervision means being able to step in. An adult in the same room looking at their phone is not supervision. Supervision means: within reach, eyes on both, ready to end the interaction before the dog has to.

10. What does this mean for working with dogs?

In this text, we have taken apart three instruments—one of them our own. It would be cheap to stop there. So: what follows from this for professional work?

Behavioral assessment before the incident, not after. The entire German system is reactive. A dog is assessed after something has happened. The Reisner data show why that is too late: two-thirds of these dogs had never bitten a child before. What many of them did have was fear—and it is often visible long before, if someone who has learned to look is watching. When behavior therapy rather than training is called for is the first question here, not the last.

Ruling out pain belongs at the start of every behavior consultation, not at the end. In every second dog that had bitten a child, a medical cause was in question. Any behavior therapy that begins before an orthopedic and dermatological workup may be working on the wrong problem.

Management is not giving up—it is often the most reliable intervention. A baby gate in front of the dog’s bed can prevent more bites than any cue. Properly built muzzle training isn’t an admission of failure either, but a safety measure that gives the dog back freedom. Anyone who dismisses management as an “excuse for bad training” hasn’t read the numbers.

Child–dog competence is a discipline of its own. It is aimed at adults, not children. Anyone who tries to create safety by relying on the child’s understanding has not understood the child’s developmental stage—and is delegating responsibility to the person least able to carry it.

Owner competence shows in everyday life, not in an exam. That is why the decisive question in our work is not what someone knows but what they do when things get difficult—and whether they get help before they lose control. An owner competence certificate can’t assess that. A relationship supported over months can.

Behavior is observed across situations, not in one. That is the real reason why a one-time test—whatever kind—cannot structurally solve the problem. Behavior is context-dependent. If you want to assess it, you have to see it in different contexts, over time.

That is not a better testing procedure. It is letting go of the idea that a testing procedure is enough.

11. In closing

A child has died. We don’t know why. It is quite possible that we will never know for certain.

What we do know: in the coming weeks, people will argue about this dog’s breed—a breed determined by outward appearance that already went by two different names in the coverage on day one. There will be calls for lists and counter-calls. In the end, little will probably change.

And somewhere, in the meantime, a two-year-old will hug a sleeping family dog that is in pain, that no one has ever examined, that has never bitten anyone—and that would probably pass any temperament test.

That is where we should be starting.

A note on the sources

The information on the incident in Drosa reflects the reporting by the police and the Dessau-Roßlau public prosecutor’s office, as well as news agency reports from early July 2026. The investigation is ongoing; according to the investigators, the breed designation is based on outward appearance, not on genetic testing. The information on the dog’s history varies in reliability, and we have graded it accordingly in the text. The update of September 16, 2026—autopsy result, expert report, and the dog’s whereabouts—is based on a report by the German Press Agency quoting a spokesperson for the Salzlandkreis district; we have not seen the expert report itself. That the dog had previously come to the attention of the authorities and could only be kept under conditions was reported by the Mitteldeutsche Zeitung and picked up by the news agency dpa. The details—the 2024 incident, the temperament test without objections, the owner competence exam, the return in December 2024, and the muzzle requirement for public spaces—come from tabloid coverage citing neighbors and the head of the animal shelter. We have no official confirmation of these details. The conclusion in the section “The ritual” does not rely on this information but solely on the legal situation under the dog law of the state of Saxony-Anhalt. We do not name the child, even though the name has since been published by some media outlets. We will update this section when reliable new information becomes available.

The studies cited differ considerably in strength and scope. Morrill et al. (2022) is a large population-genetics study; the percentage describes the share of explained variance, not the probability of a behavior in an individual case. Reisner et al. (2007) and Herron et al. (2009) are analyses from university behavior clinics and therefore not representative of the dog population; their respective limitations are stated in the text where the numbers appear. Thiesen-Moussa et al. (2018) analyzed 124 reports from a single institute and point out themselves that the way the temperament test is carried out and evaluated varies considerably between assessors.

Statements on the legal situation reflect the provisions cited and do not replace legal advice.

References

• Bundesverfassungsgericht. (2004). Beschluss vom 16. März 2004, 1 BvR 1778/01.
• Herron, M. E., Shofer, F. S., & Reisner, I. R. (2009). Survey of the use and outcome of confrontational and non-confrontational training methods in client-owned dogs showing undesired behaviors. Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 117(1–2), 47–54. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.applanim.2008.12.011
• Morrill, K., Hekman, J., Li, X., McClure, J., Logan, B., Goodman, L., Gao, M., Dong, Y., Alonso, M., Carmichael, E., Snyder-Mackler, N., Alonso, J., Cai, H. J., Boyko, A. R., & Karlsson, E. K. (2022). Ancestry-inclusive dog genomics challenges popular breed stereotypes. Science, 376(6592), eabk0639. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abk0639
• Gesetz zur Vorsorge gegen die von Hunden ausgehenden Gefahren (Hundegesetz) des Landes Sachsen-Anhalt vom 23. Januar 2009.

• Niedersächsisches Gesetz über das Halten von Hunden (NHundG) vom 26. Mai 2011, Nds. GVBl. Nr. 11/2011, S. 130.
• Reisner, I. R., Shofer, F. S., & Nance, M. L. (2007). Behavioral assessment of child-directed canine aggression. Injury Prevention, 13(5), 348–351. https://doi.org/10.1136/ip.2007.015396

• Thiesen-Moussa, D., Hettwer, A., & Hackbarth, H. (2018). Der Niedersächsische Wesenstest: Ergebnisse des Testens der Gefährlichkeit von Hunden. Berliner und Münchener Tierärztliche Wochenschrift. https://doi.org/10.2376/0005-9366-18042

Key takeaways

Breed explains only a small share of behavioral differences—and it is especially weak for bite threshold.

The heritability findings are routinely misread: most behavioral traits are heritable—but that heritability follows breed lines only to a small extent.

A temperament test does not test the situation in which children get bitten. It takes place in an unfamiliar environment, not where children are usually bitten.

The owner competence certificate tests knowledge, not behavior—neither the dog’s nor the human’s at the decisive moment.

Children get bitten where no one is watching: while hugging, while approaching a sleeping or withdrawing dog, within their own family.

A considerable share of the dogs had never bitten a child before. A dog’s history is therefore of only limited use as a safety criterion.

Fear and pain are the factors with more evidence behind them—not breed.

This is not about blaming owners. The patterns are systemic, not a matter of individual fault.

What helps is unspectacular: secure resources, make retreat possible, guide children, have pain checked—and keep risky situations from arising in the first place.

Frequently asked questions about dog bites