[jholman]

Yikes, that's a grim story.

Yeah, the injury stats are way higher than death. I just couldn't find a fast way to disambiguate serious injuries from not-so-serious-but-we-still-care injuries from the sort of bite that really just merits a fake apology and everyone gets on with their lives.

At the other extreme, I've had first-hand knowledge of a case where someone taunted a dog repeatedly over many months (stupid kid, stupid dog-owners, lots of mistakes were made), eventually the kid got bit, didn't even need stitches, but they called animal control.

So. Non-fatal dog-attacks have a very wide range of impact, and I had no idea how to disentangle those.

Oh, after all that writing I just did, I went back and re-read your source. In 2022 there were 17,500 home insurance claims related to dog bites, at an average cost of $64k. That sounds like a pretty reasonable proxy for serious injury due to injuries from dog bites from pets, the sort of pets that could plausibly have been inappropriately not-on-leash (remember we're discussing whether or not it's "incredibly dangerous and irresponsible" to ever have your dog unrestrained).

[vundercind]

Sure, I agree that 800,000-hospital-visits number isn’t really a great picture of what’s going on. The deaths number was just so very far under what I was sure was the serious-harm figure that I thought it worth bringing in the non-death attacks, and a (probably reasonable-ish) estimate of cases that prompted treatment was first thing I saw that looked close to what I was looking for.

The 17.5k stat’s interesting—I think you’re right that it may at least be in the ballpark for an estimate of unrestrained dog attacks. Some would generate a claim, some wouldn’t, some claims wouldn’t be for unrestrained dogs… yeah, probably a good starting point. I like that one, good eye.

I’d guess most attacks of that 800k aren’t from strangers’ dogs at all, but friends and family’s dogs. Simple matter of opportunity and time exposed.