I read Judi's letter on Rachel Lamb's (from HSUS) attitude about dog bites, and was angered but not surprised. As I said in my letters to CBS and the HSUS, no one would seriously advocate banning dogs because of the serious PR/political backlash - there are more dogs than ferrets in the US, and thus more dog _owners_. I found the stats I quoted to them. These are courtesy of the Baltimore Ferret Club. * An 1988 article in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association reported: "Statistics from the Center [sic] for Disease Control and an article in the JAMA indicate that the number of bites inflicted by ferrets appears to be substantially lower than those by dogs and cats. These statistics were compiled from 1978-1988 and were reported on a yearly basis: between 1 and 3 million dog bites, compared to 65 ferret bites in 10 years. Serious bite injuries were recorded as 44.000/year for dogs and 12/year for ferrets..." * If you use the populations of dogs and ferrets (500 million vs. 6 million in 1988) to correct the above statistics for size, the rate per year would be 8.8 bites/yr for 10,000 dogs and .02 bites/yr for 10,000 ferrets. This makes dogs over 200 times more likely to bite than ferrets. * Dog bites can be fatal to children. There were 157 dog-bite related deaths in the US (1978-1988). 70% of these were children under 10 years old. 25 were infants under 1 year old, and for these, "all involved pet dogs, and all but one attack occurred in the home and involved a single animal. Ten attacks occurred while the infant was sleeping or in a crib." (Sachs, Sattin, & Bonzo, 1990. JAMA, 262, 1489-1492.) Calm down before you write that letter - I know how infuriating reading those comparative statistics can be. Don't come off looking like a dog-hater, either. I mentioned having grown up in a home with dogs, but emphasized the possible danger of dogs, more so than ferrets. Keep writing those letters - Denise -- /\\ ____ ,^-o, Denise Voskuil - [log in to unmask] ``-,' `-';~~ Brain: "Are you pondering what I'm pondering?" .',-'~`../' Pinky: "I think so, Brain, but if we didn't have `^^ `^^ ears we'd look like weasels." ("Animaniacs") "Ferrets are kittens with leather jackets and no fear!" -John Reed [Posted in FML issue 1221]