(Beth Clifton collage)
A dozen years of data-logging reveals the risk
SIMI VALLEY, California––The 68th U.S. dog attack fatality of 2024, among 71 total deaths known as of January 2, 2025, an as yet not publicly identified man in Simi Valley, California, died of an apparent heart attack after suffering severe injuries from his own pit bull.
The man died trying to stop his pit bull from attacking a neighbor’s Rottweiler.
A detailed description of the incident appears toward the bottom of the ANIMALS 24-7 article Pit bull victim Kingsley Wright, age 3, was 70th dog attack death of 2024.
The Simi Valley man’s death was unusual because he was one of only two of the seventy-one 2024 dog attack fatalities who died from a “proximate cause,” rather than direct effects of bites.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Atypical death did occur in the typical manner
Yet the Simi Valley man’s death, while not typical of dog attack fatalities, came in the same manner as about a third of all disfiguring injuries from dog attacks over the years, and exactly a third of the disfiguring dog attack injuries logged in 2024 by ANIMALS 24-7: trying to prevent a dog attack on another animal, most often a smaller dog.
In about 90% of those cases over the past dozen years, the attacking dog was a pit bull.
We know that because ANIMALS 24-7 in January 2013 embarked on what is now a 12-year voyage to boldly go where no statistician had gone before, to find not only how many other pets and livestock animals are killed by dogs each year, but also to establish which dogs are doing the killing.
As of 2013, the only prior estimate of the sort was that USDA Wildlife Services had projected since 2004, based on calls for help from farmers, that dogs kill upward of 22,000 livestock animals per year, including both poultry and hoofed species.
(Beth Clifton collage)
No one else counts dog attacks on other animals by breed
Critical to realize is that USDA Wildlife Services has jurisdiction only over domestic dogs who kill livestock on working farms. Domestic dogs otherwise are a local animal control jurisdiction.
No one calls USDA Wildlife Services to complain about dog attacks on other dogs, attacks on cats, or dog attacks on other animals not kept as livestock on working farms. Hobby farms are not covered.
Further, there are no agencies at either the state or federal level that routinely and systematically collect, aggregate, and evaluate local animal control reports, even about dog attacks on humans.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Why we log the body count
This is why ANIMALS 24-7 has since 1982 logged fatal and disfiguring dog attacks on humans in the U.S. and Canada, adding logs of human dog attack fatalities in the United Kingdom in 1991 and in South Africa in 2004.
ANIMALS 24-7 will publish the 2024 final roster of human deaths and statistics on disfiguring dog attacks within another few days, as soon as we are reasonably certain that all 2024 fatalities have been reported.
The lack of governmental data tabulation of dog attacks is also why ANIMALS 24-7 in January 2013 expanded our efforts to log dog attacks on other animals.
(Beth Clifton collage)
29,000 dogs per year kill other animals
What we now know, from the average of a dozen years’ worth of data, is that about 29,000 domestic dogs per year participate in killing or severely injuring other animals.
About 87% of those dogs are pit bulls.
Just under a third of the animals killed by domestic dogs are other dogs: about 9,300 per year. About 88% of the dogs doing the killing are pit bulls.
Both figures round up to 90%.
More than 10,000 domestic dogs per year are severely injured by other dogs, exclusive of the victims of illegal dogfighting.
Eighty-three percent of the dogs severely injured by other dogs are injured by pit bulls.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Cats & other domestic pets
An average of about 3,200 cats per year are killed by domestic dogs, a figure which may be low due to under-reporting of dog attacks on ownerless cats.
Pit bulls kill 95% of the feline victims in attacks that are reported.
Domestic dogs, exclusive of situations to which USDA Wildlife Services would respond, kill about 12,400 animals of species otherwise classed as livestock per year, including sheep, goats, cattle, pigs, horses, donkeys, mules, llamas, alpacas, and poultry.
Pit bulls account for about 76% of these animal deaths, nearly 9,500 per year, with German shepherds, huskies, and Rottweilers the far distant runners-up.
(Beth Clifton collage)
“Iceberg problem”
Since USDA Wildlife Services field agents seldom actually see the dogs reported by farmers to have killed livestock, USDA Wildlife Services does not even attempt to categorize attacking dogs by breed.
None of that means that reliable and reasonably consistent annual estimates of the domestic toll on other animals, including by breed type, cannot be produced.
To be addressed is what is called by statisticians an “iceberg problem,” in which the mass of an iceberg lurking beneath ocean waves must be calculated from the slope of the tip of the iceberg floating above sea level.
This process is familiar to Arctic and Antarctic mariners, at least since the Titanic sank in 1912, but not to most people who count animals.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Finding the tip of the “iceberg”
Individual “iceberg” estimates can be misleading in detail, because iceberg shapes vary greatly, but with great consistency about 10% of the floating mass of an iceberg is above water.
Knowing that about 90% of each iceberg will be underwater, mariners can estimate from the floating 10% what the maximum width and depth of the unseen portion may be, and steer far enough clear of the unseen part to avoid a collision.
The first step, always, is to measure the tip of the iceberg.
The tip of the “iceberg” of dog attacks on other animals is those attacks that are individually documented, primarily by news media.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Data sources
Individually tabulating the thousands of dog attacks on other animals that are mentioned on social media would provide a more accurate description of the “tip,” but apart from being a data compilation task perhaps beyond the ability of any one individual, would also require a different approach to figuring out the ratio between the reported attacks and those that are not reported.
Collecting and collating information about fatal and disfiguring dog attacks on humans, working from news media reports, ANIMALS 24-7 has learned over the years that while human fatalities due to dog attack are usually extensively reported, insurance industry data consistently shows that about 25 times more payouts are made in claims for injuries inflicted by dogs than in cases of non-fatal disfigurement reported by news media.
Assuming an under-reporting ratio of 25 unreported cases to one that makes news is, in general, a good starting point for estimating the under-reporting factor in cases involving human victims.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Factors contributing to under-reporting
By 2014, however, after a year of collating reported dog attacks on other animals, several further factors contributing to under-reporting, not applicable to cases of dog injury to humans, became evident:
• Dog attacks on animals receiving media notice are almost exclusively incidents in which either a human was also killed or injured; and/or
• Law enforcement or other intervenors killed the attacking dog; and/or
• The dog attack caused the death(s) of animals valued at more than $1,000.
In addition, dog attacks on other animals belonging to the same household as the dog are usually not reported at all.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Compensation factor
Therefore our final estimate of fatal dog attacks on other animals each year became reported attacks multiplied by 25, to compensate for the gap between reported attacks and hypothetically possible insurance payouts if the victims were human, and then again by three to compensate for under-reporting of dog attacks that do not meet the criteria for hypothetically possible insurance payouts.
This amounts to reported attacks multiplied by 75.
(Beth Clifton collage)
86% of dogs who kill other animals are pit bulls
Regardless of whatever quibbles anyone may have with this method of producing the ANIMALS 24-7 annual estimates, collecting the raw data for 12 years has amassed information about 4,088 individual dogs killing other pets and/or livestock animals.
Of those 3,625 individual dogs who killed other animals, 3,275––90%––were pit bulls.
From year to year, the primary input data has varied widely, showing a general trend downward. This does not mean, however, that fewer dogs, and fewer pit bulls, are attacking and killing other animals.
What it appears to mean, mostly, is that as dog attacks on other animals become more common, at the same time as local news media are contracting due to economic pressures, those dog attacks are becoming less newsworthy.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Fatal attacks on humans are steeply up
If dog attacks on humans were declining, one might reasonably presume that dog attacks on other animals would be down, too. However, fatal dog attacks on humans in the U.S. have approximately doubled since 2013; fatal attacks by pit bulls have quadrupled since 2005.
If the number of households including pit bulls had increased, incidentally, since 2013, a higher percentage of pit bull attacks on other animals occurring within the owners’ homes might be going unreported.
This, however, is not the case: pit bull ownership from 2013 through 2024 appears to have flatlined. See How many doggies are in the window? Dog breed census 2024
(Beth Clifton collage)
Percentages remain steady
Despite the year-to-year variation in the numbers of dog attacks on other animals collected by ANIMALS 24-7, there has been relatively little variance in the percentage of those attacks that are inflicted by pit bulls.
(Click here for 2024 projected animals killed by dogs, showing the year-by-year totals since 2013.)
Most of what variation there is results from instances in which just one or two dogs break into poultry barns and go on killing rampages, sometimes killing hundreds or even thousands of birds.
Beth & Merritt Clifton with friends.
Several such rampages occurred in each year from 2017 through 2019, but ANIMALS 24-7 has received no reports of a large-scale rampage in a non-commercial poultry barn since 2020.
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The post Pit bull attacks on other pets lead to a third of disfiguring human bite injuries appeared first on Animals 24-7.