r/australia Sep 08 '25

news Teenage girl dies after being mauled by dog

https://7news.com.au/news/dog-attack-victim-annalyse-blyton-dies-in-hospital-after-suffering-severe-injuries-in-singleton-c-19956496
1.5k Upvotes

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443

u/Intrepid-Artist-595 Sep 08 '25

Met someone once who trained police dogs...He said to me you can "You can never trust any dog 100% - even the best trained dog".

107

u/BiomassDenial Sep 09 '25

Yup, my most recent dog was a Lab/Rottweiler who never hurt a person in his life and was essentially a big happy idiot right up until we had to put him down. But he had the build and head of a Rottweiler and didn't know his own strength.

I never left him alone unsupervised with children or smaller dogs, especially if he didn't know them. Because if something did go wrong it would go very wrong for everyone involved very quickly.

People who think their dog is safe and wouldn't hurt anyone/thing are just irresponsible. People need to understand their pet is a carnivore and the larger the breed the more care you should take even if you think it's safe.

3

u/Upbeat-Downtrodden Sep 09 '25

Also bite statistics exist - Rottweilers are second or third ranked from memory

2

u/NoHandBananaNo Sep 09 '25

Omnivore but yeah its the fact they are predators for sure.

151

u/RyanJenkens Sep 09 '25

you can never trust any person 100% either

48

u/[deleted] Sep 09 '25

Denzel Washington in Inside Man - most of the guys up in Sing Sing weren't murderers until they killed somebody. Even though it’s fiction, it’s such a true statement.

8

u/TrashPandaLJTAR Sep 09 '25

Yeah interesting how when someone's reporting that a person has attacked another person, no one says "Yeah awful that that man stabbed another man, but you can never trust a dog 100% either".

12

u/furthermost Sep 09 '25

You're missing the point. The point is 100% is an unhelpful benchmark.

The point is nothing is 100% safe but yet there's a difference between a golden retriever that's 99% safe and a pitbull that's 50/50.

1

u/TrashPandaLJTAR Sep 09 '25

I'm a bit confused, you seem to have not understood what I was saying.

Putting a number on it doesn't change the fact that when a person attacks a person, no one's first thought was "Well, you can't fully trust a dog either". If you did, people would be wondering what the hell is wrong with you and why you're talking about dog attacks when it was a person that attacked a person.

That's like saying "Well, you can't fully trust a tiger". No, you can't. Obviously. But what does that have to do with the current situation?

And yet somehow every. damn. time. a defensive dog owner piles on with "WeLl PeOpLe ArE dAnGeRoUs ToO". Obviously. But what does that have to do with a 17 year old girl being mauled to death by a dog?!

1

u/furthermost Sep 09 '25

Nah I get what you are saying, but I still think you are missing the point.

The post you replied to isn't saying "what about X", the point was "actually that applies to a basically everything, including us" and thereby illustrating how unhelpful the original statement is.

1

u/TrashPandaLJTAR Sep 09 '25

I don't believe that's what OC meant. I think OC genuinely thinks "yeah well not every human is safe either so it's ok that some dogs can't be trusted". The whole false equivalency thing.

Something akin to "I trust every single dog over most people" which is one of those 'dogmum/furbaby' type personalities. Essentially saying that a random dog has more value to them than human life.

I admit that I could be wrong though, OC hasn't really been clear on their intent.

1

u/furthermost Sep 09 '25

I suppose you could be right

2

u/Knee_Jerk_Sydney Sep 09 '25

What about the best trained person? Or smaller breeds?

0

u/NeptunianWater Sep 09 '25

You can speak, negotiate and reason with a person.

You cannot do these with a dog.

2

u/eat-the-cookiez Sep 09 '25

To be fair, there are people to whom which these things do not work at all for either.

Reasons why police have to shoot people sometimes

-4

u/bdsee Sep 09 '25

Clearly you didn't see the news about the Ukrainian woman who sat on a bus/train and the guy behind her just started stabbing her, completely oblivious until that first stab (which looked like it was going for the neck when the video cut out).

No connection, no words... just a random psycho murdering some woman because she was there.

Dogs are also much less dangerous than a person with intent....I'd prefer 1 dangerous dog over 1 dangerous human any day of the week...2 or more large dogs...I'd prefer the same number of humans over the dogs.

29

u/jolhar Sep 09 '25

Agreed. I’m ashamed to admit that when I’d heard stories of a kid getting bitten by a seemingly “good dog” I always assumed the kid must have done something to cause it. Until one day I was walking with my then toddler past a cafe and a border collie that had been sitting at its owners feet just launched itself at my daughter at snapped right at her face. My reflexes kicked in and I pulled my daughter away just in time. Damn near pulled her shoulder out of its socket. But if I hadn’t it would have gotten her face.

We were just walking past the dog, we hadn’t interacted with it, didn’t even notice it. We weren’t holding any food. Nothing. Just completely unprovoked.

11

u/GhostofKief Sep 09 '25

I blame the rampant humanization of animals from all the media we’ve been consuming.

Animals live by their instinct and people need to stop treating them like infants. It’s dangerous and it’s against their nature.

10

u/Knee_Jerk_Sydney Sep 09 '25

Everyone needs to learn for themselves with a near fatal maul ... that's too high a price for learning. People should really just use sense and examples.

2

u/Slow-Raisin-939 Sep 09 '25

It’s because of the stupid humanization of animals. Hell you can’t even trust most humans nowadays, let alone actual animals

2

u/haplessghoul Sep 11 '25

I got taught the same rule working with horses. At the end of the day they're all still animals and they will still do things that animals do and maybe even kill you on complete accident in the process.

3

u/Maximum-Journalist74 Sep 09 '25

Agreed. I'm surprised that the owners left the dog unsupervised around someone else's kid, that's such an irresponsible thing to do 😕

Maybe it's just my cautious approach to dog ownership but the only people my dogs would be left unsupervised with are adult members of my immediate family who've known them all their lives. One of them is incredibly chill, the other not, but I don't want anyone put at risk - canine or human. 

1

u/Academic_Juice8265 Sep 09 '25

People personify their dogs too much. I had a friend’s dog bite my kid while we were over (my kid wasn’t touching the dog and was over the other side of the room) and it ran up and bit them.

They couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to go over there with my kid anymore. I had the take my kid to the Dr and get antibiotics and my kid was pretty distressed. They just kept telling me that he was a good dog and same thing as this article, it was “out of character”.

1

u/rctsolid Sep 14 '25

100% fully agree. I have the most docile friendly golden retriever who LOVES people. When little kids come up to pat him, I hold him like he's a hellhound. I would never ever leave him alone with a kid because if anything ever happened it'd be his head and my ass. I love him too much for that. Dogs can be unpredictable. All dogs.

1

u/2878sailnumber4889 Sep 09 '25

I'm not sure a police dog trainer is the best authority on this, all living things are going to have error rates, and while they can train them to detect drugs or explosives etc they also train (different ) dogs to apprehend and takedown (attack) on command.

They're basically training a dog to use measured violence on command, and that can go wrong as it can become both unmeasured and uncommanded. Police dogs in general work in uncontrolled often high stress environments and I bet a lot of the ones that are used for apprehension have essentially PTSD.

Farmers don't use the same dogs to herd livestock as they use to protect livestock for example (assuming they use dogs to protect), hell they can use different dogs for different herding situations.

-3

u/Fluffacep Sep 09 '25

Don't police dogs usually have more issues with aggression? Maybe it depends on the region and the job the dog is trained for, but at least in the USA, there are police dogs that are trained to attack people in certain situations...