Ending San Antonio’s dog attack problem will take a community change of heart

Whenever my husband takes our two bigger dogs Sophie and Rocky out for a walk, I always sort of hold my breath until they safely return.

Our dogs are strong and healthy, Mark’s a big guy and he carries a retractable police baton in his pocket whenever the three of them go traipsing around our modest, near-Westside neighborhood.

But our area, located within a high-poverty zip code, is blighted by loose dogs, and on several occasions Mark and our mutts have been menaced by out-of-control canines.

Thankfully, nothing horrible has happened beyond some snarls, teeth-baring and barking.

But that hasn’t been the case for at least a half-dozen unfortunate souls in San Antonio, who — as recent headlines have blared — were either seriously injured or, in two cases, killed during dangerous dog attacks.

Each year, around 3,000 dog bites are reported to Animal Care Services, which enforces animal control, handles pet adoption and educates the public about pet ownership in Bexar County. The incidences of serious bites, which are so violent they cause broken bones, disfigurement or death, jumped a whopping 70% from 2018 to 2022, according to the San Antonio Express-News.

The majority of dog bites — more than 60% — are clustered in poorer districts on the east, west and south sides of the city, according to the San Antonio Report.

Does this mean San Antonio’s horrific and growing dangerous dog attack problem is merely a function of poverty? Is it a monetary issue? Or does it stem from what I’ve long suspected as the ecumenical cause of rampaging canines — namely, there are no bad dogs, just bad owners?

I sat down with the head of Animal Care Services, Director Shannon Sims, to get to the bottom of what’s fueling the city’s rise in dangerous dog attacks and what, if anything, can be done, aside from punishing scofflaw dog owners with fines or prison sentences.

The answer is: It’s complicated, but several core issues underlie the problem.

First off, this isn’t simply a case of low-income dog owners versus affluent ones — at least not totally.

“We see dangerous dogs in every district in the city, rich and poor,” Sims said. “But we do see more of this where people allow their dogs to roam freely.”

Truth Number One: Most of the dogs you see out running around are owned dogs, not strays. A study done a few years ago found that 85 to 90% of animals roaming free of restraint actually had a home and owners, according to Sims.

According to ACS’ last loose dog survey, at any given time some 30,000 dogs are roaming free in San Antonio.

Truth Number Two: About 75% of these animals haven’t been spayed or neutered, and that’s a huge driver of the problem.

“In the serious attacks we’ve had this year, they’ve been very directly attributable to the fact a female was in heat and a male was obviously stimulated,” Sims said.

Overstimulated dogs in close proximity can easily become dangerous dogs, Sims said, but too many people fail to get their animals fixed.

An economic factor is at play: The city offers a wealth of free or low-cost sterilization programs, but they’re always operating at capacity, Sims said. Full price spay and neutering can run up to $800 — which is why the city is planning to add two new sterilization clinics on the east and west sides by the summer, and is actively wooing new vendors to increase capacity.

But cost isn’t the only reason some dog owners fail in this most basic responsibility of pet ownership. Some argue they don’t need to fix their dogs because they’re never off their property. (Reality: wood fencing is often no match for canine lust.) Or they’ve convinced themselves their dogs are happier with intact sex organs.

“We run into people who say, ‘We don’t want to take his manhood,’ or ‘I want to allow her to experience the gift of motherhood,’” Sims said. “Both ideas are rooted in ignorance. There’s no dog sitting there wishing, “Wow, I sure wish I had my testicles,’ or ‘Wow, I sure wish I could have some puppies.’ That directly comes from the owner’s state of mind.”

Really, when you think of it, not sterilizing a heavily sequestered animal amounts to a kind of sexual torture.

Here’s another misbegotten belief on the part of some owners: That animals are happier when left to roam the neighborhood. Some folks actually open their fence gates before they go to work so that their pooch can explore while they’re away.

“That’s like leaving your child alone or letting them run free,” said Sims, adding that dogs have the mental capacity of a 2- or 3-year-old human. “You know when you leave children to their own devices, they’re going to get in trouble.”

Speaking of children, dogs are like them in another way, he said: You get out of them what you put into them.

Dogs need to spend time with their human pack, being socialized and paid attention to. Along with physical sustenance and veterinary care, they need to be taught manners and behavioral expectations. They need to be perceived as members of the family, because that’s what they are.

That’s how they learn to become good dogs and to view their owners as the alpha head of the pack: Not by owners yelling or beating or punishing them, but by owners providing food and gentle correction and positive reinforcement for proper behavior and bedding and safe limits and love.

(Incidentally, this also happens to be the best way to raise a child.)

People who constantly leave their dogs outside, who throw them bits of human attention and food scraps as an afterthought, should hardly be surprised when their furry backyard denizen turns into a monster.

Here’s another misbegotten belief that’s often interwoven with the above: The notion that dogs are security systems.

“I tell people all the time, it’s way easier to get an account with [a home security system] and cheaper than the expense of dog food and vet bills,” Sims said. “A home security system doesn’t need to be walked or socialized. Asking a dog to be a security system is setting the animal up for failure.”

Dogs aren’t sophisticated assessors of threat, he said; they are baldly territorial creatures and will protect their area or turf, even if that means transgressing borders. And it’s in their animal nature to go after any target perceived as weak — as in, children or the elderly.

Sims said his enforcement officers tend to go out to the same houses again and again, dealing with the same owners who can’t seem to keep their animals safe, cared for and contained.

For dog owners who are already on ACS’ radar, an internal-referral program can offer help, such as assistance in mending broken fences or providing resources like dog houses or “humane tethers,” which allow dogs some freedom of movement and aren’t as constricting as chaining, which is illegal in San Antonio.

Owners who don’t cooperate or accept such help will experience the full brunt of ACS enforcement, Sims said — just as those owners who’ve been implicated in the fatal dog encounters are going to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

The city has increased the ACS budget in the wake of the high-profile dog attacks, which will help pay for more investigators and officers. Since an 81-year-old man was killed by a dog attack last February, ACS officers have begun writing criminal citations, not civil ones, if a dog bite occurs while the dog was off-leash and not on the owner’s property.

All this is to the good, but to expect ACS (which has struggled with internal policy issues that are beyond the scope of this column) to be able to single-handedly reform the glut of San Antonians with bad ideas about pet ownership — again, the root cause of the dog attack problem — is absurd.

This isn’t a situation that’s going to be fixed with new laws or stiff jail sentences for bad owners or government intervention, at least not totally, Sims said. Protecting people from dog attacks — and sparing poor dogs from euthanasia, be they Pitbulls or some other breed — is going to require a full-scale culture change.

Sims said that misguided beliefs about dog ownership tend to get passed down through families. He, in fact, was raised in a family that maintained the whole “a dog is just a dog” mindset — ironic, given the line of work he ended up in.

He said these ideas and attitudes can take years, even generations to change — Sims likens it to the resistance people felt when laws first passed requiring everyone to wear seatbelts in cars.

“They were like, ‘This is baloney,’” he said, “but eventually, everyone got on board.”

In the meantime, here’s a simple rule of thumb Sims offered — if you’re not willing or able to do all the things you must do to be a responsible pet owner — boiled down to just four words:

“Don’t get a dog.”