'US Postal Service reports rise in dog attacks thanks to online retail boom'

[momcqueen]

I would be interested to read the Canadian perspective on this. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-postal-service-dog-attack-rise-post-online-retai...

Booming online retail sales are good news for the US Postal Service, but its carriers are incurring a cost: more dog bites. 

Dog attacks on postal workers rose last year to 6,755, up 206 from the previous year and the highest in three decades, as internet shopping booms and consumers increasingly demand seven-day-a-week package delivery and groceries dropped at their doorstep. The high for attacks dated back to the 1980s, at more than 7,000, before maulings by pit bulls and other potentially aggressive dogs became a public issue. 

[cumos55]

The answer to this problem.....

(1) Dog owner picks up all mail at a local postal outlet.

(2) Community Mailboxes

(3) Mailbox on  the fence outside the yard area

[ypdc_dennis]

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@cumos55 wrote:

The answer to this problem.....

(1) Dog owner picks up all mail at a local postal outlet.

(2) Community Mailboxes

(3) Mailbox on  the fence outside the yard area

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This assumes the attacking dogs are those of the buyer...

[cumos55]

Guard dogs..... Pet dogs

and then the ... roamers.......  

Dogs... no matter what the size... can very very protective of where they live

[momcqueen]

As I said at the onset, I'd be very interested to see the Canadian side of this problem. Like, is it as bad?

Or are our dogs more polite?

[pocomocomputing]

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@mjwl2006 wrote:
As I said at the onset, I'd be very interested to see the Canadian side of this problem. Like, is it as bad?

Or are our dogs more polite?

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I would suspect that because we use community mailboxes and there was a big conversion to community mailboxes until stopped last year that the problem is not as bad.

[ypdc_dennis · Accepted solution]

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@mjwl2006 wrote:
As I said at the onset, I'd be very interested to see the Canadian side of this problem. Like, is it as bad?

Or are our dogs more polite?

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Nope. "... there are more than 500 dog bite incidents to Canada Post delivery personnel each year."

https://www.canadapost.ca/cpo/mr/assets/pdf/aboutus/bookmark_en.pdf

[momcqueen]

I think this would be a great human interest piece.

[cumos55]

The population of the US is about 10 times that of Canada....  

Could we then state  that there should be 10 times as many dogs, and 10 times more dog  bites in the US than Canada

[momcqueen]

Back in the 1980s when wood stoves and wood furnaces were the fashion, my father was the owner of a small business that sold and serviced wood stoves and wood furnaces. He'd have to enter stranger's houses every day -- most often while they were not home -- to do his work. Countless times he cajoled attack dogs into becoming his friends. I'm not sure how he did it, but he did. Although, he would be entering the house to stay for awhile and usually that day only or maybe that day and the next, it wasn't like he had hundreds of homes to service for 30 seconds at a time five days a week every month of the year like a letter carrier.

Postal workers are like a game to many dogs. I know I had a cat once that used to count the minutes until she could happily attack the newspaper carrier's fingers as she was trying to slip the Winnipeg Sun under my apartment door. It was probably the highlight of my cat's day and night, she was an indoor animal that never saw the outside world. Only a stranger's fingers.