On December 6th at 8:15 p.m
Vienna (OTS) – The fact that dogs bite is not an isolated case: every year between 3,000 and 4,000 people in Austria are injured so seriously after dog bites that they have to be treated in hospital. But why do dog attacks keep happening? How can you prevent these? Who is to blame for an attack, the person or the animal? And what is a fighting dog anyway? For “Doc 1: Fighting with the Dog,” Hanno Settele will travel through the “dog country” of Austria on Wednesday, December 6, 2023, at 8:15 p.m. on ORF 1 and see how dangerous the four-legged friends are to people can become real.
More about the content:
At the beginning of October, a jogger on a dirt path in a small village in Upper Austria was attacked by an American Staffordshire Terrier and died on the spot from severe bite injuries. Since then, the discussion about so-called fighting dogs has returned. In order to shed light on the debate, Hanno Settele talks to renowned experts, visits people who have had experiences with fighting dogs themselves, and looks for facts in a highly emotionally charged discussion. Above all, he asks the question about the responsibility that dog owners bear. And he wants to know: Is the fear of the “attack dog” justified?
In Styria, for example, Georg Resch looks after problem dogs that are no longer socially acceptable due to their aggression and tries to resocialize them. One of his protégés is the Rottweiler, which injured a woman so badly last summer that she had to go to the intensive care unit. She died there around two months later. In Vienna, Hanno Settele meets Raja Hothi, a relative of the deceased, who is now campaigning for stricter rules in dog ownership. That’s what Monika Diendorfer also wants: A few years ago, she herself was the victim of a free-roaming American Staffordshire Terrier – an experience that left the pensioner permanently traumatized.
Animal lover and journalist Maggie Entenfellner is also in favor of more thoughtful and, above all, nationwide uniform regulations. She is particularly concerned about working dog sports, which Minister Johannes Rauch also now wants to ban: The sport, which also includes attack training, makes dogs aggressive. Georg Sticha, himself a working dog athlete, sees it differently: Through training, dogs become more balanced, controllable and therefore less dangerous. According to Regina Bregenzer, dogs are anything but dangerous. She breeds bull terriers and cannot understand the bad image of listed dogs. And while many listed dogs are long-term tenants at the animal shelter in Vösendorf because of this bad reputation and have little chance of being rehomed, Rottweilers are actually trained to use weapons at the Kaisersteinbruch military dog center – just in case, of course.