We were at a dog park. Not even inside it yet — we were coming through the gate. Mr Big was in vest and on leash, and it was one of those sunny days that isn’t too hot, the kind of day you take your dog somewhere for a stretch and some new smells because he has earned it.
A dog came at him like a steamroller.
It was smaller than him, which surprised me. Broad-faced, some kind of boxer or bulldog type as far as I could tell, and it had a crazy look on its face and it was coming straight for Biggie. I stepped in between them. Mr Big went behind my legs. I put my hand out in a stop motion and I yelled at that dog to stop.
It did not stop. It almost knocked me over.
I ended up grabbing at its collar trying to keep it off my dog, who was standing behind me doing nothing — although he did bow up a bit, and I knew from his past that he would stand his ground if it came to it. This smaller dog did not care about any of that. It seemed like forever before the owner came over and grabbed it.
I was furious. Dogs do not belong in a dog park if they cannot be controlled — if they do not have a stop, a drop and an absolute recall. That is the whole deal. That is the price of admission.
And then the man said the thing I have heard some version of my entire life with this dog. He told me a pit bull isn’t allowed in the dog park, and that we shouldn’t be there with my dangerous dog.
His loose, uncontrolled dog had just charged a leashed service dog in a vest, and I was the problem.
It took everything I had not to become a very bad example of a service dog handler that day. What I said instead was this:
He’s a service dog. You can tell by the fact that he didn’t take your dog apart. Any untrained dog would have.
We stayed. I told him he needed to have control of his dog at all times, and to take it to another enclosure while I got Big settled where we were going. He told me they come here all the time and it’s their place. I told him his house is his place, and this is a public dog park.
He left. We stayed in that first enclosure, and Big settled, and he paid very little attention to the other dogs after that. Some of the other owners came over and talked to me once things cooled down. It was still an ugly, uncomfortable afternoon.
Nobody was hurt. Mr Big was never touched. I got scraped up a bit from leashes and collars, and that was the whole injury list.
That is the closest I have come, and it is the reason I can write this. Because for a lot of handlers, it does not stop at a close call.
What to do in the next sixty seconds
If a dog is coming at you and your dog right now, stop reading and do this.
Stop your dog and put your body between them. I stop Mr Big and have him sit beside me or behind me, whichever the time allows. He is going to watch intently no matter what, and that is fine — that is his job. What matters is that he is behind me and he is not moving toward it.
Make yourself big and use your voice. I change my body language and occupy as much space as I possibly can. A sharp, loud, low command word is not for your dog. It is for the other one. You are trying to break its concentration, because a dog locked in on a target is not thinking, and a loud interruption is sometimes enough to knock it out of that state.
Do not act like prey. This is the one that matters most and the one people get wrong. An aggressive dog at that moment is running predator behavior. Screaming, flailing, turning away and running, waving the end of your leash — all of that reads as prey, and prey behavior makes it worse. Your dog picking up prey behavior from you makes it worse still.
Do not go for the head. People reach for the aggressive dog’s face or jaws, or they try to grab it around the middle and lift it like a toddler. That is how handlers get bitten. If you are going to put hands on a dog at all, it is not at the front end.
Do not hit it with things. People swing sticks, canes, bags, whatever is to hand. In my experience sticks, canes and sprays are not nearly as effective as people believe, and the seconds you spend fumbling for one are seconds you are not using to control the situation with your body and your voice.
I am deliberately not publishing the specific physical technique I use to end it if a dog gets within arm’s reach. It works, and I have used it, and I am not putting it in an article where somebody could get it wrong on a dog that did not deserve it. If you want that skill, get it in person from a trainer who can watch you do it.
Here is what I wish somebody had told me before it happened to me: do not expect the other owner to be gracious. Do not expect accountability. People are extraordinarily rude when they are caught out not handling their dog, and bracing for that in advance will save you some of the shock.
Who do I call when a dog attacks my service dog
The honest answer is not the one you want.
Animal control is the right agency. Not 911 unless a person is injured, and not the police unless there is a human casualty or you need someone to stop the other owner leaving. Animal control is who handles dog-on-dog incidents, and they are the ones who can open a file.
But you should know what usually happens, which is not much. In my experience, animal control is not going to care very much unless there is a hot-button breed involved. The police are not going to want to get involved at all. The city is probably not going to do anything unless there was actual bloodshed from a handler or a bystander.
I filed a complaint with the city over the dog park incident. I never heard anything back. That is the normal outcome, and I would rather you know it going in than find it out afterwards.
And there is a legal reason for it, which almost nobody explains.
Handlers assume that reporting an attack gets the other dog declared dangerous. In a lot of states, on the facts of a dog-on-dog attack alone, it does not. Texas is my state, and Texas is a good worked example. Under Health and Safety Code § 822.041, a “dangerous dog” means a dog that:
makes an unprovoked attack on a person that causes bodily injury… or commits unprovoked acts… that cause a person to reasonably believe that the dog will attack and cause bodily injury to that person.
Read that twice. A dog that mauls your service dog and never touches you does not meet the first limb. Your dog is property in the eyes of that statute, and property does not trigger the dangerous-dog machinery.
The second limb is the one that matters and the one nobody talks about. If the loose dog’s behavior made you reasonably believe it was going to attack you, that can qualify. When a strange dog charges a handler and their dog, that is very often exactly what happened — it certainly was for me, since the thing nearly knocked me down.
So when you make a report, say what actually happened. All of it, including what you believed was about to happen to you, if that is true. Not because it is a workaround, but because handlers routinely leave out the part where they were frightened for themselves, and that part is legally the only part some statutes are listening for.
The procedure in Texas under § 822.0421 is worth knowing in shape, because most states run something similar. A person reports it. The animal control authority may investigate — may, not must. It acts on the sworn statements of witnesses. If it makes a determination, it notifies the owner in writing.
Sworn statements of witnesses. That is the practical reason to get names at the scene, and it matters more than the photographs everybody tells you to take.
What the ADA does not do
This surprises people, so I will say it plainly.
The Americans with Disabilities Act does not help you here. It governs access — whether a business has to let your dog in, what two questions staff may ask, what they cannot demand. It does not say a word about what happens when somebody else’s dog attacks yours. There is no federal cause of action, no federal penalty and no federal agency to complain to.
This is one of the very few service dog problems where federal law gives the handler nothing at all. Everything protective here is state law, and it varies enormously.
| State | What it does for a harmed service dog |
|---|---|
| Florida | Third-degree felony, plus mandatory restitution that covers lost wages for the whole period without the dog |
| North Carolina | Class I felony, and “serious harm” is defined to include harm requiring retraining or retirement |
| Texas | Penal Code § 42.091 reaches recklessness, and covers permitting your animal to attack |
| New York | Harming a service dog in two degrees, as its own offense |
| Michigan | Misdemeanor, no restitution provision |
| California | Covered, but thinner than the states above |
I have written each of those up against the actual statute, and the state-by-state hub compares them side by side. Find yours before you need it, not after.
How many service dogs are attacked each year
Nobody in the United States counts this. There is no federal registry, no CDC category, no agency that tracks attacks on working dogs. If you have searched for that number and come up empty, it is not you.
The only real data anywhere comes from the United Kingdom, where Guide Dogs studied their own working population twice and published both times in the Veterinary Record.
The 2010 study looked at 100 incidents and found more than three attacks a month. The 2016 update found an average of 11.2 attacks a month. That is roughly three and a half times as many in six years.
What the 2016 data found:
- Nearly all of the attacks happened in public areas
- 68.4% of the dogs attacked were qualified, working guide dogs
- 43.2% were injured
- Over 40% of qualified guide dogs had their working ability affected
- More than 20% needed time off work afterwards
- 20 dogs were permanently withdrawn from the program — 13 of them working with a handler at the time
The 2010 study added the part that handlers feel and nobody counts: in 19% of incidents, the handler or a member of the public was injured too. Not the dog. The person.
What this data is: one charity, one country, self-reported incidents, guide dogs specifically. It is not a US national statistic and I am not going to pretend it is. But it is real, it is peer-reviewed, and it is the only serious measurement of this that exists. Everything else you will read on this subject is somebody’s guess.
Why service dogs are so vulnerable
Here is the number that reframes everything.
In the 2016 study, 55.5% of the dogs were working in harness when they were attacked. In the 2010 study it was 61%. Vest on. Handle up. Doing the job.
People ask whether service dogs are trained to attack, or whether they will defend you. The answer is no, and that is precisely the problem.
A service dog is trained to ignore other dogs completely. Not to greet them, not to react to them, not to escalate. That neutrality is the single hardest thing to train and the reason the dog is safe to take into a grocery store or a hospital. It is also why, when something comes at them, they are standing still in a harness doing exactly what they were taught.
The training that makes them safe in public is the training that leaves them defenseless.
That is why the “your dog must have provoked it” accusation is so infuriating and so wrong. More than half of these dogs were visibly, unmistakably working when it happened. The 2016 authors made the same point about the harness — it is designed to be visible, and it should have been obvious to the people whose dogs did this.
The breed question, handled honestly
The 2010 study found that 38% of the attacking dogs were bull breeds, which was over-represented compared with the proportion of that breed type in the general dog population.
I am publishing that because it is what the study found and I do not hide data that is inconvenient. Here is what it cannot support:
- It is UK data from 2010, and it does not transfer cleanly to the US dog population
- The breeds were identified by eyewitness report, not by any test. Visual breed identification is famously unreliable, and people who have just watched a dog attack are not neutral observers
- One figure, in one country, in one charity’s records, is not a basis for a breed rule
I have a particular reason to be careful here. Mr Big is a chocolate lab mix with a broad head, and he is mistaken for a pit bull constantly. On the day I described at the top of this article, the man whose loose dog charged mine used that as his defense — my dog was the dangerous one, because of what he looks like. I have written elsewhere about whether a pit bull can be a service dog, and the answer under federal law is unambiguous.
The useful lesson from that afternoon has nothing to do with breed. It is this: the dog that came at us was loose and uncontrolled, and its owner was not watching. That is the variable. It is the variable in almost every one of these.
Which brings me to the thing I most want you to take from this article.
Do not assume that a dog being in a public space with its owner nearby means the owner is a responsible one. They may not know how to handle their animal. The dog may be able to overpower them. They may not have current rabies vaccinations, which is the legal minimum of dog ownership almost everywhere. And they very likely will not take responsibility if something goes wrong.
I know how that sounds. Assume the worst anyway, and plan accordingly. Learn to control your service dog in any situation. Keep your own dog current on rabies and parvo, because you may be the only responsible party present.
At the emergency vet, and what it actually costs
Mr Big did not need a vet after the dog park. I was the one who needed patching up, which I found funny afterwards and not at all funny at the time.
But I have been to an emergency vet with a dog, and every handler should know what that room is like before they are standing in it.
You are handed paperwork. You assume your dog is about to be seen. Your dog is not about to be seen. Before any assessment of care is given, you are asked to pay. I was asked for a minimum of $600 up front, in cash — and they showed me the conveniently located ATM. Plus a credit card on file, which they ran a $1 charge against to confirm it was live.
That $600 was not the bill. That was the deposit — the price of being looked at. Everything else had to be settled before we left, cash or card or financing, it did not matter which. For something my regular vet would have billed as an office visit, supplies and a shot, I paid over $800.
They are holding your animal at that point, and they are using your love for that animal as the lever. It felt like robbery. It is legal.
I have heard from handlers asked for as much as $3,000 up front — and told plainly that this was a starting point, not an end point. It costs less for a human to walk into an emergency room, and a human cannot be turned away. Animals are turned away every day.
What you are actually being offered at that counter
When you cannot produce the deposit, the counter offers you financing. Usually CareCredit, sometimes Scratchpay, sometimes something newer.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau studied these products in May 2023, and veterinary care is explicitly one of the things they cover. The findings, in plain terms:
- The promotional period is typically 6 to 18 months at 0%
- If the balance is not paid in full by that deadline, interest is charged at 26.99% from the original purchase date, on the entire original amount — not on what is left. On all of it, backdated
- Consumers paid roughly $1 billion in deferred interest between 2018 and 2020
- 20% of healthcare deferred-interest purchases ended up charged interest. For people with credit scores under 619, it was 34%
- 65% of medical credit cards are signed at the provider’s location
That last figure is you, at the counter, at eleven at night.
This is not a new concern. In December 2013 the CFPB ordered CareCredit’s then-owner to refund $34.1 million to more than 1.2 million consumers over how the card was sold — enrolled by office staff while patients waited for treatment, with many people never receiving a written agreement and believing the card was simply interest-free.
Nobody at a veterinary practice is going to walk you through this. They are veterinarians, not financial advisers, and what these products do for them is guarantee they get paid in full. That is the entire appeal from their side of the counter.
My own view, and it is a view rather than advice: retroactive interest is legal theft. If you cannot clear the balance inside the promotional window, a card you already hold may treat you better, because at least the interest starts when the debt does.
What you can actually do at that counter
Not advice, just the avenues that exist. Which of them fits your situation is yours to work out.
Ask what has to happen tonight and what can wait for your own vet. Then let the vet answer that question, not the internet. I want to be careful here, because I have opinions about emergency pricing and none about your dog’s wounds. Bite injuries are the ones that look trivial and are not — punctures close over the top while the crushing and tearing damage sits underneath, and infection does the rest. That triage call belongs to somebody with their hands on your dog.
Ask for an itemized estimate before you agree to anything. You are allowed to. The deposit and the treatment plan are two different conversations and they are often deliberately run together.
Ask whether the financing decision can wait until the estimate exists. Very often it can. The thing that gets people is signing at the point of maximum panic for a number nobody has written down yet.
If you have an HSA or FSA, ask about it. This is the one route that exists for service dog handlers and does not exist for pet owners. IRS Publication 502 says you can include in medical expenses the costs of buying, training and maintaining a service animal, and it spells out that maintenance includes “food, grooming, and veterinary care.” I do not have one. If you do, I would use it before I signed anything at a counter.
One honest caveat: the publication describes the animal as assisting “a visually impaired or hearing disabled person or a person with other physical disabilities.” Mr Big is a psychiatric service dog. That wording is a genuine gray area for psychiatric teams and I am not going to tell you it is settled, because it is not. Ask a tax professional what it means for your situation.
The other owner’s insurance is a real avenue, and it is not the one you think. Homeowner’s and renter’s policies carry personal liability, and the industry reports typical limits of $100,000 to $300,000, with an average dog-related claim of $58,545 in 2023. But those figures are for bodily injury to people. Your dog is legally property, so an injury to your dog is a property damage claim — a different part of the policy, with different limits and different treatment. It may be covered. Ask the carrier, and do not assume.
None of the above is legal or financial advice, and I am neither a lawyer nor a financial adviser. It is a list of doors that exist.
Getting what you need at the scene
Assume the other owner will disappear, because mine did.
Get their details, and expect resistance. If there is no officer present, most people will simply leave. That is the normal behavior, not the exception.
Get witness names before you get photographs. Everybody tells you to photograph the injuries, and you should. But the statutory machinery in most states runs on sworn witness statements, and a photograph of a wound does not tell anybody whose dog did it. The people standing around are the evidence.
And know this about the people standing around: most of them will not help. There were other people at that park and they watched. That is not a comment on their character — it is a well-documented feature of how humans behave in emergencies. Ask a specific person to do a specific thing and you break the spell. Shouting for general help does not.
Photograph what happened, not just what is bleeding. The other dog. Its collar or lack of one. The gate, the sign, the leash on the ground. Where everybody was standing.
If you are here because your dog did this
Some of you searching this are on the other side of it. Your dog got loose, or slipped a collar, or went for a working dog before you could stop it, and now you are trying to find out what happens next.
Do the right thing. If the other animal or the handler was hurt, this is one of those moments in your life that shows people exactly who you are.
Give the handler your name, your number and your insurance details. Get your dog secured before anything else. Offer to pay the vet bill, and mean it.
I will also tell you plainly, because it is true: the criminal exposure in most states is worse than the vet bill. Look at the table further up this page and read your own state. A felony conviction and a restitution order that covers the handler’s lost wages for the entire period they were without their dog is a much worse afternoon than writing a check today.
Will your dog work again
This is the question that frightens handlers most, and the research answer is genuinely mixed.
Over 40% of the qualified guide dogs in the 2016 study had their working ability affected. More than 20% needed time off. Twenty dogs were permanently withdrawn, thirteen of them working with a handler when it happened. That is real and I am not going to soften it.
But the same numbers say most dogs kept working.
Mr Big was upset for a while and then he was fine. He shakes things off remarkably well. He is not different around other dogs now, except that he watches intently if a dog makes a fuss about him being nearby — which is what he should do. Nothing about his work changed. I never retrained anything, and I never once thought that incident might end his career.
I think part of why is what we did next, and it is the only piece of advice I have on this:
We stayed. I kept him in that dog park until he had settled and I had settled and we had both experienced a change out of that state. We did not leave on the worst moment of the afternoon.
Your dog is far more likely to be finished if you make a big deal of it and then avoid the environment where it happened. If you can safely put your dog back into something similar, soon, calmly, and let it end boring — do that. Dogs are enormously good at recovering from a bad thirty seconds. They are much worse at recovering from a handler who has decided the world is now dangerous.
If it does turn out to be more than that, and the question becomes whether your dog can keep working at all, that is a different and much harder decision. I have written about retiring a service dog from the other side of it.
What I actually changed
I did not stop going out. I did not buy any equipment. Two things changed.
I mostly stopped taking Mr Big into dog parks. Not entirely, but it is no longer a default.
And when I do, I read the yard before I open the gate. How many dogs are in there. What they are doing. Which owners are watching their dog and which are on their phone. Whether anybody’s dog has a recall. You can learn most of that from outside the fence in ninety seconds, and it is the single most useful ninety seconds available to a handler.
That is not fear. That is the same assessment I make walking into any room with him, applied to a place I used to walk into without thinking.
Frequently asked questions
What do I do if a dog attacks my service dog?
Put your body between them, stop your dog behind you, make yourself large and use a sharp loud voice to break the other dog’s concentration — and do not scream, run, flail the leash or grab for the attacking dog’s head, because all of those make it worse and are how handlers get bitten.
Who do I call for a dog attack?
Animal control is the agency that handles dog-on-dog incidents; call police only if a person is injured or you need someone to stop the other owner leaving. Be aware that in practice very little usually happens unless a person was hurt.
How many service dogs are attacked each year?
Nobody counts this in the United States. The only published data is from Guide Dogs in the UK, which recorded an average of 11.2 attacks a month in its 2016 study, up from more than three a month in 2010.
Is it a felony to hurt a service dog?
It depends entirely on your state — Florida and North Carolina treat serious harm as a felony, while Michigan treats it as a misdemeanor with no restitution provision. Check your own state on the state-by-state hub.
Can I sue if my service dog was attacked?
Civil claims and small claims court are avenues that exist, and some states add mandatory restitution through the criminal case instead. This is a question for a lawyer in your state, not for an article.
Does homeowners insurance cover a dog attacking another dog?
Sometimes, but not the way people assume — a service dog is legally property, so an injury to your dog is a property damage claim rather than the bodily injury claim that dog-bite coverage is usually described around. Ask the carrier directly.
Are service dogs trained to attack?
No. They are trained to ignore other dogs entirely, which is exactly why they are so vulnerable — more than half the dogs in the research were working in harness, standing still and doing their job, when they were attacked.
Will my service dog have to retire after being attacked?
Most do not. Over 40% of working guide dogs in the research had their working ability affected and 20 were permanently withdrawn, but the majority returned to work — and getting your dog calmly back into a similar environment soon afterwards appears to help a great deal.
What happens if my dog attacks a service dog?
Give the handler your details, secure your dog and offer to pay the vet bill, because the criminal exposure in most states — including felony charges and restitution covering the handler’s lost wages — is considerably worse than the bill.
Should I use CareCredit for an emergency vet bill?
That is your decision and I am not a financial adviser, but understand what deferred interest means first: if the balance is not cleared inside the promotional window, interest is charged at 26.99% from the original purchase date on the entire original amount.
How much does an emergency vet visit cost?
Deposits of $500 to $800 before any assessment are common and I have heard of $3,000 being demanded up front, with that framed as a starting point rather than the final bill.
Sources
- Frequently asked questions about service animals and the ADA — US Department of Justice
- 28 CFR § 35.136 — service animals under the ADA
- Brooks A, et al. Incidence and impact of dog attacks on guide dogs in the UK. Veterinary Record, 2010
- Moxon R, et al. Incidence and impact of dog attacks on guide dogs in the UK: an update. Veterinary Record, 2016
- Texas Health and Safety Code Chapter 822 — dangerous dog definitions and determination procedure
- Medical Credit Cards and Financing Plans — Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, May 2023
- CFPB orders GE CareCredit to refund $34.1 million — Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, December 2013
- Publication 502, Medical and Dental Expenses — Internal Revenue Service
- Spotlight on dog bite liability — Insurance Information Institute, 2023 claims data
Nothing on this page is legal advice or financial advice. I am a service dog handler, not a lawyer, a veterinarian or a financial adviser. Laws differ in every state and your situation is your own — check your state’s statute, ask your vet about your dog, and ask a professional about money.