Bloodthirsty dogs

[snopes]

Comment: Could you find out if it is true or not that once a dog gets the
taste of blood (either by biting someone or from eating raw meat) they
will be more likely to bite, or even crave the taste of blood.
I have heard before that once a dog gets the taste of blood it will crave
it.

[landmammal]

Yes, dogs are actually a subspecies of vampire.

[Salamander]

Our two pups go absolutely bananas if we give them some meat in their food bowl. Not because they "crave" it but because it's a treat and they love treats.

Bella also loves chew ropes too... in fact I think if I put a chew rope on one side of her and meat on the other she'd probably spontaneously combust from the internal friction of not knowing which way to go first.

[Eddylizard]

I've heard this before from my dad - once a dog gets the taste of human blood he'll want to bite more humans. I'd be interested to know if there is any veracity in it. Either way it was the excuse used to put the dog down er I mean send it off to live on a farm when it bit the neighbour kid I was forced to play with. Frankly the neighbour kid was so annoying that if the the dog hadn't done it, I probably would have - and probably made a more thorough job of it than the dog.

[nolly]

I've heard this many times and I say no.
I've had 2 dogs that have bit/drawn blood each only once.(both times were when they were being provoked or I was threatened)
Interstingly enough, the first dog, Buddy (an Amstaff/Pointer X) turned his nose up at blood that had dripped from a foot wound of mine. This was a dog that would instantly eat anything edible within reach (broken eggs, dripped meat 'juice', even celery!)
If he had 'craved' human blood, why did he not clean up the blood from my wound? (I used this point to drive home to my mother that this 'craving' is indeed a myth)

[Cervus]

I've known several dogs who loved the scent and taste of human menstrual blood. My current dog will drag used pads out of the wastebasket and lick all the blood off them. (And then he'll often walk around the apartment with the pad stuck to his face or paws. It's gross but funny.)

Never had a dog bite me on purpose, though.

[Troberg]

I've been bitten enough to draw a fair amount of blood. It was when I played tug of war with a toy with my parents' dog, and my fingers accidentally got in the way. I was just surprised, it didn't hurt much, but the dog was so embarassed that I almost thought he'd disappear.

Never made him thirst for blood or try to attack anything larger than a butterfly. In fact, once a bluetit managed to get into the house, and it scared him...

[BillyJoeJimBob]

My best guess would be that the old axiom "once they get a taste of blood" should really be...."once they start killing chickens and cattle"

Thats a habit thats almost impossible to break.

I always associated the "human blood taste" notion with tigers, lions and other big felines. In fact I gather from reading Jules Verne's Captain Grant's Children and other works from that period that this excuse was often used to rationalize hunting the said animals, often to extinction.

[Lady Neeva]

I think it's an effect of the fact we're actually pretty pathetic as animals go. We had to develop huge brains just to survive... really, think about it. Humans, as an animal, have almost no natural defense against predators and our hunting ability is pretty weak until we started using tools.

We don't have any fangs/teeth worth mentioning. We don't have much in the way of claws, and if we DO grow our nails long enough that they could serve as such, they'll break heh. Our skin is thin, and has no protective fur layer. We're slow and weak compared to other animals.

So since we really can't defend ourselves, we end up with an irrational fear of other animals kind of.

Not saying humans are worthless... we did develop these nice big brains that compensate for our lack of other standard animal abilities quite nicely heh. Just saying that we know subconsciously that if any other species were to attack us, we'd be hurt and there isn't a darn thing we can do about it -- so we overcompensate by creating myths like this so we have an excuse to kill anything that might possibly threaten us.

Fortunately, I think our brains are starting to compensate for irrational fears like that... you'll notice theres no matching "once a cat tastes blood" myth, probably because every kitten on the face of the earth has bitten a human hard enough to draw blood at least once. I know all of mine have, were promptly punished, and never did it again outside of extreme (to them) duress.

[Seraphina]

I have always fed my dogs as natural diet as possible that means raw meat is a big part of their diet. For large part of my life we lived in rural areas and had livestock from horses to chooks, cats and pet rabbits. None of my dogs killed any of these creatures, nor did they ever bite anybody.
Dogs bite people for different reasons; from being too territorial, too possesive of their bones/food, to being fear biters. Domesticated dogs kill livestock because it is fun to chase them and "play" with them, they consider them nicely animated squeeky toys.

[imjustasteph]

I read a book that followed this idea, sort of.

Except the idea was more that once a dog ate human flesh, in the case of the dogs in the book, out of necessity/starvation coupled with either finding a conveniently dead human or finding it necessary to kill one in self-defense, it developed a taste for it.

Leading to the book being about a pack of wild dogs who attacked and killed any lone human they could.

Obviouslt the book was fictional, BUT there is often a good bit of fact and research (not the research in this case probably, cheap paperback horror....) under a fictional story.

I can more easily see an animal developing a taste for flesh than for blood....and it's certainly rarer that a pooch eats a chunk of human than that he tastes human blood.

[PallasAthena]

I don't know that dogs develop a taste for things necessarily. I think they pretty much eat whatever they can get. If they can catch and kill something, they'll eat it. Hand out? Even better. If they have to scavenge it? That's okay, too. That's my experience anyway.

With my dog, this is pretty much the rule, except with cilantro. My dog is cilantro-thirsty. When she catches a whiff, her eyes start to glow and her lips start to slavver. It's downright scary!