Ms Nanci Creedon:

No. Britain introduced the Dangerous Dogs Acts to ban pitbulls and a small number of breeds and they have seen an increase in the number of those dogs, so banning the breeds just glorifies them. If people want a big scary dog, they will pick the one that is banned.

When it comes to bite prevention setup, the Merseyside Dog Safety Partnership is run by a veterinary behaviour expert, Carri Westgarth, and is seeing fantastic results. It is doing all the things I have suggested. It is going into the schools, assessing dogs and gathering so much data, and all those data can then feed back in the right way, starting with the education of parents. If we start to find that a large number of serious bites occur from dogs that have been recently bought, then maybe we start educating people that for the first six weeks they need to be careful to take extra precautions and so on. However, I cannot advise as to what we should definitely do because we just do not know. We just do not have the data. They are doing that on Merseyside. They are gathering the data and churning that back into their practices. It would not be that difficult to implement. I would offer my services free of charge. I know a number of dog behaviour experts who are just itching to do something. At the moment I feel so frustrated. It is almost like being in a straitjacket because I know the information that will help to minimise dog bites, but how do I get to the masses?

The next question, I think, was about adopting dogs-----