A mother in Ohio stepped away to grab laundry. A mother in Queens was asleep. A mother in Alabama had been gone less than 20 minutes. In each case, the dog was known. In each case, the dog had never done anything like this before. And in each case, the outcome was irreversible by the time anyone understood what was happening.
These are not cautionary tales from a distant era of poorly trained animals. They happened in 2025, in ordinary homes, with dogs that families trusted completely.
The Dog Attack Tragedies That Happened
In Ohio’s Tuscarawas County, deputies responded to a call on Lake Road on July 2, 2025. Dispatchers initially couldn’t hear anyone on the line. A second call connected them to the mother, who reported that the family dog had killed her baby. When deputies arrived, they found a one-year-old girl with bite wounds to the face and throat. The family identified her as Blakely Blosser.
According to the county sheriff, Blakely had been with her mother at the family’s home when the attack happened. After bathing the little girl, her mother picked up clothes from the bathroom floor and turned toward the laundry room. The toddler followed, and that was when the dog attacked. The sheriff said the bite caught the baby near her neck and jaw. The dog was a pit bull the family owned. It had not flagged as dangerous.
In Queens, New York, a 1-month-old girl was found dead in May 2025 after the family’s puppy was discovered gnawing on her face while she slept between her mother and stepfather. The mother called 911 just after 6:30 a.m. The dog, a six-week-old German Shepherd-pit bull mix, had bitten a substantial portion of the infant’s face. The New York City medical examiner subsequently determined the dog did not cause the infant’s death, finding that the dog’s injuries were inflicted after the child had already died. The cause of death remained under investigation.
In Alabama, six-month-old Ember Renee Southard was attacked by an 11-year-old American Bully at a family member’s home. The dog had no prior history of violence toward children. Ember’s mother hadn’t even been gone 20 minutes when she got the call. By the time she reached the hospital, she said her daughter already looked dead.
Each of these mothers described the same bewilderment. The same disbelief. The dog was known. The dog was loved. And still.
A Crisis That Has Been Building for Years
According to DogsBite.org statistics, 127 people were killed in dog attacks in 2024, the most ever recorded in a single year. That figure represents a 165% increase from 2019, when 48 people died. Fatal dog attacks have more than doubled in five years.
From 2020 to 2024, children nine years old and under made up 30% of people killed by dogs, despite representing a much smaller share of the population. Young children are dying in these incidents at a rate wildly disproportionate to their share of the population, and the dog responsible is almost never a stranger.
More than 4.5 million animal bites occur in the United States every year. Around 85 to 90 percent of those bites are from dogs. Public health surveillance data consistently finds that about 77 percent of biting dogs belong to the victim’s family or a friend. In 2024 alone, Nationwide Children’s Hospital Emergency Departments and Urgent Cares treated more than 700 children with dog bite injuries.
The family dog. Not the neighbor’s Rottweiler. Not the stray at the end of the block. The dog that sleeps at the foot of the bed and greets you at the door.
Why a Dog Attack on a Child Can Come Out of Nowhere
The most common thing families say after a dog attack on a child is some version of: it came out of nowhere. He’d never shown any aggression. She was always so gentle with the kids. And they’re usually telling the truth as they understood it. What looks like no warning from a human’s perspective can look like a fully articulated series of warnings from a dog’s.
Veterinary experts believe that predatory or hunting behavior is the primary motivation behind most attacks on infants specifically. A dog that registers a small, soft, squirming, crying creature may trigger a prey response that has nothing to do with anger, jealousy, or animosity toward any member of the household. The mother who believed her dog hated her wasn’t entirely wrong to sense that the dog had a particular reaction to her presence, but the reason is almost certainly not one that maps onto human emotion.
As babies grow more mobile, rolling over, reaching, climbing, their unpredictable movements can overwhelm dogs that seemed perfectly comfortable before. Veterinary guidance notes that newborn infants may be at particular risk because their small size, irregular sounds, and sudden movements can trigger predatory responses in dogs, and that a dog’s stress signals in these situations can be extremely subtle and easy to overlook.
Owners often fail to recognize early warning signs in a dog’s body language. Dogs can become stressed or concerned when they hear a baby cry. For dogs with certain genetics, that sound can trigger an entirely different set of behaviors and responses.
Warning signs that a dog is uncomfortable around young children include avoiding the child by walking away, growling when stared at or approached, licking lips, and looking away. For infants and toddlers, these signals are easy to miss, especially when you trust the dog completely.
The dog most likely to be trusted around an infant is also the one the family has lived with the longest. The 11-year-old American Bully that killed Ember Southard had, by her mother’s account, been around countless children and never once hurt any of them. The dog wasn’t new. Its behavior was.
What the Research Says About Risk – and What Families Miss
Young children are more likely to be bitten by a family pet than by any other dog, and the attack typically happens in the presence of a parent or caregiver who was certain they had it covered. Attentiveness and love for your pet are not, by themselves, enough.
The general rule from veterinary experts is firm: never leave a child under three years of age alone with any dog, at any time. Not for the minute it takes to move laundry. Not while you answer the door. Not when the dog has been part of the family since before the child was born.
Most incidents of dogs injuring babies occur within the first few hours or days of an infant’s presence in the home, or when a dog encounters a baby in an unsupervised situation it hasn’t been prepared for. The dog doesn’t need to be new to the baby. It just needs to find itself in a context that’s unfamiliar.
Children, especially those under nine years old, are at elevated risk for dog bites partly because they cannot interpret an animal’s body language well enough to recognize when a bite is about to happen. A baby obviously can’t. The entire burden of reading that situation falls on the adults in the room.
Dogs are significantly more likely to bite children and infants in the face than in the extremities, the target area they typically choose with adults. A bite to the face from a large dog carries a different scale of consequence than a bite to the hand. The physical anatomy of the situation matters enormously.
What Parents With Dogs Need to Know
None of this is a case for getting rid of every family dog. Tens of millions of American households include both dogs and children, and the vast majority of those relationships are exactly what we hope they’ll be. But the families who suffered these losses in 2025 also thought they had it figured out. The dog had always been fine. Until it wasn’t.
Any breed of dog can bite. Dogs that are better socialized around people and other animals are less likely to become frightened by those interactions, and less likely to bite as a result, but socialization is not a guarantee.
Dogs rarely bite without giving some kind of warning, but some give signals so subtle they’re easy to miss. Dogs bite because they’re afraid, angry, or frustrated, or because they’re in pain, or because they’re protecting something they value. An 11-month-old baby reaching toward a resting dog’s face, or crawling into a dog’s sleep space, can trigger any of those responses in a dog that has never once growled in years.
Subtle stress signals in dogs are often ignored, and they can result in bites. A dog tolerating a situation is not the same as a dog that is comfortable in it. Learning to tell the difference, the stiffened body, the hard stare, the lick of the lips, the deliberate turning away, is one of the most practical things a parent can do.
The practical baseline, according to veterinary and pediatric guidance, is physical separation between dogs and babies whenever an adult isn’t present in the same room. Baby gates. Closed doors. A crate the dog actually uses. Not as punishment, but as a boundary that takes the question of what if entirely off the table.
Read More: 15+ Poisonous Plants to Keep out of Your Home and Yard
The Part Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud
The mother who believed her dog hated her was reaching for something she could understand. Hatred has a logic. It has a subject and an object. It means the attack wasn’t random. Grief does that. It looks for a story that holds all the pieces together, even when the pieces don’t actually fit.
The harder truth is that the dog almost certainly didn’t hate anyone. It was operating on impulses older than the relationship, older than the house, older than the family’s love for it. That’s more frightening in some ways than hatred, because it doesn’t resolve. You can’t negotiate with a prey drive. You can’t explain to a dog that the baby is part of the family.
Keep them apart. Consistently, without exceptions, regardless of how many years have passed without incident. These impulses go back further than any single dog’s history in any particular household. And every family whose dog attacked their child this year had, until that day, every reason to believe theirs would be different.
Disclaimer: This information is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment and is for information only. Always seek the advice of your physician or another qualified health provider with any questions about your medical condition and/or current medication. Do not disregard professional medical advice or delay seeking advice or treatment because of something you have read here.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.