Parents for Dog Bite Awareness

Date: April 20, 2026

Victim: Evelynn Templeton, 7mos (deceased). Mother, injured and treated 

Attacker: Family dog labeled English Mastiff mix

Location: Family Home, Portland, Tennessee 

The dog had been owned for several years uneventfully prior to the attack. Mom was allegedly holding Evelynn in a baby carrier inside the home when the dog broke in through the closed back door and mauled Evelynn and her mom. 

This case highlights a pattern we are seeing regularly, one that needs to be openly discussed and shared to prevent future attacks. 

#Dogbiteawareness 

Young adults are encouraged to buy dogs, 🐕 especially large and challenging ones, in their 20-30s before settling down and starting a family. This has become an ingrained cultural practice. 

Because of the average canine lifespan these adults often still own the dogs when they feel it’s time to start a family. So the dog they chose as suitable for a high energy, high resource, high attention home 🏠 without children suddenly has a new parent who is distracted, tired, and facing a rough budget. 

This is a repeatable, identifiable timeline. 

Young adults need clear information helping them to think ahead to their near future so that the choices they make now don’t destroy their families in 5-15yrs.

This is also one of the many reasons shelters are complicit in morbidity and mortality rates. They appeal to short term thinking by claiming they only distribute unsafe dogs to adult households or people who can handle the dogs. 

That includes the demographic of a young, childless adult.

So shelters are directly targeting young, childless households to sell them dangerous dogs. And those are the very people who will soon make reproductive choices with the same dogs still in the home. 

It’s a direct setup for future infant mortality.

If someone has already bought a dog from a rescue, invested time and money training it, and spent years bonding with it, then it will be difficult for them to immediately recognize the danger years down the road when the baby arrives. And even harder for them to do the right thing. 

As safety advocates, the timing of education needs to match the timing of when people buy dogs. And it needs to be information that connects their current life to their future plans. 

Future oriented thinking is a huge issue in our current society. So the very skill necessary to make good choices is already impaired in many young adults. Without future oriented thinking, people find it hard to exercise, eat healthy, persist in long term projects, invest in retirement funds…and choose a safe dog for their future family. 

It might seem impossible to begin working on a deep seated problem in our world, but just by connecting the present and the future together, you’re giving others the freedom to think beyond the manipulative propaganda in their newsfeeds or the high pressure guilt in the rescue industry. 

Try it out. You might be surprised at how seeds can take root. And you might be the reason a child lives many years later. 

-JL #DBA Editor ©️ 

#PFDBA #parentingyoungadults #DINK #childless #dogowner #ilovedogs #pregnancy #familyplanning #executivefunctioning #softskills