"To Serve Man"

[Rod Serling voice] Respectfully submitted for your perusal...

It would seem that your best friend, given the opportunity to eat you, might just take it. What I've just learned is going to make me cast a more suspicious eye at my seemingly friendly dog.

There's a woman in the news recently because she's the world's first face transplant recipient. The reason she needed the face transplant is what's relevant to my story today:

"Dinoire, a divorced mother of two teenage daughters, spoke frankly about the attack in May by her Labrador. She said she was wrestling with personal problems at the time, had had a trying week, and "took some drugs to forget," which knocked her out. She said she was passed out when the dog bit her."

I don't think the dog just bit her suddenly, oh no. That would have been a huge coincidence - the dog hadn't bit her before, and had no way of knowing she wouldn't react. I bet the farm that the dog probably licked her, got no response, took a little nip, noticed that she didn't wake up, then nibbled a bit more. He apparently thought she was both tasty and didn't mind being eaten, because he continued to nibble half her face off.

It would be easy to chalk this up to a freak accident, or a sick dog. Too easy. This is not the only case on record. A similar incident happened recently to a young boy in Florida who is partially paralyzed. His dog chewed off four of his fingers while he slept. He could not feel the dog biting him.

This is only two cases, true. But how many such opportunities like this do the nation's dogs get? I would suggest very few. So when your dog licks your face while you're sleeping... maybe he's not being affectionate at all. Maybe he's testing to see if it's safe to eat you. You're tonight's bill of fare on The Twilight Zone.

ps.

Interestingly, the woman's dog was euthanized whereas the boy's dog apparently was not. So I gather that the rule is, "you get away with eating me while I'm asleep, BUT NOT THE FACE!"

pps. Update: both dogs were destroyed. We assume they deserved it, but are we sure they weren't just being dogs?

Not even trying anymore

Fact checking is officially a thing of the past. Not only is it too expensive for media outlets to do research to check factual information, it is apparently too difficult to do simple arithmetic.

CNN Article about using antidepressants during pregnancy:

"Sixty-eight percent of those who stopped taking antidepressants slipped into depression. They were five times more likely to suffer a relapse than the women who continued on drugs."

Oh so the group that continued on drugs must have had a relapse rate of 68 divided by 5, or about 13%.

"But staying on antidepressants did not shield expectant mothers from depression entirely; 26 percent of those who continued drug treatment became depressed anyway."

Hwaaa?