AQHAlisalove wrote:
I don't know about it attacking the child, but is it ever worth the risk?
Aggression is aggression, and if it was that brutal with another dog that wasn't even near it, I certainly wouldn't want it near a curious little kid who is pulling on it's ears.
To each their own, I just personally wouldn't take that chance.
Animals are unpredictably enough as it is....when they are displaying that kind of behavior it's a big warning for me.

On the other hand, animals are pretty complex- it's more than flipping a switch 'aggression - on' and it's set that way for all time- it may be that the animal is only aggressive in specific situations. Of course, we as people may not understand the situation the animal is seeing, which may make it hard to understand the origin of the behavior, but that doesn't mean there isn't SOME reasoning behind it.

I mean, when I was very young I was pulling on our dog's ears, and this is a dog who HAD bitten someone once (defending my brother when he was younger), and the dog's response was to snarl and grab my arm in a pressure bite- no teeth, no damage, just a very firm communication of 'stop that'. So he was clearly able to understand the different situations and the appropriate behavior for each.

I think it depends a lot on how well you're able to figure out the trigger mechanisms- what creates the situation in which the dog thinks aggression is okay- and how realistically you can avoid them in the dog's daily life, with or without kids. (For example, a lot of dog bites you hear about with kids are to do with dogs with food aggression issues where the kid goes and messes with the dog's food. A kid below a certain age is never going to understand why they should leave the food alone, so realistically it's better to just keep the dog and kid apart unless strictly supervised.)

That said, given that the dog in question in this thread was running around loose (so that it was able to get to the other dog) and it sounds like there's not a well-controlled environment where the dog lives, it seems unlikely that this particular dog will get the kind of care and attention it needs to prevent future problems.