Live or Die Tests at animal shelters

[Catherine]

Animal shelters assess dogs and give them a set of tests to determine if they are aggressive or safe for adoption. These are essentially "live or die" tests. A dog that fails is all too often euthanized without being given another chance.
I will let you read the details of the tests in the article.
Too much is resting on the results of tests that have not proven to be an actual indicator of a dogs behavior in real life.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/31/scien...tests.html

It is horrible to think of how many dogs have died because under a stressful shelter situation they failed to pass some random "test". Just because a stressed dog bit a strange plastic hand that threatened his food doesn't mean he would bite a human.

The developers of the tests no longer believe in them. 
We like things simple and neat, but dog behavior is very complex. No simple set of tests could possibly give accurate results. 
It is sad that animals have died because of this. 
If I had a hand in developing the tests I would feel responsible for every dog who died because of them. Dogs have actually passed the tests and then done aggressive things later in a home setting. The tests give shelter workers a false sense of how safe a dog is. If it passed the tests, I wonder if they continue to observe the behavior enough to note signs that a dog does have an aggression problem.

I don't advocate killing a dog because of aggression, but it would not be a good pet for people with children.
Common sense and good observation might be better tools than what is being done now.