TIME OF VICTIM’S DNA PERMANENCE IN JAWS OF ATTACKER DOGS.

Dogs attacks against humans represent a serious social, healthy and legal issue. During the last ten years more than ten lethal attacks occurred in Italy [1-3]. In order to fight this serious phenomenon, we need to use severe civil and criminal punishments towards anyone may omit, because of fraud or negligence, any measure to prevent or avoid aggressiveness events. Often these events remain unpunished as consequence of the impossibility to identify the animal makers of the tragedy and, consequently, the legal entities who are responsible of the management of the same. In the event of a legal dispute, presence of the victim’s DNA, in the jaw of the dog attacker, may represent an indisputable date in order to give the relevant responsibilities. The objective of this work is to confirm the possibility of revealing the presence of the DNA of a hypothetical victim in the jaws of an aggressor dog and quantify the time in order to be able to give a precise indication on the useful technical time to prove the participation of one or more animals to an attack on people. Ten dogs were given the opportunity to belabor a simulacrum of a victim consists of a piece of beef. Subsequently they were performed on these dogs of the dento-gingival swabs at established times. Swabs was performed is the DNA extraction with subsequent search of STRs cattle. Our analysis shows that the bovine DNA traces persist in the dogs mouth up to an hour and a half after the attack simulation. Therefore, the method of investigation we propose to prove the dog or the dogs responsible of the attack was revealed efficient, provided that the swabs are made promptly.