You love your dog. You're about to love a tiny, unpredictable human even more. And somewhere in the back of your mind, a terrifying loop is playing: what if they don't get along? What if there's a growl, a snap, a bite? You've heard the horror stories, and now you're lying awake wondering if you have to choose between your dog and your child's safety.

Take a breath. You don't have to choose. The vast majority of dog-baby conflicts are predictable and preventable — they happen when a dog is startled, cornered, guarding a resource, or pushed past a threshold nobody noticed. Bites are almost never 'out of nowhere.' They're the last line in a paragraph of warning signals we simply didn't read.