IIRC, a survey of incarcerated burglars indicated that a dog was the number one deterrent to home burglary. The Mk 1 eyeball on your stuff, either human or canine, is the best safeguard. That's also what makes good neighbors and a sense of who belongs and who doesn't in the neighborhood so helpful.

That's EXACTLY the sort of thing I'm talking about. I've seen them pull roll-down gates clean off the building, I've seen them use an ax to simply REMOVE the door. Heck, the have concrete cutting chain saws that go right through cinderblock!

True, but dogs can be bait distracted pretty easily MOST OF THE TIME. I say it like that because there was this one time when I thought the dog would take the bait and leave me alone, and he would have none of that. I got bit good as a result.

Dogs are also easy to defeat by sensory deprivation/irritation. Pepper spray sometimes works. So does a good ultrasonic transmitter. One of the quickest ways to disable a dog, and most any other organic deterrent, is a laser sweep across the retinas. Quiet, quick, easy, and repeatable.

I believe in layered security, including solid doors, an alarm, dogs and guns. Of all my layers, my guns are the most trusted for keeping me alive. I'm not a burglar, but if I were, then I'd be most afraid of a homeowner with a firearm.

Silly me - I always thought it was a "Hush Puppy" (and NOT the shoes) - a nice supressed .22 pistol

Batteries last longer than bullets, and can't be traced back to the shooter.

Besides, legally owning a suppressor requires it be registered, and this state prohibits their use.

You can get a good 150 mW laser on the internet for about what a good suppressor will cost you.

Well Said!
Saved me a lot of typing

Very true. But I was thinking of their deterrent value, not their defensive/offense capabilities. It's their bark, not their bite, that makes them valuable.

I'm far more dangerous than my dog is, but his hearing is a lot better than mine, and he's a light sleeper. He stays inside at night, and barks whenever anyone approaches the house. A burglar won't have the advantage of surprise over me. My dog's considerable protective instincts are just a back-up.

My family business is commercial real estate, in that we buy old buildings, fix them up, and rent them out.

Anyway, Years ago I can remember getting a phone call that one of our buildings was on fire (it wasn't, one of the sprinkler heads had just popped from age). They got in fine through the front door (solid wood), but were having trouble with the back door (steel door, steel frame, Medeco locks). The failed to get through it with hand tools and ended up using the cut-off saw to cut the locks out of the door.

Another time the fire department was having trouble getting through some similar steel doors on another building when I arrived. I didn't have the keys, but I did have my backhoe parked across the street. One big push from the bucket and the doors were down.

Based on those experiences, I've realized a good steel door, with good locks, set in a steel frame can offer at least a little security against brute force attacks. I mean, if the fire department is wailing on the door with a sledge hammer and they can't get it to open, than I can't see anyone kicking that door down to come inside. On the other hand, I've also seen that wood doors are essentially useless. Even solid wood doors don't really offer much more than a few seconds of security.

"It's their bark, not their bite, that makes them valuable."

In this respect, they are not much different than false alarms on electro-mechanical systems. If a thief knew a dog was in the house, he could get the dog to alert repeatedly until it too is regarded as a nuisance and ignored; or worse, conditioned not to respond. Imagine having your dog wake you every night for a week between midnight and 4:00 am barking and growling. Your search for the distubance yields nothing, and after a week or so of this you are losing sleep. You might not ever realize that he's being alerted like that on purpose, if you never see a perpetrator rustling bushes or tapping on a fence in the yard, or some such.

Dogs on patrol in the yard are a direct threat that has to be dealt with more deliberately. Dogs in the house as an alarm are not much different than an alarm, and just require more indirect methods to neutralize.

This is not to say that a dog isn't darned handy during a home invasion, especially if the homeowner is armed and willing to use effective force to repel the invader. But they are not foolproof either.