- "Assaulted," both in the legal definitions and in popular usage, isn't synonymous with "attacked," and I suspect that's where some of the strays you caught in the comment section came from. Even if correct, that's a different bar to clear.
- The dog attacking is different from the owner causing the dog to attack. The latter is a higher bar to clear, and one people are going to want more evidence for. It's also incongruous when paired with the word "assault" with some other parts of your post. In particular, "let their dogs run off-leash" doesn't evoke the same mental image as "unleash their dog and tell them to attack." Your comment has the former and has language indicating the latter. People pick up on that sort of thing. For that matter, when trying to defend you to that one commenter I had to make a guess as to which interpretation of what you wrote is the most likely way to resolve that verbal inconsistency, and I might not have gotten it right. Maybe you really do get intentionally attacked by people unleashing their dogs on you. If so, why write about free-range dogs roaming around as it pertains to the attack problem?
- Active assault is also different from self-defense and from dogs accidentally picking up non-verbal cues.
And I focused on the "dogs attacking" part of your comment in that defense, but in the context of the article, your initial point was that dogs are sensitive to nonverbal clues, your evidence was that you've been attacked, yet the experiment had what I think is stronger evidence in that they explicitly controlled for that effect. Attacks happen for many reasons, potentially including nonverbal clues. Do they happen exclusively because of a sufficiently extreme sensitivity to nonverbal clues that the experiment's control wouldn't apply? Probably not? I imagine a lot of the people who gave you flack for the way you wrote about those attacks took that into account. The structure was "<A> evidenced by <B>" when that evidentiary link is tenuous and <B> is a bold statement about something that's clearly distressed you. That comes across more as an uncontrolled rant and makes people less likely to believe <B> in its entirety, whether true or not, and whether that intellectual habit of the readers is justified or not.
Independent of any linguistic nitpicking, I'm sorry you keep getting attacked. Stay safe out there.