This Bites

A temperamental cat does not enjoy being touched, the woman reaches out anyway and is subsequently bitten on the arm.

A fearful dog is backed into a corner, his growls ignored, the only way he knows how to react now is to land a bite on the outstretched hand coming towards him.

A puppy is eating and the toddler crawling across the kitchen floor decides to investigate. Those sharp little puppy teeth find their way into his cheek before the parent is able to react.

The boy grabs a toy rope at the same time his playful dogs does and suddenly there is a bleeding finger in the game.

Animal bites happen a million different ways, for a million different reasons. If the person bitten seeks medical attention the bite will be reported to the local animal control office. This is a pain in my ass. Pun intended. Processing animal bites is one of the least favorite parts of my job.

Humans share this world with animals and many of us intentionally share our homes with them. It should come as no surprise that inevitably a bite will happen, but to some humans it still comes as a shock and they are not prepared to handle the situation and their world seemingly falls apart. Others simply accept it as part of being an animal owner and move on with life.

I have met just about every type of personality when processing bite calls. The incidents are typically reported via a medical report that comes from the place someone sought treatment for the bite. Often people don’t even realize why they are filling out this bite form at the urgent care or hospital and are surprised when I contact them. Of course, the lack of proper communication between the health care provider and the patient contributes to this, and I swear most health care facilities don’t even know where these reports are sent or why. Contacting a dog owner who was bitten by their own dog while giving him a treat is usually met with panic and uncooperative responses until I explain to them that I have no intention of taking their pet away. I explain that I simply have to make a report since they sought medical treatment and that I just need the date of their dog’s rabies vaccine. Other times I speak to someone who was bitten by an animal, and they are beside themselves with worry that they have now contracted a deadly rabies virus. I try my best to explain to them that rabies in domestic pets, in this country, is extremely rare and that we quarantine the animal for ten days and would know if there are signs or symptoms at that point. Then there will inevitably be the bite victim who demands the pet be immediately removed and ‘killed’ for what it has done. I again have to explain to them that we do not simply remove every animal that bites and that we definitely do not want to ‘kill’ the animal. An owner can elect euthanasia after the quarantine period, but rarely will a bite case be sent to court where the owner does not have a choice in the matter.

One Friday afternoon, just before shift end, I ran out to one more call. A woman said she had found a dog several days earlier and now would like to turn it over to the shelter. On one hand this call is not urgent and can wait until the following day, on the other hand I can quickly finish the shift by bringing one last stray to the shelter for the night. So I made the decision I came to regret.

The woman answered the door, and I could see a medium sized, brown mix dog in her kitchen. She held the door to her home open wide, reassuring me that he is friendly so all I had brought was the leash in my hand. The dog suddenly ran towards me full speed, never hesitating or barking, and sunk his teeth into my thigh. I grabbed his head and pulled him off and shoved him back into the house as fast as I could, grabbed the door handle and slammed it shut while the woman stood there with wide eyes. I’m fairly certain I cursed during this reaction but at that point didn’t care what she thought of me.

Very rarely do animals bite without provocation. This has been one of the very few instances where that was the case.

I went to my vehicle and returned with a catch pole. I knocked on the door and told the woman not to open the door wide again. She took the leash from me and managed to get it around the neck of the dog who was now barking in the kitchen. I told her to hold onto it until I have him secured on my pole and then I walked the dog out to my vehicle and loaded him into the kennel.

My thigh felt pinched. It wasn’t really painful yet, it just felt tight as if someone is holding onto it with a tight grip. I don’t know if this dog was truly a stray or if this was in fact the woman’s dog and she was lying to me. It would explain the protective aggression towards me, and people lie to our face daily so it wouldn’t have surprised me. I made my way back to the animal shelter and advised my supervisor on the way that I had sustained a bite and will need to seek medical treatment yet tonight.

After putting the dog away in a kennel and filling out the necessary paperwork for the bite quarantine and making sure to place a CAUTION label on his kennel, I went to the bathroom to remove my pants and inspect my leg. It was starting to throb at this point. The bite was deeper than I had anticipated. My work pants are made of a thick material, but I could clearly see the outline of punctures where each tooth met skin. I wasted two more hours that evening sitting at the urgent care before being able to go home and start my weekend. Over the next few days and weeks, the trauma to the tissue around the bite became more and more obvious. My leg was sore for some time, but this is all part of my job, and I was back on Monday morning limping my way through another shift. It is by no means the only bite I have sustained at this job, but it was the only one where I couldn’t blame myself. This particular dog did not leave the shelter again.

Of course being bitten by an animal is painful, and will take time to heal, but rarely is it life threatening or life altering. Not a shift goes by that I don’t have some sort of animal bite case to process and at this point have pretty much seen it all. Children with bites to the face, because they’re always at that eye level with a dog, joggers with open leg wounds and infected cat bites. I have also dealt with overprotective parents who allow their child to play at the neighbor’s house, and when their kid comes back with the tiniest scratch on a finger, they threaten to sue the neighbors they had just been best friends with.

We can be called to scenes where a bite had just occurred. There was a woman locked in her bathroom because her dogs began to fight each other, and she tried to intervene and was bitten in the process. The dogs are now at each other’s throat, blood smeared all over the walls, the owner only being able to escape to the bathroom and call police. Both dogs are badly injured, and the owner is left with nasty wounds to her hands.

Sometimes we are sent to a scene where EMT’s are attending to a man who was jogging in a park and attacked by a dog that is still at large. We may get some assistance from the local police department if they have time and then have to track down and confine the dog before it bites anyone else.

Most of the bites however are reported to us after the fact. They become a tedious case of tracking down reluctant victims and angry animal owners and filling out pages of paperwork. Then they linger in my worklist, taking up space and stressing me out until the ten-day quarantine has ended. Then I often have to waste more time trying to make contact with the animal owner again to verify the animal’s health before being able to close out the call. To say I detest working bite cases is an understatement.

I thank the reader for indulging my vent session on this subject. Most people have a part of their job that they would rather not deal with. This is mine.

As long as we share our lives and homes with animals, there will be bites. Personally, I think we are all better off just accepting this fact and not making it a bigger issue than it needs to be.

*Stepping off soap box.