Until you’ve suffered a dog bite, you can’t really know how it feels.
Not just the pain, or even, in the case of a bite from a little dog, especially not the pain. It’s the shock. Wounds from a knife in a kitchen accident are bad, but they do not compare to the indescribable outrage and disbelief you feel when your body is gripped by a furious entity who is savagely trying to destroy your flesh.
The first time I was bitten I almost passed out from the shock of it. I was bitten several times after that and so was The General. It was always deeply painful. Fortunately, with the exception of that first bite from a Chesapeake Bay Retriever, most our other bites were from small aggressive dogs, and the damage they did was fairly minimal.
We came to collectively refer to these particular dogs as ‘little biting rat bastards’ or LBRBs for short.
The thing is that while the LBRBs were responsible for most of our bites, when a large dog decides to bite you, the damage can catastrophic. That’s why, while small breeds like Cocker Spaniels, Lhasa Apsos and Jack Russell Terriers often appear on lists of dog breeds who bite the most, it is the Pit Bulls, Dobermans, Rottweilers and yes – Great Danes and Labs – who are responsible for most of the fatalities and very serious injuries.
We didn’t insist on meeting every dog whose owner wanted to board them with us before accepting the booking. We always asked about aggressive tendencies though, and quickly learned to pick up on any hesitation or waffling when we asked, “Is s/he friendly?” If in doubt, we told them to bring the dog in to meet us. Any evidence of growling or snapping and the booking wasn’t going to happen.
And of course, if the dog actually bit one of us as a visiting Doberman did, it was, in our expert professional opinion, a bad sign.
Someone who we’ll call ‘Ivan’ was coming down from Nunavut, one of Canada’s northern Territories, for a vacation in the south and called to book his dog with us. The dog was some sort of Russian or Eurasian sheepdog – a Caucasian Shepherd, if memory serves.
In any event, it was a huge purebred dog who belonged to one of those fairly rare sheep guarding breeds.
Ivan assured us that there were no aggression issues.
There was no practical way of meeting the dog (who we’ll call Vlad). We took the owner’s word for the dog’s docile temperament. We knew that Eurasian bred sheep guardians could be very standoffish with anyone other than their owners. But our only experience with one had been positive. We boarded an Anatolian Shepherd belonging to a neighbour.
He was magnificent. He managed to look majestic even when lifting his leg to pee. That dog had been aloof but there was not an aggressive bone in his body.
Ivan arrived some months later with Vlad.
Vlad was enormous and gorgeous. He was also growling.
Ivan kept assuring us that he wasn’t normally like that. We figured maybe he was just freaked out from the long trip on the airplane, or perhaps because Ivan was there. Those type of guardian dogs are famously protective of their owners.
We agreed that The General would take him for a walk while I filled out the paperwork. Usually a walk settles things. The dog’s attention gets diverted by all the smells on the walking path, and he now knows it’s okay to go with the dog walker. Plus, the dog walker must be a nice person, since he took him for a walk, right?
Our next indication that there was something very seriously wrong was when Ivan called out the door after The General and Vlad, “Don’t hesitate to use a taser on him!”
Wait – what???
I told Ivan we didn’t own a taser, and even if it was legal (which it isn’t in Canada), we were not running the kind of kennel that stores the tasers next to the squeaky toys. I questioned him about why Vlad might need to be tasered but he immediately walked it back. Nice, friendly dog, no trouble, nothing to see here, let’s move along. We completed the paperwork and Ivan left.
The General came back with Vlad a few minutes later. He said the walk had gone okay. Vlad had stopped growling. He was wagging his tail, grinning up at both The General and me. Vlad allowed me to pat his head and scratch his neck. My fears allayed, I left to take some other dogs on a walk.
I had not gone very far down the path when I heard The General call my name. I turned around to see him standing in the side door of the kennel, with his left arm held up at right angles to his body. I started back. When I got close enough to hear him, he asked in a calm voice if I could come back inside as he needed some help.
The calmness worried me. When The General is mad or upset, he rants and raves. When the shit hits the fan for real, he goes very quiet and serious.
I returned, and shoved my dogs into the play room. The General was in the kitchen, still with his left arm held up, and the other arm supporting it.
He was leaning against the counter and I suddenly realized there was blood dripping down the elevated arm.
I asked The General what was going on. Turns out that when he tried to get Vlad through the door into his room, the dog refused and started growling again. The General thought perhaps it was because his bed and his toys were in there. Some dogs are quite protective of their stuff.
He held Vlad back with one hand while with the other, he dragged the stuff out of the room and tossed it away. All the while, he was crooning in his best Dog Whisperer, non-threatening voice, “Sweetie honey dog, look at Uncle John; such a nice non-threatening man.”
Vlad stopped growling and started wagging his tail again and butting his head up against The General’s leg. The General actually dropped down to his knees to hug him, putting his face at Vlad’s level. It was a big love fest.
Until it wasn’t.
The General got up, took Vlad by the collar and again tried to get him to go through the door to his room.
Vlad jerked himself free. Then savagely bit The General’s hand.
In an example of The General’s usual quick thinking, he lunged behind the dog and used his body to force Vlad through the door, locking it behind him. The General then elevated his shredded hand above his head and opened the door, which happened to be located right beside Vlad’s room, to call me back.
While he waited for me, The General had wrapped his hand in a tea towel. We decided we’d better take another look at it. As we slowly unwound the tea towel, we both winced in anticipation of what we would see. There was a deep jagged tear between The General’s third and fourth fingers. His heavy gold signet ring seemed to have gotten in the way of the teeth, but getting that ring off was going to be a bitch.
The first time I had gotten bitten, I had been told by the Emergency Room doctor that they didn’t stitch dog bites unless absolutely necessary because of fears of closing bacteria into the wound, increasing the risk of infection. So we generally just cleaned up a bite and put a a bandage on it if warranted.
This time however, it was pretty clear a bandage wasn’t going to do it. This was deep, long and nasty. The General was having trouble moving the affected fingers. I packed the wound with gauze pads and wound tape around the whole mess.
The General insisted he could drive himself to the hospital and that I should stay and try to get hold of Ivan. Because, oh yeah, in addition to the immediate problem of making sure The General got medical attention to minimize what looked like the real possibility of him losing the use of some of the fingers on his left hand, we still had this enormous biting dog to deal with.
If this had happened when we first opened, we might have been stupid enough to try to cope with the dog, as we did with the Chesapeake Bay Retriever who gave me my first serious bite. After all, aside from financial considerations (this was a lengthy booking in the off-season), Vlad’s family had flown thousands of kilometres from home and were expecting to enjoy a nice long dog free vacation.
It’s not like they could take the dog home, make other arrangements with family or friends who knew the dog and who the dog was happy to be with and then continue their vacation. Part of us felt like we would be in dereliction of duty and letting these people down if we made them take the dog away.
But we very quickly realized it would be madness to put ourselves in harm’s way with a dog big enough to maim or even kill either of us if he decided to do it.
I called Ivan on his cell while bracing myself for anger and accusations. Sadly, experience had shown that outrage was, more often than not, the result when a dog owner was called on the bad behaviour of either their dog (rarely) or themselves (more frequently than you might imagine).
Lucky break – Ivan was still on the highway heading back to Ottawa, and picked up his phone right away. (At that point I had no idea what we were going to do if he didn’t answer or had left town already). Another lucky break: instead of chastising me for “not trying hard enough” (as another client with a biting dog had done) he was unmistakably horrified at what I had to tell him and promised me he would be thereto get Vlad as fast as possible.
I checked on my dogs in the common room, then filled a bucket to start mopping up the blood which was in puddles outside Vlad’s door and in trails everywhere John had walked. I hadn’t gotten very far when Ivan arrived. Even though the whole incident felt like it took hours, in fact it probably hadn’t been more than ten minutes since Ivan left the first time.
The poor man was practically shaking. His eyes were as big as saucers and he couldn’t stop saying how sorry he was. It turned out he was a physician. He kept coming back to how his whole deal is to try to help people and cure their illness and injuries and here his own dog had been the cause of this horrible situation.
He kept asking me how I could be so calm and business like, especially later, after I took him back to get Vlad and he saw all the blood which I had not yet had a chance to clean up.
When he calmed down a bit, he asked me what he should do.
I had been thinking about alternatives and had come up with two. There was another kennel not far away, that had accepted a human aggressive Chow Chow that we had refused to board after meeting him. I suggested that he could call them and see if they would take Vlad on. This enormous dog was a lot more to handle than a Chow, but he could at least inquire.
My only other suggestion was to call a vet, either our own, who we greatly respected, or one of the big animal hospitals in Ottawa. There was a possibility that one of them might have facilities to cope with Vlad for the duration of Ivan’s vacation. I pointed out that if he chose this option, it was unlikely Vlad would get more than a cage, food and water, and be taken out on a muzzle and lead a couple of times per day to do his bathroom business.
Instead of asking for the relevant phone numbers, Ivan asked me if I thought he should have Vlad put down.
I have found that answering these kinds of questions is a no-win situation. It’s like giving parents advice about their kids. Even if they ask your opinion, secretly, all they are expecting you to tell them is that their obnoxious little brat is really just misunderstood and a little more indulgence will fix everything right up.
My reply was therefore circumspect. I began by stating unequivocally that this was a decision only he could make. I would not be comfortable telling anyone they should have their dog destroyed, whatever the circumstances. He accepted that, but pleaded with me to at least give him advice.
And then the story came out.
For starters, he was a first time dog owner. Secondly, he had bought Vlad off the internet, directly from a Russian breeder, sight unseen.
Wow. And here I thought I had made every mistake in the book as a novice dog owner.
They lived in the far north, where dogs are typically not pets, but kept for work purposes; sledding and pulling loads. Those dogs often live outside, chained up to posts in groups, growling and lunging at anyone who gets too close.
They had only tried to walk him once, because when he caught sight of these dogs, he did his best to try to pull them over there, snapping and snarling the whole way. A local had seen their plight and helped them wrestle Vlad back into their house. It was that guy who had told Ivan he needed a taser for his dog.
The whole experience had been terrifying for them. After that, Vlad only went out into their own back yard. Since Vlad’s only experience with other dogs had not been positive, Ivan wondered if the presence of other dogs had been the catalyst for his aggression.
Inside their home, Vlad had started off as a loving companion to him and his wife. But Ivan now admitted that the dog had started to growl at them when they came near his food.
I expressed sympathy for him. It was genuine.
I have always thought that, while it is horrible to be faced with euthanizing your beloved dog because he is fatally sick or injured, the absolute worst is when you have to make the unthinkable decision to put your dog down for intractable behavioural problems.
I have known a couple of people who have done this; people who I admired tremendously for pursuing every avenue they could to fix things, from hiring behavioural specialists, to medication, to trying to re-home their dog.
I adore cats and dogs. But I have seen a lot of shit over the years and I am at base a realist. We have gone a long way with some of our own cats and dogs, to a point well beyond what many people would live with. People struggle with situations most pet owners will never, thankfully, have to face.
My experience has led me to withdraw from the ranks of those who believe every dog (or cat for that matter) can and should be saved.
I should also point out that I believe equally strongly that there are way too many people who surrender dogs and cats to shelters for ‘behavioural issues’ who should be soundly kicked up the ass and forced to do the minimal amount of training necessary to solve this so-called “behavioural” problem. Nothing is guaranteed to blow my blood pressure faster than when I hear, “We didn’t know he would get this big”, or “She pulls when we try to walk her”, followed by “Do you know anyone who’s looking for a dog?”
I told Ivan that one of the worst situations with an aggressive dog is when the aggression is unpredictable. The problem comes and goes. Nothing happens for a couples of weeks and you start to relax, thinking it’s over. You keep hoping it will get better as the dog matures, or with enough training. If Vlad had been consistently aggressive, biting members of his family, I’m sure it would have already been dealt with.
But a dog that is making up to you one minute with wagging tail and smiling face, who literally bites you the next? That’s a harder situation for a loving owner to deal with.
I pointed out to Ivan that, living in Nunavut, he didn’t even have access even to a vet, let alone trainers or behavioural specialists that he could have worked with if he lived further south. I asked how he would get help in dealing with Vlad. He had no answer of course.
We also discussed Vlad’s size. It’s one thing to be bitten by a Bichon Frise or Miniature Poodle. Being bitten by a one hundred and sixty pound dog who means business is a whole other scale of dangerous. That’s why you don’t see Fifi being trained as a military attack dog.
I mentioned children. If Ivan and his wife decided to start a family, would they feel confident of Vlad being around the baby? Ivan mentioned that they had good friends who had children who were already a bit nervous around Vlad.
I talked about liability issues if Vlad escaped and savaged someone, or even hurt or killed their another dog. He might have to pay big bucks if that happened.
Just the thought of someone being injured by his dog was enough to make him go pale. He said he didn’t care about the money. But as a physician, he couldn’t come to grips with the fact that The General was at the ER as we spoke, because of violence perpetrated by his own pet.
We were both spooked by what would have happened if Vlad had attacked when John was on his knees with his face opposite Vlad’s. His throat could have been torn out.
In the end, Ivan decided to have Vlad put down. I told him I would call our vet and explain. I knew they would handle this with their customary sensitivity both to the dog and Ivan.
I suggested that if he decided to get another big dog, he need to start off with something likely to be easier to handle, such as a kindly, sweet-natured Golden Retriever, or if he was determined to have a Eurasian sheep guarding breed, then a Great Pyrenees.
I strongly cautioned him to do his research on both the breed and the breeder. I told him that I’ve known dogs of even those famously gentle breeds, who had been put down for aggression.
We both cried on and off through the discussion. Once he had made the hard choice, I hugged him, and we went down into the dog wing together to collect the doomed Vlad.
His emotional reaction to seeing his dog wagging his tail and looking happy to see him was offset by the equally emotive sight of John’s blood puddling on the floor outside the room.
Ivan called me after the deed was done to tell me how kind and understanding our vet had been both to him and to Vlad. He thanked me and apologised once again.
The General returned with stitches and an enormous professional looking bandage, as well as a case of mild post-traumatic stress. He was nervous around big dogs for a long time after this happened. I dealt with the ones we didn’t know.
Both he and I had recurring nightmares for weeks, featuring Vlad lunging at the moment when The General was down at face level with him.
The finger was swollen, stiff and sore for months. It was close to a year before The General recovered full range of motion. The doctor who fixed him up said that had it not been for the signet ring, the tendons might well have been severed and he would have required surgery.
A horrible experience, but an instructional one. Fall in love with those pictures of gorgeous dogs on the internet by all means. We all do. But don’t let their beauty lead you into an impulsive decision you may regret for a long, long time.
I wondered if the guys who get Russian brides off the internet would give the same advice?