A few years ago, I was bitten by a dog. It wasn't a bad bite at all and it definitely didn't change my feeling towards dogs. I had some bruising and a scrape from lateral movement of a tooth, and that was it. Well, ok, and a little pee came out. She bit me in two different spots on my forearm. She was a big dog, I remember very clearly, even in the moment, thinking "wow, this dog has amazing bite inhibition-" meaning she was extremely pissed off, since dogs usually only bite once and she bit me twice, but she didn't bite me hard. Her name was Missy (It wasn't. But I'm changing all the other names, so I figured I'll change hers too). I love her. We actually talked about adopting her, even after that. She was a very cool dog. I hope she got over her issues and went to an awesome family and is cherished for her whole life.
I'm in training to work at a doggie daycare now, and yesterday we learned about bites. A bite at dog daycare is a rarity, but also over a long enough timeline, an inevitability. So we were just learning about different types of bites, how and when they usually happen, and what to do about them.
I raised my hand.
"Are we in trouble if we get bit?" I asked, immediately wishing I had said bitten instead of bit, in case other people in my class found my adorable southernism stupid rather than, as I mentioned, adorable (A note for readers north of the Mason Dixon: When speaking, it's bit. And it's one word. Snakebit, dogbit, fleabit. In writing there's some flexibility, and the technically correct form, "bitten," is acceptable. But aloud, stick to the colloquial). I also noticed a quiver in my voice I had not at all expected.
The trainers seemed baffled. Some of the students were probably considering the possibility that I was a complete dumb fuck.
Yes, they said, if you somehow goad a dog into biting you by kicking it or hurting it, you are definitely in trouble.
"No, but obviously I'm not going to do that. I just mean in a normal situation, if a dog is overwhelmed or something and it bites me, will I be in trouble?" my voice was definitely wobbly, which was weird as hell. I felt the crying-prickly-feeling in the corners of my eyes. Totally unexpected wave of emotion. Weeeeeeird.
Of course not, they said. Things happen with dogs sometimes. If somebody gets bitten they will be tended to, if hurt, and have time to calm down and get over the scare, and they can decide if they want to work with dogs for the rest of the day, or go do office work and take some time, and another employee can work with the dogs. They said it like this was the most obvious thing in the world, like why would a person be in trouble for getting bitten.
The day Missy bit me was a really bad day. I got bit and then I got bitched out.
After class yesterday, I went home and cried. It felt fantastic. It was a really good cry where all this emotion I didn't even realize I had been carrying with me just came out. I didn't realize how worried I had been that if I ever got bit, I would be fired. Wouldn't that just be the worst? Bitten and then fired. Damn.
It had been causing me not to be willing to take risks. I'm not great at reading the body language of small dogs. I've just never been around them. I'm a champ with anything over about 40 pounds. Then there's a gray area. Less than 20 pounds and I'm like, "what are you? Are you even a dog?" And I had been avoiding learning about small dogs, because as you learn there's always a chance of making a mistake, and that terrified me. After my cry, I thought, I'm going to ask if I can shadow a shift in the small dog room, and ask if I can watch the groomer groom a small dog, and and and - I had all these ideas and I was excited to go out and learn. That was such a good feeling that I got all moved and overwhelmed and cried some more.
Remember, I hadn't even realized I was carrying this around with me. I knew I wasn't afraid of the bite itself, and I wasn't afraid of dogs, and with medium and large dogs I felt good about being able to read their cues and avoid a bite in the first place. So crying and being upset about a bite from four years ago that didn't even draw blood was totally bizarre.
There was more to it, though, and today I told my Wonderful Mentor the rest of it (her response was, "do you want a hug?" and she gave me a really sincere hug and I loved it).
The rest of it is, I had gone through a training course to be able to work with dogs, and at the time was volunteering for a dog-related facility. I'm going to be a little vague here because I'm actually thinking I would like to go and volunteer there again, and in general shitting where one eats is to be avoided. If you know me, you know the place. If you don't know me, the name of it isn't really relevant anyway. We're going to call it Nonprofit Dog Place (NDP). So I went through like 40 hours of training and then supervised activities and all this with NDP.
Within NDP, another non-profit kind of glommed on. This one's fake name is Traumatized Dog Rescue. The traumatized dogs would come live with the happy dogs and learn from them, and get rehabilitated and then adopted out. You had to get all this special permission to work with the traumatized dogs, but nobody did, so I didn't either.
I met Missy by accident. I was helping paint a puppy play room, and there was a note on Missy's kennel "please let Missy out to potty and let her spend time out of her kennel." Since there was no salutation on the note, I figured it was just for whoever was working in that room so she would get let out at various times. Right? Don't you think that if a note is for one certain person, you would put that person's name on the note somewhere? So this note must just be for anybody - which is not an uncommon thing at this place, just to find note, "if you're here on saturday please give Tobie a treat" or "Tobie needs to potty frequently, please take him out when you take your dog out" (It wasn't just for anybody. Somebody just doesn't know how to write a note)(dumbass). So I hung out with Missy a lot that weekend and we liked each other very much. We didn't really do anything. I painted the room and she laid on the floor. Sometimes she would come up to me and I would scratch her back. She didn't like other people that much, so the Traumatized Dog Rescue volunteer had me come work with her too. We worked on easy stuff like teaching her her name (her real name) and to come up to people to get a treat.
Then we were in a little sitting room just spending time with her so she could get used to being around people. She had a chew toy and we were all sitting on the floor, and she leaned toward me so I reached out to pet her.
Fun fact about dogs, sometimes when they lean toward you, they want petted, but sometimes when they lean toward you, they are claiming space to keep you away from their chew toy. I misread her and she bit me when I reached out to pet her.
I think I said "woah" or something similarly meaningless. The volunteer pulled her off of me by the leash. (She would have bitten more than twice if she hadn't been pulled away)
To the volunteer's credit, the first thing she said was "are you ok?" but the second thing was "you can't reach toward her when she has a bone." (you don't say.) In retrospect I think that's sort of horrible, and that five seconds after a bite, a person probably isn't in the frame of mind to receive coaching.
I went to scoot away from Missy to give her more space.
"You can't scoot away from her or she'll think she's dominant," said the asshole volunteer. At the time, that seemed reasonable (ask me now what I think about dominance theory. And about keeping a person in a situation where they are clearly miserable). So I sat there, trying not to cry from OMG ALL THE ADRENALINE, and a little fear, and definitely shame.
Shame? At this place there was a big belief that no dog bites without warning. Theoretically that's true. At the time I believed it completely. "I didn't see a warning," I said. "What did I miss?"
"She probably froze for a split second. If you had been paying attention you would have seen it."
After about ten minutes, she said I could leave.
After that, a lot of the rescue volunteers acted differently toward me. I was aware of my reputation of being bad at reading dogs. The regular volunteers acted differently too. Nobody wanted me to work with their regular (non-rescue) dogs, because they thought I would mess it up. Just like that, I had gone from being really, really good with these dogs, to being absolute rubbish and people talked about me and told me not to mess with the dogs. My husband and I were volunteering together, so when they talked to me about the dogs, it was suddenly all "get Husband to do this, have Husband take the dog here." Like he was the grownup and I was a child.
Soon after that my brother died, and my volunteer certification lapsed, and I was grieving and busy with work and I didn't have time to renew my certification. Except I also think, when something is important, you make the time for it. I just didn't want to go back.
So of course I had been worried that a bite would end my career. Duh. I had every reason to think it would.
Here are some things I know now that I didn't know then:
1. I'm actually really good at dogs. But all that training I got? Those 40 hours? That was with GOLDEN RETRIEVER PUPPIES. It was unreasonable for me to expect myself, or for anybody else to expect me, to read a traumatized rescue dog.
1a. These rescue dogs had often been punished for showing teeth or growling, so their warnings were things like a split second freeze, or leaning forward to claim space. Canine behaviorists train for years so they can spot this stuff. My week of training was a joke for these dogs. They had been conditioned not to warn before biting.
1b. I hate the words that I said, "what did I miss?" I shouldn't have owned that. I wish I had said, "what did she signal?"
1c. The volunteer's wording, "she probably froze for a split second" means SHE DIDN'T SEE IT EITHER.
2. This is a big one I realized when I thought about this with my insurance brain: it was so against the rules for them to have me with Missy. It was a huge liability issue, and I wouldn't be surprised if they intentionally made me feel like it was my fault so I wouldn't tell the boss what had happened because they would be in Deep Shit.
3. It was not my fault - People get bit. My Wonderful Mentor has been bit. It doesn't mean you're bad at dogs. It just means dogs sometimes bite and people sometimes get bit.
IT WAS NOT MY FAULT
4. And the biggest, most important thing I know now that I didn't know then, is that these women were complete assholes. When we were talking about bite protocol in class yesterday, I was thinking "ok if SHE gets bit, she'll want to go somewhere quiet by herself, and if SHE gets bit, she'll want to dive right back in to keep her confidence up, and if SHE gets bit, she'll want to be with somebody and be emotionally nurtured a little bit..." Those are the kind of thoughts a normal human should have. If something bad happens to a colleague, even a volunteer colleague, the normal human response is to help them.
So that was a big deal for me. I went to work today excited to learn about small dogs. Their tiny little teeth still seem awfully pointy, but now I know that if I get a bite, it's just a bite and not a bite and a pink slip. And my bosses and colleagues will coddle me, or leave me alone, or get me a Sponge Bob band-aid, or whatever I need to help me succeed.
Those other people were assholes. I've found good people now.
So yeah. It wasn't a hard cry, which is good, because what you just read is the result of about four hours of introspection, and a hard cry for that long would give me the worst nightmare headache ever. It was just, like, dribbly eyes and emotional sulking. Bookended with solid steady cries.
And now I'm letting it go. It's done. Maybe I'll never get another bite. I hope not. They hurt. And there's paperwork. And I'm so much better at reading stress and aggression signals now. Who knows, maybe I can avoid a bite for the rest of my career. But it's nice to know that if I ever do it bit, it'll hurt, and there will be paperwork... and that's pretty much it.
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