While walking my Bichon Frise yesterday, a neighbor was “walking” their hound dog sans leash. As the hound dog approached, my little guy assumed a “tough guy” stance and began barking his head off and pulling at the leash.
I was a tad slow on the uptake, and bent down to scoop up my dog when the hound was maybe 3 feet away. I guess my Bichon was in fight-or-flight mode, because as I reached under his chest to raise him up, he reflexively bit down – hard – on my thumb.
Sonuvabitch … that bite really hurt. I manage to get my dog cradled to my chest, and began to walk off. The neighbors ran up and offered apologies. Yeah, yeah, yeah … whatever – use a dad-gum leash next time.
Oddly, my thumb was still throbbing. I check out the thumb and notice that my dog bit through my thumbnail as if it were a Dorito. Nice and bloody, even. Were he a Rottweiler or a Doberman, I’d have processed the injury immediately. But I was stuck for a while on the idea that “my Bichon did this?”
I tell you what: I have played with my Bichon hundreds of times, and been harmlessly play-bitten hundreds of times. I would have never thought he could do any kind of damage at all to my person. Yeah, it wasn’t a big deal at all as far as dog-inflicted injuries go. But I’m so used to seeing my dog as mild-mannered and easy-going and itty-bitty-awe-so-cute … well, he earned himself a little respect last night. When backed into a corner, the humble Bichon is not to be trifled with.
I have a Rat Terrier, about 20lbs. I gave him a bone once in the kitchen and he took it right into the living room, to eat on the carpet. So I was gonna grab it from him and get it off the carpet, little bastard bit me. Clean through my hand from the top and the bottom, right at the ball of my hand. Really made it hard to use my thumb for a while.
He play bites all the time, but that was the first time hit really bit me. We’ve gone at it since over stuff like dropped chicken and ribs…stuff I really don’t want him eating. He’s obsessed with food, it’s the only time he’s ever gotten vicious.
Cats, too.
I’d often played the cat-wrestling game where you put your hand palm-down over the kitty face to torture the cat and the cat retaliates by grabbing with all four paws and sinking teeth into wrist. Sometimes roughly enough to have little hairpin red striped all up and down my forearms.
One day the cat was sitting on the kitchen counter and, to close a silverware drawer while I had my hands full, I hip-checked it and kept going until I rebounded against the kitchen counter, pushing the drawer along with me. Except that there was a cat paw inserted in there just before I started, as the kitty had apparently decided to hop down. So I ended up pinning kittypaw pretty hard against the countertop edge. And about 0.03 seconds later my forearm had catfangs buried what felt like 3 feet deep, I swear they only stopped moving when they bounced off my arm-bone! Did the trick — in another 0.6 secs I was several feet from the counter, the things I’d been carrying were all over the floor, and I was emitting some rather odd sounds.
