That Time I Got Mauled By Max The Doberman
A little over ten years ago, my parents got my dad’s soul dog, Rogue, an American Rottweiler, and started taking her to puppy classes at Petco. It was here that Rogue met her best friend, a Doberman named, Max.
Though I was already out of the house, I was still living back in PA at the time, and would frequent these puppy socials, because, well, puppies. So I had met and interacted with Max several times.
Eventually the puppy classes ended and shortly after, Rogue and Max were too big to partake in the puppy socials. They still kept in touch with Max and often got him and Rogue together for playdates.
At some point, it was said that Max had a few ‘incidents’ with ‘nipping’ a child and adult, but no one seemed too concerned. So, I went over to Max’s house during one of the playdates with Rogue.
I remember getting out of the car and, Max, at this point, not yet even fully-grown, had his front feet up on the gate jumping to let me in. I gave him a pat on the head and a warm hello, then one of the older humans opened the gate.
Everyone was standing around in the backyard talking when Max came up behind me and fully bit on to my upper thigh. I immediately got down into a ball and covered my face as he started grabbing and pulling my hair before then fully biting back into my side. It felt like an eternity before they got him off.
They rushed me inside and he STILL was throwing his body into the glass door to try and get to me and I remember praying that glass did not break. He had very clear (unwarranted) intent.
I was covered in blood and already bruising all over my body. They cleaned me up and, well, the gathering was certainly over after that.
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Max ended up severely injuring a child a few months after the incident with me. His owners briefly tried training and medication. The wife wanted behavioral euthanasia, but the husband refused. It caused such a rupture in their marriage it led to a divorce. I can’t remember if he was eventually put down or if he died of old age, but he has definitely passed by now.
(I wish I was making this up, but it just so happens this story is the EPITOME of how having a dog with behavioral issues can really cause chaos in so many areas of life.)
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One of my first thoughts when this happened was: why doesn’t Max like me? It was a question that would unravel me any time it happened to cross my mind.
Now being a trainer (and getting a fair amount of dogs that want to bite me initially) I can thankfully look back on this attack objectively.
It doesn’t matter if Max did or didn’t like me. Unless I would have provoked him, there is never a reason for a dog to intimidate, bite, or attack a human. Period. If they are doing so, there are much bigger things at play than if a dog simply does or doesn’t like someone.
Because two of the other biting ocassions were with children, it’s likely that they were constantly putting him in situations he was not equipped to handle successfully and they were ignoring his stress cues.
While most of America DOES need a lesson in proper dog ettiquette, I grew up in a very dog savvy household. That means we did not ride dogs, we did not pet strange dogs, we did not ignore stress signals, and we even knew to not make prolonged eye contact.
While you should respect dogs as dogs, you also shouldn’t have to walk on eggshells around them.
This was a dog who had previous incidences of human aggression. WE shouldn’t have taken their word for it being ‘out of the blue’ and THEY should have had him on a leash, muzzled, and worked the scenario more like a training session and not thrown all caution to the wind just hoping it wasn’t going to happen again.
It certainly wasn’t about him smelling ‘fear’, as him potentially biting me wasn’t a thought in my mind. Yes, dogs can smell surges in cortisol, norepinephrine, and adrenaline, but that doesn’t mean much unless there’s been an association built between smelling those hormones and a negative stimulus occuring.
I hold nothing against Max…or his owners. They were doing the best with what information they had at the time. And I understand how we grew up, how ownership used to be, and wanting to hope for the best; it can take a lot of time and mental work to create true paradigm shifts for the better. However, my goal is to educate all clients and this community to the point of preventing issues like this from arising in the first place. It not only saves humans, but it also saves the dogs from bite records, restricted access, bans, sub-par quality of lives, and euthanasia.