My Dog Bit My Child. . . Now What?

This week we are talking about dog bites. More on the lines if your dog has bit your kid.

This episode hits close to home because it just happened to me. A week and a half ago my daughter was roaming around the room at 5 am. Our dog was sleeping in the same room. It was pitch black the dog had got up from his bed and went to the other side of the room where the baby was at. At that moment my wife told me to turn on the lights. I was fumbling to turn on the lights and from what we gathered the baby scared the dog and the dog reacted out of fear and bit the baby. By the time I had turned the light on the baby had a gash in her face down her cheek and was bleeding pretty bad. We called 911 to make sure she didn’t have to be taken to the hospital by ambulance. Lucky for us while the wound was big it didn’t hit anything that would cause permanent damage to her mouth, saliva glands, or anything else. We figure it will just leave a scar. We were able to take our toddler to the hospital ourselves. She was stitched up by a plastic surgeon in the ER and it was by far the hardest thing I have ever had to watch.

We had to quarantine our dog for 10 days at a vet boarding facility. It’s law in our state if a dog bites they have to be quarantined even if they are vaccinated for rabies. The whole purpose of the quarantining is to see if the animal is infected with rabies. In most places, you can quarantine the dog at home but in the city in which we live, we could not do so. We had to choose between letting the rental cop animal patrol officer transport our dog in the back of his truck in the freezing cold or we could transport him to a boarding facility run by a vet. We chose the latter.

If your dog bites someone here are 3 things to do immediately:

1- Separate your dog from the situation

2- Make sure the bite is taken care of

3- Learn and know your rights as a dog owner

Now that your dog has been quarantined and you’ve probably made a couple of hospital visits what do you do with your dog. A lot of people decide to not keep the dog. We’ll unlike most we decided to keep the dog for a few reasons. One he is part of our family and two he didn’t bite out of aggression. He bit out of fear. Now if this was in the middle of the day, and the baby touched him and the dog got mad and bit her it would be a different story.

This is also the time in which you will have opinions flying at you left and right. I had someone pretty much tell me that we are bad parents for keeping the dog. While you are entitled to your own opinion the least you can do is word it in a way that is actually polite.

Now the question is what are we going to do to make sure nothing like this ever happens again. Here are 5 things we will do to make our house more secure with a toddler and a dog.

1- Change the routine of the dog add more structure

2- Keep dog/toddler separated

3- Dog is only allowed in certain areas of the house

4- Remove dog immediately if signs of stress

5- Pay to have dog professionally trained

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