I remember walking down the street one day with a friend while a tiny angry snake curled itself around my hand, opening it’s itty bitty mouth as wide as it could, and biting me with all of it’s wee power.

“That thing looks like it’s biting pretty hard.”

“EHHHHH, I’ve had worse. This doesn’t even hurt. Kinda tickles. Can you see those adorable little fangs?!”

“I can’t believe no one has noticed you walking by them with your hand being eaten off.”

“Why would they notice? I just have a weird bracelet. A wiggly little grey bitey bracelet. I think I’ll call it Sid.”

Only minutes before I had found Sid slithering around the park enjoying the summer sun. He was however clearly not a wild snake. His coloring was very domesticated. Obviously I couldn’t leave him there to eat local wildlife so I did what any good Samaritan would do – I abducted this scaly little creature and returned him to a life of captivity. Sid never grew any manners. He was ill tempered, if not downright pissed, for the rest of his days. He wouldn’t be the only “pet” I ever kept that was… problematic, nor was he the only animal I’d been bitten by. In fact by now I’d been bitten by a whole host of creatures, all for different reasons, but the biggest one was I was doing something stupid like conducting a citizen’s arrest on a reptile.

In fact one of my earliest memories was a battle with an enormous armored dragon who’d gotten up on the wrong side of the swamp that day. OK, so it wasn’t really a dragon, but it was an ancient lumbering snapping turtle, the kind that was so big that it routinely stopped traffic whenever it crossed the road to go between the swamp and the pond. I was only four or five at the time when I met this grand madame. I had just come home from errands with my mother and she thought this was a great time to teach me not to mess with the aforementioned turtle. So we got out of the little red Nissan, which in itself wasn’t much bigger than the turtle, and she had me stand back as she picked up a stick to antagonize the beast. Of course our new friend was far from amused, she raised up on her haunches, gave a violent hiss, and lunged at the stick which she broke like it was a toothpick. I was so terrified by this demonstration I ran screaming the quarter of a mile up our long driveway where I am told I dashed into the house and locked the door. To this day this is one of my mother’s favorite stories to tell strangers about me. I guess it could be worse.

Many years later I’d have a friend name another turtle after me who had just as much as an anger management problem. However she wasn’t a snapping turtle, she just thought she was. Instead she was a little slider, violently whipping her claws back and forth, snapping at the air and probably cursing in turtlese. It was a dubious compliment to have my name bestowed upon such a creature.

But it wasn’t just reptiles I apparently rubbed the wrong way. Another one of my earliest memories was my first field trip at the age of seven. We went to a farm. A farm that happened to be populated by a massive swarm of goats who very quickly robbed me of my camera and tried to eat the strap it was dangling from. I don’t remember if I got nipped in this process but it seems likely considering they were in a swarm afterall…

Growing up in an agricultural area it wasn’t long before I was introduced to horses and ponies and even allowed to ride one here and there. I have met some horses with the patience of saints, able to ignore the bad behavior of any screaming child, but I was far more adept at finding horses who were mischievous at best. I cannot count how many times a horse has grabbed my shirt with their teeth in an attempt to toss me around like a rag doll or body slam me against the barn – ALWAYS whenever their owner was looking away. I developed some trepidation around these animals and this only seemed to make the problem worse. Whenever they saw me their eyes would light up in a glimmer that read, “Oh! Little one! I am bigger than you!!”

But I’d take the horses over a ferret any day! Ferrets were something of a curiosity when I was young and I remember being about maybe eight or ten when a friend of mine ended up with one as a pet. We all gathered around the kitchen table as his mother read the paperwork that came with him. He was from Marshall Farms and according to the pamphlet he was bred from many generations to be completely domesticated, never biting his master, even safe to have around other pets! I didn’t know anything about them so this sounded perfectly legit to me at the time. Little was I to know that ferrets are basically domesticated weasels that were bred to exterminate rats through ravinous slaughter a few hundred years ago. And Marshall Farm? It was the biggest ferret farm in the US, notorious for such rampant inbreeding that the ferret population here went from living for about ten years before their founding to about 2-3 afterwards as their lines screwed everyone else’s up. And it was clear the inbreeding wasn’t doing anything good to the little minds behind those beady little eyes. This ferret was named Mick after Mick Jagger. He was psychotic, downright mental. He’d bite anything or anyone and then throw his whole body into crocodile spins trying to rip off chunks of flesh. But from the outside he looked perfectly adorable and I had no idea about his unfortunate predilection towards attempted homicide when his owner (also an asshole) told me to reach into the cage. The resulting bloodbath had to have been one of the worst bites I’d ever receive from anything. I renamed the little bastard: Mick Jagged-Tooth and wouldn’t so much as look at another ferret for years afterwards…. until that is I was helping out at a wedding in my early teen years and the bride asked me to go feed her menagerie of pets which included a suspiciously similar looking ferret with the same life philosophy: bite first, ask questions later. “He was an abused rescue and can be kind of a dick.” YEAH, I CAN SEE THAT. I had to throw pieces of food into his cage one nugget at a time to distract him long enough to swipe his food and water bowl to refill. He spent the entire time making agitated noises, running from one side of the cage to the other, and darting at my hands.

Funny enough I also had a sad record with hamsters. In fact shortly before the Great Ferret Attack of Yarmouth Maine I was at the same kid’s house, alone, staring into a ten gallon tank with two adorable little fluff balls sleeping in the corner. Surely no one would notice if I reached my grubby little kid paws in there and gave them a quick pet…. the perfect crime! Like stealing cookies from the cookie jar! Or at least it would have been had the hamster not woken up with a start and immediately latched itself to my finger by its teeth. Horrified and not wanting to get in trouble I yanked my hand out of the cage but the hamster refused to let go! By now I was frantically flailing with a fierce cotton ball still wildly swinging with my finger. When he finally did release he went flying across the cage, thwacked on the side of the aquarium and slid down the wall before giving me a contemptuous look and cuddling back under the bedding. Never again would I play with anyone else’s pet without first seeking permission.

Later in my life I’d have my own small pets – mainly rats. I know, why rats? Well because I thought they were cool and spent years campaigning for one which would have been completely fruitless if it weren’t for two getting loose or being released in my home town. One succumbed to the winter weather and the second? He needed a home. He was a wonderful little fellow. I loved him so much and he was just the sweetest ball of blubber you could ever ask for. He never bit me but he did eventually die which left a gaping hole in my twelve year old heart. It didn’t take long before someone else had a rat in need of rescue, a sleek muscular albino they caught in their garage. I named him Babe. He had the energy of a sled dog, the strength of an Olympic athlete, and the temperament of Hannibal Lecter. To this day I’ve never met another animal like him. He was pure muscle and rage, spending every waking moment running full speed on his wheel. He was also completely unhandlable. He’d bite you through the cage bars whenever he had the chance, and not a little warning nip either! He’d bite like a rabid weasel with something to prove. The only way I could clean his cage was to trick him into a box, seal it, remove it from the cage, and clean the cage in his absence. He was by far the most dangerous animal I ever kept as a pet – and that may be because he wasn’t a domesticated rat but rather a wild albino rat that had just been caught by happenstance. But the worst rat bite I ever received was merely from a panicked baby who got his head stuck between the bars of the cage. When I went to push him back in he tweaked out, bit me, and then because he was pulling valiantly to get back into the cage his mouth clamped shut even tighter and I was stuck with my thumb in his mouth driving his teeth deeper and deeper into my flesh. I screamed, but since I was cranking up the Woodstock album at the time it was just drown out by happy screaming. It’d take another ten or fifteen minutes for my mother to realize I was calling for help. By the time she came bounding up the hallway I screamed at her to get me a fucking towel which I threw over his head while she pushed his butt forward so he’d release his grip. With my thumb out of his mouth we were able to push him back fully into the cage. This bite gave me permanent nerve damage in the tip of my thumb which always feels tingly or numb now.

Another animal I will always remember were the Spiny Mice. They’re desert dwelling creatures that are about the size of a gerbil with course hairs on their back that resemble spines. They are nearly odorless and are quick, smart, and quirky little pets. I however had a breeding group that was only three generations from the wild and 50% were total assholes. In fact I ended up naming one Mordrid after he murdered his parents for reasons unknown. Their teeth were like hypodermic needles and to make matters worse when they bit they didn’t just bite down once but would walk their teeth biting and releasing and biting again until you were bloodied beyond recognition. It was sad because the other half of them were actually really quite interesting pets but the ones who were homicidal dicks won out being the longest lived and the most capable at reproducing.

My most serious bite came from a much larger animal when I was much older. I had the misfortune of having two pit bulls dropped off on me. Of course one was male, the other female, and as is to be expected they were an already seriously inbred brother sister pair. Not surprisingly the bitch was pregnant and I ended up with a huge litter of all white puppies. They were cute but almost all of them had entropion, or inward facing eyelashes, that obstructed their ability to see and two of them were absolutely deaf. Chaos reigned from here as I ended up with the puppies way longer than I should have. At six months of age I had three left, a really profoundly stupid female, a nervous aggressive twig of a male, and a HUGE deaf and blind tank of a dog. One day the nervous aggressive one flipped out and bit the blind one. I temporarily forgot all my own training and accidentally got between the two. The blind one just bit air trying to defend himself until he bit…. my calf. with his whole head around my leg his teeth sank through my skin and muscle like a knife through butter and since he was blind and deaf he had no idea he was biting me and not the other dog so he clamped down and hung on for dear life. I felt no pain, it was all adrenaline at this point. I knew I had to stay calm because the only way I was going to get my leg back without horrific tearing injuries was if I stayed calm and still and waited for him to open his mouth on his own, which he did. My wounds were just punctures but they went deep into the muscle and over the next three days my leg turned black with bruising. That wouldn’t heal for many months to come.

I homed the deaf dog and its sister but the nervous aggressive one was too dangerous for me to feel comfortable giving away. He was the sweetest most loving dog on the planet but put him in a situation where he didn’t know the people or the environment and the result was always disastrous. One such time was when I tried to clip his nails. He was so freaked that before I even had a chance to get one clip in he already had the entirety of my head in his mouth. Thank God he didn’t bite down or he could have crushed my skull like a watermelon. Instead he seemed rather confused I was in his mouth at all. I reached up, more annoyed than anything, pulled his jaws apart enough to slide out. I still have a few scars on my hairline where his teeth just barely punctured the skin. He’d eventually have to be put down for his issues and as unpredictable as he was it was still a very heavy moment in the household who all loved him dearly. He served as another heartbreaking warning that poorly bred animals can be neurologically fucked up. He clearly did not behave like a normal dog and towards the end of his life he even had seizures.

But if there’s anything nastier than a dog bite it’s a cat bite, of which I’ve had several whoppers. The first came from a twenty five pound Bengal tom cat who I was babysitting at the time. In fact I was babysitting a whole cattery including several females and two very large very feral males. The males I had to separate by keeping one in a large cage. Well he busted through that cage in no time and went straight for the other tom cat. The noise was shocking – like the sound of demons being sucked into Hell. I charged into the room with a broom and beat him off the other cat before trying to get him back in the other cage. The only thing was he was completely wild and had no desire what-so-ever to get back in that cage. So I basically had to run him down and sit on him like a goddamn pro wrestler. That’s when I learned this cat was so muscular he didn’t even have a scruff on his neck to control him by. Nothing. Hard as a goddamn brick. I tried lifting him up but he was demonic. And that’s how a second later I found myself with a twenty five pound cat dangling by the teeth from my arm. That left the most interesting scar! Like a vampire bite! And being as he was a cat I had to be super vigilant it didn’t get infected. Cat bites are way worse with infection than dogs and as you probably guessed from reading all the above stories I never went to a hospital for any of my injuries. Too prideful for that.

However the last bite I want to tell you about would have been the bite that should have driven me to the aforementioned hospital. It came from a cat named Hobbs. I don’t even remember why I was volunteered to deal with Hobbs but for some reason he needed to get into the cat crate and I was there… He seemed a docile enough creature so I picked him up. The bite he gave me in response was a pain I will never forget. I don’t know what was up with this cat but he had the vice like bite force of a shark. It was completely and utterly uncatlike in its ferocity and power. And his teeth were bizarrely sharper than a usual feline. He fuuuuucked my hand up. And when I threw in the towel he completely decimated someone else’s hand. It was unbelievable how much damage this cat did. And no. He never got into the crate.