(Photo by Getty Images/iStockphoto)
My dog, Roark, stood sentinel at the screen door. Our mailbox was affixed to the house, right beside the door.
Then, as the mail guy strode up the driveway, shuffling through a beefy stack of envelopes, I saw it:
The little hook, meant to secure the screen door, hung loose and limp.
Right then, everything switched to slow motion. Me, trying to race across the room. Roark, bounding out the screen door. The mailman, grimacing as Roark’s teeth made contact.
We had become a statistic. The U.S. Postal Service demanded we pay the carrier’s doctor bill and a day of lost wages (which was only something like $500, because this was in San Diego some 30 years ago and Roark did little harm), but dog bites can be much more serious and costly for dog owners — and painfully terrifying for mail carriers.
After an edifying decline, dog attacks on postal carriers are rising again, both in California and the nation, according to data wrangled from the Postal Service.
The financial consequences can be severe: The average cost for a dog bite claim is $64,555, according to the Insurance Information Institute. And dog owners could be responsible for medical bills, lost wages, uniform replacement costs and pain and suffering if postal workers are hurt.
My dog Abu (Teri Sforza/SCNG)
Ouch
The numbers are revealing:
Nationwide, more than 6,000 dog attacks were logged on postal carriers in 2018. That dropped to 5,800 in 2019; held steady in 2020; dropped further, to 5,400, in 2021; dropped even further, to 5,300, in 2022; but shot up again to more than 5,800 in 2023 — an increase of more than 9% in a single year.
In California, dog bites totaled 794 in 2018; dropped to 777 in 2019; creeped up to more than 780 in 2020; plunged to 656 in 2021; crept up to 675 in 2022; and rose to 727 in 2023, an increase of almost 8% in a single year.
It’s not just in California, either. Bites were up last year in Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Illinois, but down in New York, Florida and Michigan.
The largest cities in California had the most bites, of course — Los Angeles had 65; San Diego, 41; Sacramento, 26; San Francisco, 20; Long Beach, 19; Oakland, 17; Fresno, 13; Bakersfield, 12; Santa Ana, 10. But at least one attack was reported in nearly half of California cities (236).
In SoCal, Pasadena, Inglewood and Anaheim each reported 8 attacks; San Pedro and Pomona had 6 each; North Hollywood, Huntington Beach, Garden Grove and Burbank had 5 each. See the number of attacks per city in California below. If your city isn’t here, congratulations, yours is a peaceable kingdom.
Heel!
These numbers are part of an annual push by the Postal Service to properly train the public.
Yes, of course, your dog is very friendly. But — as my sweet boy Roark proved — even the loveliest dogs will do what they think is necessary to protect the homestead from intruders.
You’ve heard about the doggy psychology behind the canine-mail carrier malice: Stranger enters territory every day. Dog goes crazy, barking and snarling warnings. Stranger leaves. Dog concludes he/she has had fantastic success protecting the homestead! Dog repeats the behavior into infinity.
Baldy View Dog Park in Upland in April. (Photo by Anjali Sharif-Paul, The Sun/SCNG)
You, dog owner and mail recipient, can protect your postal carriers as well as your pooch and pocketbook:
There’s this cool new service called “Informed Delivery,” which lets you digitally preview incoming mail and packages (informeddelivery.usps.com) so you know when to expect a delivery.
Pay attention to when the mail arrives each day, and ensure the dog is inside, behind a fence or on a leash at that time.
Don’t let kids don’t take mail directly from a carrier, as your dog might conclude that’s threatening.
Carriers know to make noises or rattle fences before entering a yard. If they’re charged, carriers also are trained to stand their ground, protect themselves by using their mail satchel as a shield, and spray out some dog repellent if necessary. They have “dog alert” features on those funky handheld scanners to alert them to potentially troublesome territory.
If owners don’t play nice, and carriers feel unsafe, home mail service can be halted and owners would have to pick up mail at the post office.
(Photo by Terry Pierson, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)
Yo-yo
Why the drop and the rise in bites?
It’s a bit unclear. Maybe folks were home more to keep a better eye on their pups during the pandemic, so bites went down. Maybe they crept back up after folks returned to offices and left Houdini dogs in yards or forgot to lock side gates.
The Postal Service’s lengthy missives about the dog bite phenom included this prepared statement from letter carrier Tara Snyder, who I’m fairly certain was not the carrier targeted by my Roark lo those many years ago:
“Even though a customer’s dog is friendly to most people, it can always have a bad day,” she said. “(E)ven when a dog is in the house, customers need to make sure their door is secure so their dog can’t push it open and bite the letter carrier.”
Ooof. Makes you wonder if dogs hate junk mail as much as humans do.