Tara FitzGerald had lived in New York City with her five-year-old dog, Biko, for four months when she crouched down to scratch his belly in the hallway of her apartment. As usual, the dog loved the attention, but then FitzGerald noticed a subtle, almost imperceptible shift in his mood. “Did you just growl at me, Beeks?” she joked. Later, she wrote,
The words were barely out of my mouth when his stocky frame came flying toward my face and knocked me backwards to the floor. His teeth were bared in a tight grimace, and he was snarling in a voice of wild fury I had never heard before. He seemed to be powered by a savage, primal rage. I still can’t quite reconstruct how it happened so quickly, how he went from prone to airborne in a split second, how [he] could flip and fly in one smooth movement, gaining such speed and trajectory that I never stood a chance of raising my arm in time to shield my face.
FitzGerald felt a “soft tearing sensation, like slow ripping through silk. Then hot blood gushed from my mouth, pumping out in heavy spurts.” Biko had torn through her face, removing “a large amount of soft tissue from lip and cheek,” according to her medical report from Bellevue Hospital. She would eventually require the expertise of several plastic surgeons, as well as that of a therapist who helped her work through her post-traumatic stress disorder. FitzGerald would never look - or be - the same. “What does it mean when your face is no longer the face you recognize?” she wrote.
When her veterinarian recommended that she euthanize Biko, FitzGerald felt conflicted. “I was horrified by the idea, and also a little frightened of the possibility that my decision might be coming from a vengeful place. I didn’t hate [my dog], but I did feel betrayed by him.” In the end, she decided that euthanasia was the best option because of something she did not originally disclose to medical personnel: Biko had bitten her before.
FitzGerald’s dog was a basset hound.
The pain and grief that FitzGerald felt over her disfigurement is evident in her writing, but she never blamed Biko’s actions on his breed, nor did she indict all other basset hounds. Rather, she accepted that after five years of love and companionship something incomprehensible had gone very wrong with her dog. Her story did not make the news.
Dickey, Bronwen. Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon (Kindle Locations 4216-4223). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.