In journalism, a dog biting a man is a common incident, and so for generations, dogs have enjoyed a monopoly on unprovoked ankle nipping. So much so that journalism schools teach that when a hound chomps a person, it is just a Tuesday. 

However, when a human sinks their teeth into a hound, it is page-one news. Even in this day and age, a man-bites-dog event is highly unexpected and headline-worthy.

I was forced to consider the possibility that it is not so rare anymore after an old Facebook memory about a man from Manchester who, in 2017, bit a police dog, popped up. 

Being naturally curious as to the progression of such incidents, I went down an Internet rabbit hole and started looking into incidents where humans, usually the male of the species, have bitten our supposed best friends.

There were stories galore, but according to the United States National Library of Medicine, there is no database tracking the exact number of "human bites dog" news stories globally, as they are tracked as isolated criminal incidents rather than a collective statistical category. 

When a human bites a dog, it is categorised in police databases under ‘animal abuse’, ‘cruelty to animals’, or ‘interfering with a police animal’ rather than its own specific biting metric.

A review of articles over the last 10 years reveals that human-on-dog biting stories almost always fall into one of three categories: Fighting back against police K-9s, severe substance intoxication and defending a pet, for instance, when a larger dog attacks their smaller pooch. 

So while there hasn’t exactly been an avalanche of reported incidents, in the words of the ultimate Welsh crooner, Sir Tom Jones, it’s not unusual.

All of this reminded me of the story I was told once of a fairly senior Kenyan policeman back in the mid-1990s. 

The cop was off duty and had gone to the Tea Room, an upcountry matatu terminus in Nairobi, to meet a relative who was visiting the city. Our policeman arrived early and decided to wait in his car while listening to the radio. It was the Moi era, when public service hirings and firings were announced in the news bulletins, and so these broadcasts were practically mandatory for government employees. 

If you knew Nairobi in those days, you would be aware that the River Road area was home to a lot of petty thieves, such as pickpockets, handbag snatchers, side-mirror swipers and an assortment of con artists preying on those they saw as simpletons from the villages making their debut in big bad Nairobi.

As the policeman sat in the front seat of the unmarked car listening to the radio, he was also aware of his surroundings and on the lookout for criminal behaviour. It was a warm day, so he had rolled down the window, and his arm was hanging out of the window.

Being left-handed, he wore his watch on the right arm and the sight of his wrist and the smart-looking watch wrapped around it proved too much of a temptation for this one passing crook. 

This paid-up member of the Nairobbery gang decided to swipe the watch and hoped to get lost in the crowds before the man wearing it could get out of the car and give chase. What the crook had not counted on was our man’s lightning speed reflexes. 

Exercising excellent situational awareness, he had already clocked the crook casing him, so when the thief grabbed for the watch, the policeman seized his arm and bit down hard, causing the thief to freak out and run away.

The policeman was armed, by the way, and could just as easily have shot the thief and gotten away with it, but he wasn’t the trigger-happy sort, and also the police force had recently been under the spotlight for what we in the media called “stray bullets” harming innocent members of the public.

When I heard the story, it was hard to imagine a Kenyan cop not shooting the perpetrator instantly, but even harder to imagine what drove the policeman to bite the hand of the stranger. I mean, ewww!

What would you have done?