In the past five years, 1,000 postal workers have had a finger partly or fully bitten off through a letterbox. Many others have experienced horrific, life-changing injuries, too. Why is this problem suddenly so much worse?
Early in December last year, Kirsteen Hobson was covering a colleague’s round. A postal worker for the past nine years in the Highland port of Oban, Hobson remembers the date because she was really looking forward to a Christmas night out. She was on the communal balcony of a block of flats when she saw one of the customers leaning out of his front door to greet her. “I said hi,” she says. “I bent over to get the mail, to hand over to him, and the next thing I knew there was a dog on my face – literally on my face.”
Before she could react, the alsatian had bitten off a large part of her top lip. “I felt my lip come off, then I managed somehow to push the dog off me. Then it lunged at my face again and got me under the eye and on my forehead.” Hobson pushed the dog off again and fled towards the door. As she retreated, the dog bit her a third time, in the thigh. She had the wherewithal to open the door to the stairwell and shut it behind her. “Had that door not been there, I don’t think I would have been able to get the dog off me.” The owner “wasn’t able to control the dog at all”, she says.
