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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.
In shock, Hobson went to A&E. “A woman was dry-heaving looking at my face,” she says. After being temporarily patched up, she was sent to the nearest plastic surgery unit. Before she set off, she went to the loo. “I looked down and thought: ‘What is that?’ and it was my lip, just sitting on the toilet floor. Obviously, my lip got caught in my jacket.”
She needed two operations: one to tackle the bite in her leg and stitch her head and eye wounds; and a second to rebuild her lip, grafting skin from inside her mouth. After spending four days in hospital, she was off work for three and a half months. She is still far from 100%. “It changed my whole face,” she says. The wound under her eye is “still lumpy” and her thigh has struggled to heal.
I struggle with panic attacks since it happened. It’s not rational – it’s fear
The severity of injuries has also increased alarmingly. “Many sustain life-changing injuries. Many cannot continue as a postal worker out on delivery as a result of the physical and psychological impact of these attacks,” says Dave Joyce, the health, safety and environment officer at the Communication Workers Union (CWU). “They are dreadful.”
That is no exaggeration: I see pictures of shocking injuries (including Hobson’s) and hear of several postal workers who have left the job as a result of attacks. According to the CWU, 1,000 postal workers have had a finger or part of a finger bitten off through letterboxes in the past five years.
“There’s still a bit of a joke in our society, a throwback to the 1970s – Benny-Hill-type sketches of dogs chasing postmen,” says Lizz Lloyd, Royal Mail’s director of health and safety. On a recent visit to a stately home, she says, she was appalled to see they were selling “postman-flavour” dog treats in the cafe. But as the experiences of Hobson and many other postal workers show, there is nothing funny about it. “Dog attacks and dangerous dogs is a national crisis,” says Joyce. “Our workers are on the frontline.”
Darren Conlon, a postie for two and a half years, agrees: “This is happening all the time. I’m not the only person in my team who has been attacked.” In November 2023, Conlon was delivering mail to a house in Plymouth. “I had heard dogs on the property in the past,” he says. “But I’d never seen them and when that happens multiple times, you assume everything is fine.” It wasn’t: as he walked up the driveway, four dogs ran over. “I thought the best thing I could do is approach them in a friendly manner, so I put my head down, showing I was not threatening, and a greyhound came straight for me. It literally hit me in the front. You know instantly: oh, no, this one’s not playing.”
Conlon tried to use his postbag as a shield. “It grabbed it, shook it in its teeth and pushed it to one side.” He hid his hands, so the dog “latched on to the back of my left thigh. It was well and truly gripped on. It was not funny at all.”
The owner appeared and after a struggle, managed to pull the dog off. Conlon was left with a deep wound that required treatment and a tetanus injection. “I couldn’t sit down for several days.”
The ferocity of the attack shocked him: “I was in the Royal Marines for several years, so I’m quite used to traumatic events, but this one was a little bit different.”
Over the past nine years, Lincolnshire postal worker Paula Anderson has suffered five dog attacks. In the first, a bull mastiff jumped over a low garden fence and attacked her as she bent down to deliver mail. “I put my arm up to protect my face and it bit me on the elbow.” Despite swift treatment, the deep and painful puncture wounds became infected, requiring two courses of antibiotics. She was also attacked twice by the same jack russell – the first time it bit her wrist, again necessitating antibiotics; the second time, she was able to fight it off.
In the past six months, she has been bitten twice: once handing over a parcel in a doorway and once by a chihuahua loose in a garden. There have been “loads of near-misses”, too: “I’ve run out of gardens as fast as I could go and whacked gates shut … It just happens.”
So what is going on? For a start, there are simply more dogs about. Dog ownership expanded dramatically during and after the pandemic, with pet food industry figures now indicating there are 13.5m dogs in the UK. The phenomenon of behavioural problems in dogs who missed out on socialisation and training opportunities during lockdowns has been well documented, too.
Added to this, Lloyd says, the return to hybrid or full-time, on-site work now means that “a lot of those dogs are spending more time in isolation and they’re not used to that. The doorbell goes and it’s the most exciting thing that’s happened to them all day. They’re increasingly territorial when they protect the home.”
Louise Glazebrook, a canine behaviourist and author of The Book Your Dog Wishes You Would Read, isn’t surprised to hear that attacks have increased. “We need to start talking about how our human decisions have impacts on the dogs we are sharing our homes with,” she says. That includes unexpected triggers such as the expanses of glass in modern houses and flats, which can be “really disconcerting for our dogs”.
Then there’s our online shopping habit – another Covid hangover. “Post used to be once a day. Now, with online deliveries, it can be a gazillion times a day and the drivers can be in helmets. Some dogs can find the sudden banging of a knocker quite scary. The way we live has changed and that impacts our dogs.”
It affects our posties (and other delivery workers) too, and the repercussions can linger long after a bite heals. “It’s frightening,” says Anderson. “Every day after, for weeks and weeks, you hear a dog barking and you think: where is it? Is it loose? Is it going to come up and is it going to bite me?” Conlon agrees: “I always think I can get through anything in life, but now whenever I hear a dog and I’m doing my post round, my level of alertness goes through the roof. It affects you mentally. This is why I want to talk about it.”
“I struggle with panic attacks since it happened,” says Hobson. “It’s not really a rational thing; it’s fear, so it’s hard to overcome, but I have to try.” She is cautiously testing a return to work, uncertain if she will be able to cope long-term. Her old round remains off limits: “I just can’t go back. Having that feeling of being trapped in a block of flats …”
A dog bite can have consequences for the dog and dog owner, too. “If something happens, it’s horrible for everybody,” Lloyd says. Repercussions can range from Royal Mail suspending delivery until a problem is resolved (this can affect whole blocks and sometimes streets) to custodial sentences. The owner of the dog that attacked Hobson was sentenced to 140 hours of community service and received a 10-year ban on owning a dog. That was fairly lenient: dogs can be euthanised and, under section 3 of the Dangerous Dogs Act, owners can face unlimited fines and up to five years’ imprisonment if their dog bites someone (rising to 14 years for a fatal attack).
A dog that is territorial should not be going to the door to meet anyone
The CWU’s Joyce regrets the low number of prosecutions under the act and the low level of penalties generally imposed when cases do go to court; too many aggravated offences end in only a Community Resolution order (an informal arrangement intended for lower-level offences), he says. “The combination of poor enforcement by the police and poor penalties being handed down by the judiciary is not helping our cause at all. We’ve got to get better enforcement.” He highlights the fact that Royal Mail has successfully privately prosecuted more than 30 owners after dog attacks.
So what can owners do? Plan ahead, for a start. Postal delivery hours are predictable even if Amazon et al are not, so shutting a reactive dog in another room or behind a stair gate with a toy or treat when the post is due can prevent a lot of problems arising. If the dog is likely to jump, you can stack one stair gate on top of another, says Gemma Taylor of the Blue Cross animal welfare charity.
When there’s a knock at the door, it’s a good habit to put your dog in another room anyway, especially if it’s more reactive. “A dog that is territorial should not be going to the door to meet anyone,” says Glazebrook, who adds that the same goes for dogs that are anxious or fearful around new noises or situations. Several postal workers I speak to mention the scenario where an owner opens the door, simultaneously trying to take their mail and hold their pet back with a knee or hand. It’s a disaster waiting to happen, and they see it all the time.
The Blue Cross also recommends using a letterbox guard to prevent finger bites, or an external mailbox. Other tips include closing blinds so your dog can’t see the postie’s approach through the window and get worked up, and teaching an emergency “stop” command. These and many more are covered in a new, free Blue Cross “Protecting your Postie” webinar. Anyone can sign up, and the next session takes place on 27 September.
But it’s also important to ensure you are meeting your dog’s welfare needs, says Taylor: that your pet is pain-free, can express its natural behaviours, and enjoys companionship, a suitable diet and a comfortable environment. “A dog that can’t settle, that is stressed, that isn’t able to relax in the house is not ‘normal’,” agrees Glazebrook. “It is something that we need to do a deep dive into and address, because it won’t just get better.” She advises against owners looking for a YouTube quick fix for behavioural problems: “You can make the situation so much worse by not reaching out for tailored help or support.”
The postal workers I speak to are all dog lovers. Anderson is feeding her two spaniels when we speak; she never lets them come to the door. “Mine are really soft dogs,” she says. “I don’t think they would ever bite anybody, but you don’t take that chance, do you?” Hobson puts her French bulldog away, too. “He does bark – he’s just excited,” she says. “But people don’t want to be faced with that. If we shut them in, it solves all the problems.”
“We do care,” says Conlon. “I love dogs; we’ve got family dogs. Your dog is protecting you, it’s protecting your property, but please protect us as well. All we want to do is get people their post and parcels – and we get injuries that could change our lives.”
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