KC ranks high in dog attacks on mail carriers, and some of them are ferocious

A dog’s bark can still jolt Kandy Almond back to the past.

She remembers the pain, the broken bones, the blood leaking out of her body. She remembers that she was supposed to have family pictures taken the next day and her husband nearly fainting when he saw her injuries.

Now, several years after the dog attack, she still goes about her job as a postal carrier, dedicated and smiling each day she walks through the doors of the James Crews Post Office.

“You have this thing in your head, ‘I’m the mail lady, my job is to get the mail delivered,’” Almond said.

Although her injuries were more severe than others, dog bites aren’t unusual for Kansas City mail carriers.

The city was ranked among the top 14 in the nation by the United States Postal Service for the number of postal workers attacked by dogs in 2014. Of 5,767 postal employees attacked nationwide by dogs, 30 happened in Kansas City. A total of 80 cities made the list.

The rankings were released in May by the Postal Service as part of National Dog Bite Prevention Week.

In 2013, the city ranked tenth nationally with 33. Still, Brent Toellner, co-founder of the Kansas City Pet Project, which operates the city’s animal shelter, said Kansas City may not be that much more dangerous than other metro areas.

Indeed, Wichita was ranked in the top 24 cities with 25 attacks and Kansas City, Kan., in the top 80 with 10, which is about the same number of postal dog bites per capita as Kansas City.

Still, any dog bite can be devastating, and Almond’s experience has stuck with her.

The weather was a little cold on Feb. 21, 2009; not frigid enough for snow, but still cold enough to keep most people indoors. Almond often delivered mail to the home on the 2700 block of Chelsea Avenue where two dogs barked at her from behind a fence. But when Almond got near the mailbox that day, the pit bull jumped, unlatched the fence door and charged at her. Another dog from behind the fence followed.

“Oh no,” Almond recalled saying as she was pulled to the ground.

The pit bull bit her arm while the other dog bit her scalp and started dragging her. Unable to fight both dogs off, Almond began screaming. With each bite, each injury, Almond recalled that she started saying goodbye to her family.

“I’m done,” she recalled thinking to herself.

Hope came in the form of two nearby men, one younger and fit, the other an older man who walked with a cane. Almond remembers the younger man borrowing the cane to knock one of the dogs off her. The next thing Almond remembered, the attack was over.

The mauling had lasted for a short time, but for Almond, it felt like it went on forever. When she stood up, she couldn’t see out of one eye, and she said she felt like someone had dumped a gallon of water down her body. She looked down to see it wasn’t water, but her own blood.

Almond said she spent six days in the intensive care unit after the attack. She had a broken nose, four broken bones in her wrist and the dog that had dragged her by her scalp had also bitten a chunk out of her right arm. The pit bull had torn her face from under her eyebrow to behind her ear.

During her treatment, Almond remembers one of her doctors telling her that she looked like a jigsaw puzzle, but the good news was that it looked like all the pieces were still there. She said she’s had three plastic surgeries since the attack.

Daniel Gomez, manager of the James Crews Post Office, said he has known Almond since 2012. He called her 2009 incident “tragic.”

Gomez said in the area the post office delivers to, residents can sometimes have a dog not as a pet but as protection. That can make the dog more hostile to people it’s not familiar with.

“Most of the carriers, they’re pretty much aware there are dogs are out there,” Gomez said. “They do what they can to protect themselves.”

Toellner, of the Kansas City Pet Project, cautioned against using the Postal Service’s rankings to draw too many conclusions about the danger of dogs in the city.

For one thing, the sample sizes are small so just a few dog attacks can influence the Postal Service rankings.

For another, he said, dogs and postal workers have a complex relationship because of this recurring situation: a dog sees an unfamiliar postal worker, the dog barks, the mail worker drops off the mail and then leaves. He said that can escalate to dogs becoming more frustrated with the postal worker’s presence over time.

“The dog learns, ‘If I bark, the mail carrier leaves,’” Toellner said. “It’s unfortunate, but every single day, they reinforce that the barking makes them leave.”

Toellner said dog bites can happen more frequently in the summer when dogs spend time outside in the warm weather and also in the later winter months of February and March.

“They’re tired of being cooped up and not getting the exercise they need,” Toellner said.

There was no denying that the attack on Almond was severe — it caused the postal worker to go to counseling.

“For a while, I hated dogs,” Almond said. “I hated every dog out there. I thought somehow they were all trying to get me.”

When she returned to the office, Almond said her co-workers were surprised at her persistence to come back to work.

“This is a sign from God that you’re not supposed to be doing this,” she recalled one telling her.

The thought of going back out on the streets terrified her. She’d spent the time after her recovery working in the post office rather than delivering mail. She slowly worked her way back to her old job by delivering express mail.

“I wanted to get back out there,” Almond said. “I didn’t want this to defeat me.”

Six months after the attack, she was back on the street delivering mail. Almond said her manager at the time made sure she was put on a different route.

“I want to do my best at anything I do,” Almond said. “I don’t want to be the weak one.”

Most days, the 42-year-old postal employee quietly goes about her work. Almond said she tries to be friendly with dogs on her route so they’ll get used to her as time passes. Almond’s husband, son and niece also work for the Postal Service, and she worries about their safety. Both her son and niece have been bitten while on the job.

Every once in a while, Almond will hear a dog barking or see one at a house she’s delivering mail to, and in that moment, the fears of the past don’t seem far away. On those days, Almond remembers what she told herself when she first started delivering mail after the attack.

“You plan on doing this the rest of your life,” Almond recalled saying to herself. “You can’t be scared of every little thing.”

This story was originally published June 9, 2015 at 3:03 PM with the headline "KC ranks high in dog attacks on mail carriers, and some of them are ferocious."