Animal Behavior for Creators: Canid Bites
Source: Wikimedia commons; The Affinities of the Antarctic Wolf (Canis antarcticus)
Any creature with a mouth can bite. This includes domestic dogs, werewolves, and the humans who care for them.
This post came about due to overanalyzing the absolute shit out of a lovely piece of Once Upon a Time fanart by @konako, pictured here, featuring a bite from a quadripedal werewolf. Support artists: please reblog and fawn over the original work!
Disclaimers & qualifications: I am a practicing animal behavior professional, but this analysis doesn’t constitute a consultant-client relationship. If you’re having issues in real life, it’s important to contact a professional.
This analysis is meant to help you bring fidelity to your works of fiction, and you can embellish as the story needs. There are some things that I left out because they’re more relevant to real life than to fiction. Again: consult a pro.
Content warnings
Written descriptions of bite wounds. If you want images, google is your friend.
Discussion of canid bites, including towards children.
Discussion of animal aggression.
What’s under the cut:
How & Why Aggression Occurs
Animals vs. animals: differences between sentient & non-sentient characters
Elements of a Dog Bite
Identifying Characteristics
Putting it All Together
Further Reading
How & Why Aggression Occurs in Real Life
Do you hate conflict? You have something in common with animals.
Conflict in the animal world is risky, resource-intensive, and often dangerous. While it is often pictured in documentaries for its cinematic value, most of an animal’s life is going to be spent avoiding conflict as much as possible. A day spent without fighting might mean a day spent without injury, and a life lived long enough to reproduce.
But there are rare moments where conflict is necessary. Conflict might get you:
Space (distance from threats)
Resources (food, territory, mates, etc.)
Safety (threat removal)
Biting is the most overt, “loud” display of aggression, but most canines can accomplish these in different ways and avoid overt conflict. Consider other signals:
Scent markers
Turning away
Eye body language (sideways gaze, whale-eye)
Stiff body language
Lip curls
Growls
Snarls
Air snapping
Unfortunately, humans often fail to notice, ignore, or even suppress these conflict-avoidance strategies in domestic dogs. This leads to increased bites.
Note about predatory behavior: Predation is quiet, smooth, and taken upon the easiest target. Predation is not aggression.
Animals vs. animals: differences between sentient & non-sentient characters
In fiction, there are animals and there are Animals. We understand the inherent difference between Goofy and Pluto and it’s not just on how many legs they walk. While in real life there are only animals (the Pluto kind), fiction allows us to anthropomorphize and ascribe human characteristics and motivations onto all sorts of characters.
I’m grossly oversimplifying since this isn’t the subject, but I’ll differentiate animals from Animals by metacognition. Animals (Goofy) think about others and consider/plan, while animals (Pluto) meet more immediate needs.
In fiction, you can imply and infer intent/motivation where in real life this wouldn’t be helpful.
Fictional animals:
Pet dogs
Wild creatures
Some werecreatures
Fictional Animals:
Canids in anthropomorphic universes
Werecreatures
Sentient animals
Familiars
Anthropomorphic motivators are available to Animals, but not animals. Things like:
Jealousy
Guilt
Righteous anger
Sense of revenge/justice
If this serves your story, you can have these motivators in all sorts of characters regardless of their sentience. But keep in mind that we tend to look at animal behavior through our human lens, so this can cloud our judgment and actually make decisions that cause harm.
Canid Bite Characteristics
Source: Wikimedia commons Saint Michael's College Biology: Digital Coyote
Generally, bites that involve most of the mouth will replicate the shape you see on the skull. Canine bites carry an hourglass shape, while primate bites are much rounder. Rodent bites are a different shape than both.
Identifying general dentition can be hard with less clean wounds, but they can be used to differentiate between species. They can and have been used to identify people lying about dog bites that are actually human bites.
Types of Injuries
Bruising
This can happen with or without punctures and can be shallow or deep. The bigger the jaws, the easier it is to bruise skin. It’s a lot easier to bruise than it is to puncture, so you’ll see this on a lot of bite injuries.
Scratching
I don’t mean with claws. When you have movement in a single direction, usually from the dog or victim pulling away, you can have these long, lateral injuries. They can make wounds look worse than they are, especially on the hands and arms.
Determining direction on bite wounds requires looking at teardrop shapes. They generally move in the direction of the taper.
Punctures
These are pretty self-explanatory. The depth of a puncture is usually up to how inhibited the biter is. Most canids have pretty good control over how hard they bite, though naturally larger skulls have an easier time going through flesh. Generally, severity is determined by any bite that is more than half the length of a canine tooth.
In practice, that’s super arbitrary and a big criticism of bite scaling.
Flesh Tears
Flesh tears rarely occur without some shaking on the part of the biter, but you can get some deeper wounds with movement in a single direction.
This is where you start to see the deeper layers of skin and fat on the wounds.
The most dangerous flesh tears occur in multiple directions, and on wounds like this you might see the teardrop shapes pointing in multiple directions.
Mutilation
This is much rarer and usually reserved for severe aggression or predation. Tears are in multiple directions, skin and fat/muscle may be exposed, and organs may have been directly targeted.
Flesh Removal +/- Consumption
This is the most dangerous type of bite wound and one you’ll rarely see in domestic animals. Chunks will be missing, muscle/bone may be exposed, and organs may be missing. Google these wounds at your peril - they can be traumatizing.
Note on Rabid Mammals:
Rabies is a fatal prion disease that impacts the central nervous system and brain. While the media likes to show us rabid animals that act aggressively, most cases of rabies look quieter. Rabies impacts the ability to swallow (causing foaming at the mouth) and sometimes you’ll see animals falling over, biting at the air (called fly biting), or just unable to move properly.
The onset of rabies is determined by how quickly the virus reaches the brain. The closer the bite is to the brain, the less time the victim has to receive post-exposure prophylaxis.
Size & Injury Potential
Naturally, bigger teeth come from bigger skulls which have bigger muscles. Size plays one part in how easy it is for the biter to cause damage, and this is why bites against small dogs and children can still be dangerous.
Domestic Dog Breed & Injury Potential
When selectively breeding, humans enhanced various elements of the predatory cycle.
Tracking/seeking/alerting (hounds, nordic)
Visually identifying prey (herders, sighthounds)
Chasing (sighthounds, herders, nordic)
Maneuvering around prey (herders)
Jump-biting (bull terriers, other terriers)
Holding on (retrievers, some terriers)
Retrieval/Carrying (retrievers, gundogs)
Consumption (reduced)
Note that locking jaws appear nowhere on that list. This is a myth. While some dogs bite and hold, their jaws don’t physically lock.
Bite Direction
Dog bites with movement generally form a teardrop shape with the deepest part of the puncture at the site of the tooth and a teardrop shape in the direction of movement. Sometimes this is hard to see, especially in severe bite wounds or those occurring from multiple directions.
Determining direction tells you a lot about the orientation of the biter and the victim, and you can use that in conjunction with other things like a witness’s description.
Attempting to Operationalize Bites Through Numeric Scales
In real life, we need data. We need to measure things. “Bad bites” and “dangerous bites” aren’t a thing - you need a scale to describe exactly what you’re seeing.
The most common type of bite scale used with dogs is the Dunbar Bite Scale, which gives you a good starting reference for the severity of bites between dogs and humans. It’s handy to look at. Again, in practice I run into question marks when evaluating the thickness of punctures, and it’s a common criticism. But when determining severity, these things matter:
Did the bite break skin?
Was there holding, shaking, or tearing?
Are there multiple bites on the victim?
How much distance did the biter cross to get to the target?
Mouth Involvement
Crossing distance to bite is resource-intensive, so the vast majority of bites only involve a small amount of the mouth. The most common teeth to leave impressions on skin are incisors and canines, and it’s not often that you’ll see super clean marks.
It’s rarer and more dangerous to see marks from the back of the biter’s mouth, as those teeth are used for consumption and chewing.
You’ll see back-of-mouth impressions more on small dogs just since there’s less skull space to work with, but even then the impressions aren’t usually further back than canine teeth.
Location of Bite Wounds
Where bites occur can tell us a lot about the relationship between the biter and the victim. It can imply conflict, past events, and even learning history.
In defensive bites, usually the dog will bite the closest target. It’s much more telling (and rare) if farther targets are favored.
Common locations:
Hands & arms (adults)
Ankles
Faces (children - their height is eye level with many dogs)
Less common locations:
Legs (this happens occasionally, but people generally wear pants and don’t reach out with their legs)
Chest, stomach, or thighs (much rarer)
Identifying Characteristics
To identify species or individual, you might examine:
Tooth spacing
Tooth quality
Breaks, uneven teeth, or wear patterns
This is my very not-a-lawyer recollection: any characteristics found on a bite wound can be used to determine if someone is NOT the biter, but you can’t do that the other way around. It helps ELIMINATE, not DETERMINE the aggressor.
Putting it All Together
This all started from overanalyzing a piece of Once Upon a Time fanart I really love because I’m one of those werewolves > vampire people. And for all that show did wrong, I just love it. Go support this @konako, okay?
Link to fanart: https://konako.tumblr.com/post/676461241274925056
I cannot understate how fucking huge this bite mark is. That scarring was created by teeth that broke the skin like wet tissue. It’s rare to see impressions that clean, and that implies very little movement. There are subtle teardrop shapes on either end, but even then that is a very subtle pullback.
That means neither Ruby nor Snow moved much at all. This happened very quickly and with almost no movement at the time of the bite. Part of that is artistic clarity, but every once in a while you’ll get something that looks that clean.
Despite the huge teeth, this bite is REALLY inhibited. The chief way to tell this is because only the front of the mouth is involved. There are punctures, but they’re from the incisors. I had made the mistake of thinking the teeth on either end were the canines, but I miscounted. They’re simply the larger incisors on either end of the very front row of teeth. They’re larger, but not quite as large as the canine teeth.
(if they were intended to be canine teeth and it’s just reducing the incisor #s for clarity, sorry! either way it’s a big difference in size)
A canid has to try very hard and very deliberately to use that little of their mouth and to avoid touching with canines altogether. I very rarely see bites with no involvement of the canines other than play-nibbles or scrapes. Yes, the skull and teeth involved are huge, but despite heavy scarring, this was inhibited.
There is a considerable held back in a wound like this. It’s full of regret, a moment too quick to contemplate a choice, and inhibition. This type of wound carries so much fear it’s difficult to communicate just how deeply it goes. This bite was used to create space quickly.
Usually, it takes more effort to reach targets that are higher up on the body. Given Ruby’s height off the ground, she probably aimed further down or Snow’s leg was up. Low bites are defensive. The important thing is Snow did not reach out with her hands, which is how most canid-human conflict escalates.
Everything about this wound screams fear bite. It was quick, involved so little of the mouth (not even the canines), and there was minimal movement from either party. It’s a low part of the body that doesn’t usually extend out. The wound probably bruised like hell, but there is an incredible amount of regret and inhibition in a bite that looks like this.
Even when wounds are large or deep, the impressions they leave can tell you a lot about what happened. In real life, all we have is data, but spinning that data gives you a stronger and truer narrative in your creative works.
Further Reading
If you’re interested in learning more, here are some excellent professionals and organizations to get you started.
James Crosby: Teaches dog bite forensics courses and brings objective observation to evaluation of dog bite cases. Has interviews on several podcasts.
Michael Shikashio: One of the field’s leading experts on dog aggression and behavior consulting, and is an excellent resource on what dog aggression professionals see in practice.
Lili Chin: Illustrator with a ton of free resources on dog body language and behavior.
American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior (AVSAB): Professional organization with some public position statements. They dispel a lot of common myths and are good to read over. https://avsab.org/resources/position-statements/