Mail Carriers Deliver Biting Plea to Dog Owners

Well, well. So “dog bites man” is news, after all.

They made it news Sunday--mail carriers, their spouses and kids, stomping along the sidewalks of Northeast L.A., the part of town with the worst dog-bite-to-postal carrier numbers in the city.

“Lock your dogs up . . . if you want your mail!” they chanted to mostly empty Sunday-morning porches. Up Avenue 34 they went, then turned around and marched back, toward the TV cameraman who had set up his tripod at the bottom of the street.

A woofing Rottweiler bounded toward a cyclone fence. Bill De La Torre, manager of the post office that serves these parts, saw him coming. “ Aha !” he said. “Where’s the mailbox? It’s not on the street, is it?”

Point taken. Snow, rain, gloom of night--or Sunday’s 92-degree heat--are nothing compared to a full set of choppers on a canine planted between the mail carrier and the mailbox.

Twenty times this year a dog has bitten some mail carrier in these parts--about a third of all the post office dog injuries citywide. The post office can suspend mail delivery to obdurate owners who won’t lock up dangerous dogs. In Van Nuys in 1985, carriers bypassed an entire cul-de-sac because of a dog named Sweetness.

Fidel Garay’s wounds are long healed, but on Sunday he looked like a page out of the Thomas Bros. guide: circles and arrows drawn on his leg and hand to show the seven bites from his 33 years of carrying a mail satchel.

But hey--he has three dogs of his own. He’s not anti-dog, just anti-bite.

He looked down at the black ink loops on his leg: “I hope this comes out.”

Mail carrier Anthony Millot brought his own 130-pound Rottweiler, Maximilian, to the sixth annual protest-picnic in Glassell Park. This is the same dog, now about twice the weight, that Millot rescued a year ago on his rounds from people who didn’t want him.

“The little (dogs) are worse ‘cause they’re always wanting to let you know they mean business,” Millot said. “The big ones are the laid-back ones. The little ones will sneak up on you.”

Dogs are not necessarily worse, but crime is. “There’s so many gangs; what they want is a tough-looking dog, then they let ‘em run,” Millot said.

More people get dogs for protection, not for pets, and teach them to bite, not to wag. Richard Carpenter broke an arm falling over a brick wall as a pit bull charged him.

“The reason the people had the dog out was because of gang activity,” he said. “They weren’t thinking of the mail carrier at all.” The dog’s teeth did not make contact. Carpenter’s two dog bites came, he said, from dogs belonging to his relatives.