I was working an out of state internship one summer during my undergraduate. I was very fortunate in that I had found a family that was willing to let me stay in their house for free, so long as I gave the occasional help with things like lawnmowing and other little chores. This family also had two dogs, an American bulldog, and a small mutt. The day that I arrived and was meeting them for the first time, the dogs were going berserk (charging around the house, jumping on everyone) with a new person being in the house, which didn't bode well for how well they had been trained. As I was moving things into the room they were letting me use, the bulldog ran in and starting chewing on some of my things immediately. Second bad sign. After the owners finally caught it, got it to drop what it had in its mouth, and got it out of the room, we went down to their living room so we could chat, work out living arrangements, and get to know each other.

I could tell the owners were absolutely obsessed with their dogs, and I wanted to get off on the right foot, so as we were chatting I made sure to pretend like I really liked their dogs and pet them when they were near. Eventually the bulldog settled onto the couch right next to me, so I scratched its head while I was talking to the family. After a few minutes of this, the dog then shifted and laid across my lap. I wasn't a huge fan of this, but, again, wanting to get off on the right foot with owners, I just rolled with it. Shortly after, the dog began humping my thigh. It was small enough motions that the owners didn't notice at all what was going on, and instead only commented that the dog had a very strange expression on its face. Feeling like this had DEFINITELY now gone way too far, I finally pushed the dog off my lap and onto the ground. Its response to this was to then start trying to hump my shin instead. It gripped my calf with its front paws, which had not been clipped in quite a while, and did not have the best of grips. It began to slide down, and so gripped tighter. One of the claws dug into my calf and I got a nice 6 inch gash as it slid down. At this point the owners finally intervened and for the first time thought that maybe they should put the dog in its kennel for a while, and then said the classic pet owner thing of, "Sorry, I swear he's never done anything like that before." Needless to say, I was not at all happy with this situation, but given that I was getting a free room to stay in for 3 months in a very expensive area to live in as a broke college student, I smiled and pretended like I was not upset at all. I tried not letting them see that the dog had injured me, but was unsuccessful when blood began dripping onto their floor. I then said something like, "Whoops, I think the dog got me a little" and the only response I got was, "Oh he definitely didn't mean to!" No other response when I was sitting there bleeding all over their house...

I never had any other run ins with that dog over the next 3 months I lived there, thankfully. The scratch was deep enough that it actually turned into a pretty decent sized scar on my calf. It is noticeable enough that I have been asked about it on multiple occasions, but I never had the guts to actually tell anybody how I got it. I just never could bring myself to say, "I got it because a dog humped my leg."