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slender Dutch shepherd named Rambo. From across the yard, I can hear Rambo’s ragged panting, the high-pitched whining and the sound of his teeth smacking together as he snaps at the air in anticipation. The sight of me in the suit has ignited the dog’s prey drive—the instinct that motivates him to chase and bite something into submission. It would seem that Rambo’s prey drive is quite high. My brain knows that I’m safe, but my body doesn’t—my muscles stiffen. It’s a physical primordial response. It’s fear.
    Jakubin stands with me in the middle of the yard, adjusting my stance. Before leaving me there on my own, he offers one final directive. “If you get knocked down, don’t move,” he says. “I’ll come and pick you up.”
    I hold my breath, shut my eyes, and wait for the blow. It takes Rambo under three seconds to clear the 25 feet separating us. I feel a spike of adrenaline as the dog makes contact, the force of his weight shoving me back as his open mouth locks around my arm. The sensation registers from dull to crisp, the trickle before the deluge as I feel teeth sink into me—and that sensation is pain.
    To put the feel of a dog bite into perspective, it might be helpful to start with what’s familiar—our own mouths. Per square inch, the human biteexerts 120 pounds of pressure. That’s enough to do some damage—think Mike Tyson, who managed to tear away a piece of Evander Holyfield’s ear with his teeth. Dogs have more teeth than humans, 42 of them, 4 but the big fangs, the canines, are the real damage doers. A dog’s straight, muscular jaw is designed for meat eating, unlike the construct of a human’s mouth and jaw, where the teeth move from side to side to better grind down on things that don’t try to run when you eat them, like vegetables.
    Different studies and tests have been conducted to try to measure the discrepancies in bite impact from the mouths of a variety of species. In an attempt to determine those animals who possess the most deadly powerful bites, the host of a National Geographic Channel series called Dangerous Encounters , Dr. Brady Barr, used a force-measuring device to scale an approximate bite impact among a range of different animals. 5 He found that lions and sharks use roughly the same force of bite pressure at 600 pounds per square inch. But were you to get an appendage caught in an alligator’s jaws, you could expect something like 2,500 pounds of pressure to clamp down on your muscles, tendons, and joints, making it highly unlikely that you’d get your limb back in working order, let alone get it back at all.
    Depending on the breed, dog bites boast considerable force, ranging from that of an American pit bull terrier at 238 pounds of pressure per square inch 6 to a bullmastiff, the breed with strongest bite, coming in at a recorded 552 pounds per square inch. 7 In training a dog to attack and detain a suspect, the objective is to get a full-mouth bite with a solid grip. The strength of the bite comes from the clamp of the dog’s jaws. A weak bite happens when, for example, only a dog’s front teeth catch the material, and that’s not a bite that will hold for long. But the power of a dog bite depends on many things, from the obvious (how large the dog is) to the difficult to measure or predict with regularity (the dog’s desire to bite). The military most often employs two breeds—the Belgian Malinois and the German shepherd. According to the Air Force, the average military working dog’s bite exerts somewhere between 400 and 700 pounds of pressure.
    I can’t say for sure exactly how many pounds of pressure are coming down on my arm—Rambo isn’t a very big dog, and I’m fully aware that what I’m experiencing is hardly pushing the limits of dog-bite pain. And because I know this implicitly, I grit my own teeth and force a smile, taking