While calling the incident that left her 5-year-old son Kash with injured eye 'a bad dream,' the 'Don't Be Tardy...' star believes that the dog didn't attack the boy.
- Nov 10, 2017
AceShowbiz - Five months after her son Kash was bitten by a dog, Kim Zolciak-Biermann reveals it was their dog Sinn that bit the 5-year-old boy. In a new interview with PEOPLE, the reality TV star opens up about the incident and why they decided to keep the dog.
"It was a like a bad dream," she says of the bit, which left her son with a scratch a millimeter away from his eye. "Our dog Sinn is heavily, heavily trained. Kash is his favorite. It made absolutely no sense to any of us. This is nothing I ever thought I'd be dealing with in my life."
The incident happened when Sinn and Kash were playing outside alongside Kim's other son KJ, 6, while her husband Kroy Biermann was using a leaf blower to clean the yard. "Sinn doesn't like the blower, so he's already in high alert," Kim says in a new episode of "Don't Be Tardy...".
She goes on recalling, "My back was to the dogs and the boys. I hear Kash be loud, and then I hear barking. And then I hear Kash screaming, he's crying very loud. At that point I think he's scared, but then I realize Sinn bit Kash. He's dripping blood everywhere on his shirt. He pulls his hands down and there's multiple lacerations, I can't see his eye. I knew it was a very dire emergency."
Kroy admits he was very angry with the dog after it bit his son and wanted to get rid of it. "I hated Sinn," Kroy says. "I genuinely felt a deep rage for what he had done to my son. Sinn was always a good dog, extremely obedient and protective and not at all aggressive. He's hyper-active and hyper-sensitive but wants to work and loves to be commanded. I love my dog, and nothing like this had ever happened to me before. But it's my son. I don't love anything more than my flesh and blood. I thought, 'I don't want to see the dog - he doesn't get a second chance."
He adds, "... but Kash loves him." The boy asked to see Sinn even when he was still in the hospital. Kim adds, "Sinn and Kash have been best friends since the day we got Sinn. Kash is an absolute animal lover, and Sinn is definitely his favorite, without a shadow of a doubt. That's why it was extra hard."
After speaking with nearly a dozen behavioral specialists, child psychologists and dog-bite survivors, Kim and Kroy understood that Kash had been bitten, not attacked. "It was not an attack - he nipped at Kash's face in an attempt to communicate with Kash. Not that that is an excuse. But he took off running. It wasn't as if he was attacking. Sinn knew he had done wrong," Kim says, revealing they watched security footage of the incident.
"If Kash ever looked at me and said that he didn’t want to be around Sinn or showed any hesitation, then he wouldn't be here," Kim explains their decision to keep the dog. "We love Sinn, he's part of our family, but our children will always come first without a doubt."
But that doesn't mean they don't take precautionary measures after the incident. "Sinn had a lot of freedom before. He would sleep in the crate at night, but during the day he would roam around the house or we’d let him outside. Nobody really watched him," Kroy says.
He adds, "Now his crate is locked with a key that only Kim and I have the keys to. He's supervised all the time when he's out. And the only time he runs around free is in the fenced-in dog run we built for him the backyard, which gives him about 400 sq. ft. of grassed space." Sinn also occasionally wears a muzzle.
The couple additionally told their children to be more aware of dog's behaviors. "We've taught our kids, no matter how nice dogs are, they are capable of anything and cannot communicate to us in another way than through action - be it barking, growling, biting, scratching, or running away," Kroy shares. "A child sees flurry, fluffy, fun, slobbery ... they don't see danger. And we didn't either, as adults who had always owned dogs but never gone through something like this. But you have to understand those triggers. Whether it's loud noise, their tail being pulled, whatever it is, it should be on the forefront of everybody's mind. Not as fear, but just awareness."
