He's the coolest cat ever and would NEVER bite me.
The only animals I know that would NEVER bite are ones that can't bite. Any animal that can bite, will bite under the proper circumstances. One that hasn't bitten merely hasn't encountered the situation that will cause it to bite yet.
A friend of mine had a very docile cat. It only bit someone once, to my knowledge. It had been given a bath (something it tolerated quite well) but rather than towel it off, the owner decided to take a shortcut by using a blowdryer. That turned out to be a failed experiment which resulted in a number of very unpleasant puncture wounds.
Up until that time, the owner was confident that the cat would NEVER bite. In reality, the cat had no compunctions at all about biting once the hair dryer got close to it. It was just a matter of an adequate stimulus tripping its instinct to escape/defend itself.
Read about people badly injured, or even killed by family pets--it's distressingly common for the surviving family members to express disbelief even though they witnessed what happened with their own eyes. On the other hand, it's quite rare for one of them to comment that they never trusted the animal and always thought something like this would happen.
I understand the strong sentiment that people have toward their pets; it's very similar to the sentiment expressed by people who say that: "My child would never
<fill in the blank>!" I know they're wrong, because I was once that child and not only would I, I did. I know it because I see people repeating that mantra on the news even AFTER the evidence makes it clear that their child really did
<fill in the blank>.
I know that when people make statements about what animals would NEVER do that they're wrong. I know it because I've seen many incidents in the news where people were badly injured or killed by pets that would NEVER harm them. I know it because I listened to the tape of the bear eating Treadwell while he screamed for his girlfriend to hit it with a frying pan even though up until that point he thought he shared a kinship with bears and was not in any danger from them.
What a person believes a complex being (be it a pet, a wild animal, or another person) would NEVER do has no bearing at all on what it actually will or won't do. This is a very important lesson to learn and too many people are totally unwilling to accept it, and therefore sometimes get a very nasty and easily preventable surprise--or, worse yet, put someone else in a position to get a very nasty and easily preventable surprise. When the bear finished with Treadwell, it killed his girlfriend too--frying pan notwithstanding...
Animals that are complicated enough to make really interesting/fun pets are also complicated enough that predicting their behavior with 100% certainty is simply not possible. I'm not saying we should live in fear of animals, pets or other humans, or that we should constantly be expecting them to wreak mayhem at any moment. But just as it is irrational to live in constant fear of an unexpected response from an animal, or another human, it is unwise to convince one's self that there is nothing at all to fear, that total complacency is the proper mindset, that a particular animal or a species, or another human would NEVER cause harm. That kind of mindset is how people end up being interviewed on the news saying things like: "I never expected anything like this to happen to me." or "I couldn't believe what was happening until it was too late." or "X has never done anything like that before." That's how people end up as animal feces, or in a hospital, or in a black plastic bag with a zipper on it.
We're all interested in self-defense or we wouldn't be posting on/reading this subforum of TFL. The first step in self-defense is establishing a mindset that is firmly based in reality rather than on what we want to be true--regardless of how strongly we want something to be true or how much reality clashes with our ideal worldview.
