In April, Kim Zolciak Biermann announced that her then four-year old son, Kash, was almost blinded by a dog. But his recovery and her anxiety over the incident was about all she told us. Obviously, it’s her right to choose what to divulge, but Kim and her husband Kroy share virtually everything with the world. We’re talking about a couple who took a selfie from their kids’ hospital room. Given that Kim loves to call out her critics, her lack of details was odd. Well, now Kim and Kroy are telling the (mostly) whole story and it turns out that not only was it their own dog who bit Kash, but that they decided to keep the dog.
“It was a like a bad dream,” Kim, 39, tells PEOPLE exclusively of the bite, which left Kash in the hospital for 4 days, the 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.”
Though Kim shared news about the bite on social media after it happened, much of the details surrounding the incident have been unknown until now — including the fact that Sinn was the one who bit Kash. The two were playing outside alongside the Biermanns’ other son KJ, 6, when Kroy was using a leaf blower to clean the yard.
“Sinn doesn’t like the blower, so he’s already in high alert,” Kroy, 32, says on Friday’s episode of Don’t Be Tardy, which documents the aftermath of Sinn’s bite. “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.”
The decision to keep Sinn didn’t come easy. The Biermanns had rescued Sinn, husky-boxer mix, as a puppy three years earlier. Kroy’s instinct was to get rid him now.
Complicating matters was the fact that over the years, Sinn had formed an “incredible bond” with Kash. “Sinn and Kash have been best friends since the day we got Sinn,” Kim says. “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.”“I genuinely felt a deep rage for what Sinn had done to my son, but Kash loves him,” Kroy adds.” We didn’t want him to live a life with a phobia of dogs. We wanted him to understand it wasn’t his fault.”
“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 stresses. “We love Sinn, he’s part of our family, but our children will always come first without a doubt.”
I’ll be honest, I don’t know where to go with this story but I need to say up front that I don’t know much about dogs or animal behavior beyond being a dog/pet mom myself. A part of me thought, like the Daily Mail did, that they didn’t identify the dog because of a lawsuit so their silence was for liability reasons. Another part wanted to think they respected the sensitivity of the situation and had some restraint on sensationalizing it. According to the article, Kim spoke with “nearly a dozen behavioral specialists, child psychologists and dog-bite survivors” and spent a lot of time monitoring Kash’s anxiety after the attack. I guess I’d feel better if one of those professionals had been quoted for this story. I’m getting hung up on Kim’s comments about the dog being “heavily, heavily trained.” I don’t know if she’s trying to show that they are responsible dog owners or if the dog’s behavior suggested he needed more than usual training. But I understand the part about not wanting Kash to feel responsible for the dog’s removal or, likely, euthanasia. Not that that’s a reason to keep a dangerous animal but I can see how it led them to have the dog evaluated rather than automatically getting rid of him.
Kim said later in the article that the decision to keep Sinn, whose full name is Sinatra, ultimately was made because when she watched the security camera footage, it was obvious to her that Sinn bit Kash and didn’t attack him. She even went so far to say that Sinn “nipped (Kash) in an attempt to communicate”. Again, given the horrifying way she described this “bite,” I’d feel much more confident if someone with dog-behavior credentials was reporting this instead of Kim.
But here’s what else gets me – in what I assume is an attempt to put the public’s mind at rest as to whether the dog will hurt another person or another dog, Kim described how Sinn’s home routine has changed:
“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. 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,” Kroy says.
The dog’s crate has also been moved out of the home’s high-traffic area to give Sinn some sanctuary. He occasionally wears a muzzle, too.
These folks vacation all the time. When they aren’t away, it’s an endless stream of parties and appearances, including filming their reality show. If Sinn is muzzled in a crate for all that time, is he really having any quality of life?
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Photo credit: Wenn Photos and Instagram
