To be bitten by a tarantula or other exotic arthropod, typically
one’s own pet or the pet of someone
one knows personally. If you work with large, venomous animals regularly sooner or later you will get tagged. Many T keepers can go years or decades without getting tagged once but eventually one that plays with fire will get burned, so to speak. The good news is that most spiders deliver dry bites as a warning when tagging their owners. One of the many things that makes OBTs perhaps the most difficult
spider to keep is the fact that not only do they sometimes
tag their handlers for seemingly no reason, they rarely deliver dry bites. Getting envenomed by a new world is no worse than a bee sting if the bee had a
stinger a quarter inch
long but old world bites are “medically significant”, inducing localized swelling, generalized
pain and malaise and very painful full-body cramps that come and go for days on end.