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.