Toronto boy gets nasty surprise from tarantula brought in as birthday treat

When you think of animals brought to entertain kids at a birthday party you're probably thinking a pony, a goat or maybe a little monkey.

But Matthew and Allison Litzinger wanted their three-year-old son's third birthday to be special, so the Toronto couple arranged for an exotic animal handler to bring over a baby kangaroo and an owl and, oh yes, a tarantula.

The boy, who the Litzingers didn't want named, got to hold the Rose Hair tarantula and that seemed to go well. Until a few seconds later when he began to blink, rub his eye and start to cry, the National Post reports.

He didn't stop crying for hours. His discomfort went on for days, the Post says.

The Litzingers later learned their son had been the target of the tarantula's lesser known defence mechanism called urticating hair.

Spooked tarantulas can inflict venomous bites but they are also able to release a cloud of tiny barbed hairs by rubbing their abdomens. In people, they normally can cause nothing more than an itchy rash but if they reach the eyes they can embed themselves and potentially damage vision.

The web site AmazingTarantulas.com calls the the hairs "nature's pepper spray," designed to ward off potential predators.

“It was pretty traumatic for our son,” Allison Litzinger told the Post. “We tried to wash his eyes out, and he just started screaming at the top of his lungs.”

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Her son has had to make frequent trips to the hospital since his birthday party last September to treat the problem. The Litzingers said they weren't aware tarantulas, which are often brought to schools for educational purposes, presented this threat.

“There’s no real warning," Matthew Litzinger told the Post. "No one should ever have to go through something like this. No child should ever have to, and no parents of those children."

The Post noted similar cases, including one in England where a man cleaning his tarantula's glass enclosure was blasted with the tiny hairs, which lodged in his cornea, and an incident involving a 16-year-old boy whose eyes were hit when he let his pet tarantula crawl on his face.

The spider brought to entertain at the Litzingers' party belongs to Hands On Exotics, which offers a wide array of unusual animals, from a flamingo to a Siberian lynx. Besides the tarantula, its offerings of "creepy crawlies" includes scorpions, some of which it says "make great, easy pets and are not difficult to handle."

Co-owner Del Niedzialek said he had no idea the spider's heairs could get into a person's eye and potentially cause long-term damage. His company will no longer let clients handle tarantulas.

“This caught us just as much by surprise as it did them,” he told the Post. “We feel extremely guilty about it. We do file it under equal measures unlucky and unfortunate.”

That's an understatement as far as the Litzingers are concerned. Their son faces a long period of monitoring to determine if the hairs will cause lasting damage.

[ Related: Doctors remove spider hiding in woman's ear canal ]

Dr. Kamiar Mireskandari, an ophthalmologist at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, told the Post it took a microscope to determine that 20 of the tiny hairs were embedded in the boy's left eye.

“This is so rare, you cannot even find that much written on it in the literature,” he said.

Mireskandari decided not to try to remove the hairs for fear of causing more damage.

“You cannot find them all because they are so fine, and no instrument is that fine to dig them out,” he said.

The only course is to watch and wait, hoping scar tissue will form around the hairs and prevent them from burrowing deeper. It requires the Litzingers to keep their son from getting anything in his eye, even water. He also can't rub his eye.

“Try getting a three-year-old not to rub their eye,” Matthew Litzinger said. “It’s like getting a dog not to sniff. It’s an instinctive thing a child’s going to do. If they’re itchy, they’re going to scratch.”

His son has begun to show signs of improvement and the once-daily visits to the hospital now have dwindled to monthly. It will be a year before he's considered to have recovered.