“It was dripping, it was running down her arm,” Smith said Friday as she recalled holding her six-year-old daughter on her lap so a doctor could clean the dog-bite wound on Amelia’s arm.
With that experience from two weeks ago fresh in her mind, Smith was brought to tears on Wednesday when she learned a New Germany girl had been bitten in the face by the same dog that had bitten Amelia.
On March 20, Amelia was playing at the house of the five-year-old victim of Wednesday’s attack. She is friends with the injured girl and her sister.
“The three girls were left alone in the home,” Smith said. “The adults were outside, and Amelia and the two girls were in a room playing makeup when the dog came into the room and just attacked her,” Smith said.
The dog, believed to be a pit bull-Labrador mix, latched on to her daughter’s left arm without warning, she said.
“It wasn’t provoked. It’s not that they were playing with it and it happened by accident.”
One of the other girls ran outside to get help from the adults, Smith said.
The dog let go of Amelia’s arm on its own.
The adults wrapped her arm in paper towel and her father, who was visiting the dog’s owner, rushed her to Fishermen’s Memorial Hospital in Lunenburg where Smith met them.
When she saw her daughter, “blood was soaking through the paper towel, there was blood on both her hands, her shirt was ripped,” from where the dog had bitten through the sleeve that covered her arm, Smith said.
As soon as the paper towel was removed, “I knew it was a severe bite.”
“There were three very, very, deep puncture wounds and all along her arm you could see the indentation of all the other dog’s teeth. You could see the indentation of each individual tooth.”
Amelia sat on her mother’s lap crying and shaking as a doctor cleaned her arm. Smith said it seemed as if her daughter was in shock she was shaking so badly. She wouldn’t even take chocolate when it was offered her.
Photographs show Amelia’s swollen arm with bloody puncture wounds above and below her elbow. The holes could not be stitched, so the doctor bandaged her arm and gave her a seven-day course of two different antibiotics to prevent infection.
Blood soaked through the white bandage even before they made it home from the hospital.
Smith said Amelia told her she had been warned by the dog’s owners not to play with it because it was “mean.”
“So the dog’s owners knew he was prone to being aggressive,” she said.
The Lunenburg County woman has a unique perspective on what happened because she owns two dogs — a boxer and a pit bull.
“It has nothing to do with the breed of dog,” she said. “It has to do with ownership. The dog owners were not responsible. That dog was not properly trained or socialized.
Smith reported the incident involving her daughter to the RCMP and the District of Lunenburg’s animal control officer but was told the chances of charges being laid were slim because the dog was on its own property.
Smith, however, believes the municipality should have applied for a warrant to seize the dog.
The municipality’s dog bylaw says, a dog is deemed dangerous or fierce if, “without provocation (it) has attacked or injured any person or animal.”
The bylaw also says the dog control officer can seek a warrant to seize a dog if he believes the animal is fierce or dangerous and he can’t reach the dog’s owner to ask that it be destroyed.
The animal control officer has declined interviews.
The dog is being euthanized at its owner’s request after being held for 10 days to ensure it doesn’t have rabies. But Smith said she hopes the municipality doesn’t consider the matter over.
“I truly hope something comes of this and that people are held responsible.”
(TheChronicleHerald.ca - April 5, 2013)
