Travel Trouble
"Absolutely horrendous": Mother recalls the moment her daughter was attacked by a dog
A distraught mother has recalled the terrifying moment her four-year-old daughter was mauled at a popular beach.
Natalie was on holiday in Western Australia at a beach in Quindalup in the state’s south with her four children when the brutal attack occurred.
Recalling the moment to the ABC, Natalie said her daughter Lucia was playing with her siblings in knee-deep water when the dog raced towards her, before lunging and taking hold of the little girl’s neck and shoulder.
Once latched on, the animal dunked and dragged Lucia underwater and refused to let go.
“I ran into the water to try to pull Lucia off,” Natalie told the public broadcaster.
“However, the power and the strength of a dog of this breed and size, you’re powerless to do anything.”
Natalie said by the time they unlocked the animal’s jaw and released Lucia, she was “bleeding heavily” and “listless”, adding, “Her neck, shoulder and back had big puncture wounds. She wasn’t even crying.”
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“The ordeal was absolutely horrendous in every way,” she said, adding in an interview with 7News that the attack was “unprovoked” and “out-of-the-blue”.
“He was very big, very strong. There was no way that we could control what was unfolding … your instinct as a mother is to remove your child from that situation, but you couldn’t,” she said.
“He wasn’t stopping, he just kept biting her.”
A bystander was quick to rush to the child's side and offer help, and while Natalie's eldest child called 000 and informed her mother that an ambulance as at least 30 minutes away, the mother decided to drive her daughter to the hospital herself.
Soon after arriving, Lucia was flown to Perth Children’s Hospital and is now on the road to recovery after undergoing several surgeries.
“It’s horrible to see your child to go through that. She’s this tiny, innocent little thing, and otherwise so happy,” Natalie said.
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“It was extremely traumatic, and I don’t want anyone else to go through that.”
“She cannot be around our family pet now. She doesn’t want to go to the beach or be around dogs anymore,” Natalie told the ABC.
“That beach is where most of our family holiday memories are. It should be a safe place. It’s going to be a bit of a road to turn it back into that, from a place of fear.”
According to local council, the City of Busselton, the attack happened on a beach where dogs are permitted off-lead. The rottweiler has now been “euthanised, and an investigation is currently underway.”
Image credits: ABC News
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