Injured dog ran straight to hospital emergency department following attack

When a large aggressive dog attacked little Bella the Snorkie at the Central Experimental Farm in Ottawa, Canada on Friday, the bleeding and injured animal knew exactly where to go. She ran straight to the emergency department of The Ottawa Hospital’s Civic Campus. Bella, a 17-month-old Miniature Schnauzer-Yorkshire Terrier mix known as a Snorkie, was walking with owner Bruce Simpson in the Experimental Farms’s corn and bean fields at about 5:30pm when they encountered a woman and her dog, a German shepherd mix. Neither animal was on a lead, despite a long-standing policy that dogs on the farm’s property must be restrained. The snarling dog ran directly at Simpson and poor Bella, who weighs just 14 pounds. Before either Simpson or the other dog’s owner could react, it had grabbed Bella in its jaws and given her several vigorous shakes. The attack lasted just a few seconds. Simpson jumped at the large dog to separate it from Bella, and the woman managed to get her dog on a lead. “I was just screaming at her, very upset,” a still-shaken Simpson recalled.

The angry exchange continued for several minutes as Simpson called 911. “She was saying, ‘I didn’t know anyone was here. I came because I didn’t expect anybody else to be around,’” Simpson said. After refusing to give him her name, she turned and walked away. “She said I was scaring her because I was too upset,” said Simpson, who snapped a picture of the woman’s retreating back. When Simpson turned around to attend to Bella, she was nowhere to be seen. Still on the phone with 911, Simpson began a frantic search. It wasn’t until he returned to his car, where the 911 operator had told him to wait for police, that he noticed the voice-mail message on his cellphone. It was from Josh Picknel, a medic with the Ottawa Paramedic Service. Despite several deep bites and a three-to-four-inch flap of skin torn from her back, Bella had managed to make her way through the corn field, cross six lanes of rush-hour traffic, and present herself at the Civic’s emergency department.

Simpson and his wife had inscribed their cellphone numbers on a tag on Bella’s collar, and Picknel phoned them both to say the paramedic service had their dog. “The dog came running up and kind of looked like it was in distress,” said Keith Buchanan, the superintendent of operations for the paramedic service. “Tail between the legs and sort of this ‘I’m scared’ look on her face. She was terrified.” At first, Buchanan, who administered first aid to Bella, thought she had been hit by a car, “just the way some of her skin tears were. They were quite large.” He wrapped Bella in a towel to keep her calm and wrapped a bit of gauze around her muzzle so she wouldn’t nip at her benefactors. “Normally when dogs get a little bit of pain, they can’t talk, so they snap,” he explained. He downplayed his role in Bella’s rescue. “No big heroics or anything like that,” he muttered. “She was just an animal in distress, and I looked after her, that’s all.”

Buchanan joked that Bella’s appearance at the emergency department was a sign of “animal intelligence. If you’re hurt, the first one you want to call is a paramedic. Dogs just instinctively know that.” Simpson was impressed, too. “What a smart dog!” he exclaimed. “That’s pretty much the best place she could have gone. Which is weird.” After paramedics ferried Simpson and Bella to the Ottawa Veterinary Hospital on Boyd Avenue, Bella underwent three hours of surgery to stitch her together again. She was released late Saturday to her owners, though there’s some concern that the strip of torn skin might not re-attach and heal properly. He’s still upset that the woman allowed her large dog to run free. “If she knew there was a potential for that to happen, the dog should never have been off lead and should have been muzzled,” he said. Simpson has been in touch with city bylaw officers and has filled out a report on the incident. He’d like the woman to cover his veterinary bills, but most of all, he wants to make something is done so her dog doesn’t attack another defenseless animal. “I just don’t want it to happen to somebody else.”