A FAMILY has vowed never again to give the dog a bone after their playful puppy was left yelping in distress.
Hayley Warner has banned bones from her house after her six-month-old German Shepherd got her jaw stuck on one.
Skye’s ordeal began when the bone became firmly wedged on the jaw behind her canine teeth like a donut.
It saw three members of the family holding her and pulling at the lodged item, but it would not budge.
Hayley, from Harwich, made a late-night dash to the emergency Vets Now clinic in, Brinkley Lane, Highwoods, Colchester, to seek help.
“We’ve got two Goldendoodles as well as Skye and we’ve had dogs in the past and hadn’t had anything happen with bones before,” she said.
“Skye was in the teething stage, so we let her chew on one rather than the furniture. She was playing with the bone in my daughter’s bedroom and instead of gnawing the outside of it, she started trying to hollow it out.
“She somehow managed to get her bottom jaw totally wedged on it. We only knew something was wrong when she started making her puppy screaming noises.
“When we ran in we could see it stuck there, a bit like a donut. We thought it’d just be a case of twisting it off again and three of us tried holding her and pulling but it wasn’t budging at all. Skye was getting more distressed, so we knew we needed help.”
Vet Caitlin Donovan said: “The indents within the beef bone had got caught on Skye’s teeth. It couldn’t just be pulled off and Skye was becoming too nervous with the dental burr to keep using that.
“We were just about to go through the procedure of putting her under a general anaesthetic to cut it off surgically when Skye had one last try and got it free.”
Hayley said: “It was amazing she somehow got her paw in and loosened it at just the right moment.
“Her teeth were fine, and she just had a couple of cuts and swelling around her jaw that went down in a couple of days. Bones are banned now.”
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