Mother shares dog beach warning after daughter mauled by rottweiler in WA

When four-year-old Lucia was mauled by a rottweiler at a WA beach last Tuesday, her mother Natalie feared her daughter would not survive the horrific incident.

Natalie was holidaying in the state’s south, at a beach in Quindalup off Geographe Bay Rd, with her four children, when her youngest daughter Lucia was attacked.

The four-year-old girl suffered serious injuries, with the dog’s teeth missing one of her arteries by just millimetres.

The kids were playing in knee-deep water when the young rottweiler “came up to the water, curiously looked at the kids, for less than two seconds, and then made a beeline for Lucia, aggressively biting her on her shoulder, her neck, and her back,” Natalie said.

Natalie called the attack “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 quick-thinking bystander began twisting the collar of the dog to tighten it, and kicked the dog in the stomach several times, after which it finally let go of Lucia.

“By this stage, Lucia was a mess. Bleeding, puncture wounds, and she wasn’t really moving much,” Natalie said.

Natalie ordered her oldest daughter to call an ambulance and told her youngest son to run back to their accommodation across the road and get Jack, another adult at the home.

Luckily, Luke, the bystander who had jumped in to pull the dog off Lucia, was married to a paramedic.

“She was then able to ... give us a run-through of what we needed to do in terms of first aid, and the safest way to proceed.”

They controlled the bleeding there, while they were waiting for emergency services to arrive — but once they learnt the ambulance was still 35 minutes away, they quickly decided to make the 17-minute journey to the Busselton Health Campus Emergency Department themselves.

“Ambulances were nowhere as quick as we needed them to be. I guess that was because it was a particularly busy time of the year,” Natalie said.

It wasn’t until Lucia’s vital signs were displayed on a screen in front of her that Natalie was sure her daughter would make it through.

Lucia was then airlifted to Perth Children’s Hospital.

“The City has been informed by Busselton Hospital of a serious incident involving a child who sustained significant injuries from a dog attack at Quindalup Dog Beach,” the City of Busselton said in a statement.

“The dog involved has been euthanised, and an investigation is currently underway.”

Natalie said that while the incident was “terrifying”, Lucia has been showing resilience.

“There’s something beautiful about four-year-olds, that they have an incredible ability to move on, with a bit of distraction,” Natalie said.

Between surgeries, daily dressing changes, and canulas, Natalie said Lucia has “been through the wars”.

“It’s horrible to see your child to go through that. She’s this tiny, innocent little thing, and otherwise so happy.”

She hopes that the state will bring in tougher laws around “dangerous breeds” of dogs in public places.

“It was extremely traumatic, and I don’t want anyone else to go through that,” Natalie told 7NEWS.

Same-day rottweiler attack on WA woman

On the same day that Lucia was mauled, another woman, Tamsin Young, was attacked just after 6.20pm.

She was just going for a walk near her home in Landsdale, when she turned a corner about 100m from her home and saw a woman walking two Rottweilers.

She said the dogs already appeared agitated. “They were already in that state of wanting to attack,” she said.

“I turned, and as I turned to the side, one dog lunged, and it grabbed me on the side of my arm.”

The woman dragged the dogs off while apologising to Young, who was bruised and bleeding.

Young was back at work by the Thursday but said that her brain was still not functioning clearly.

By Friday, she was out walking again in the neighbourhood she has lived in for the last 25 years, but has noticed she now takes the bends wide, and her senses are heightened, on the lookout for potential dangers.

“There is that underlying sense of fear,” she said.