Even though she was almost blinded in a horrific dog attack, little Ivy-Lee Broughton doesn’t flinch when she sees Izzy, her grandmother’s cute terrier. She cuddles Izzy close and laughs as the dog’s tail wags happily in response.
The cuts around the gorgeous little three-year-old’s eyes are still healing, although she will always bear the scars inflicted by the vicious stray. But brave Ivy-Lee doesn’t bear any grudges against dogs as her love for Izzy shows. Her shocked parents Aaron Broughton and Nicola Edgecumbe are not so quick to forgive. They are still reeling from seeing the wounds inflicted by the bull mastiff-cross, which pinned the little girl down and tore at her face with its teeth.
“Everyone was hysterical with terror,” says dad Aaron (34) who witnessed the attack in Hawera and bravely wrestled the animal off Ivy-Lee, probably saving her life and definitely saving her sight.Aaron, who is separated from Nicola, has Ivy-Lee at weekends, and had taken the little girl to a friend’s house where he was helping build a deck.
As he carried some planks of wood across the section he noticed the dog there and shouted at it to go away. “It turned away and then Ivy came out. I looked around and didn’t see the dog anymore. That’s when I heard growling.”The memory of seeing the stray attacking Ivy-Lee’s face in a frenzy still chills Aaron to the core.Ignoring the threat to his own safety, he bravely hauled the out-of-control dog off his daughter, and punched it.
When he turned to Ivy-Lee, he was horrified by what he saw. “Her face was swollen beyond recognition and she was covered in blood. It was awful,” he says quietly. Aaron rushed Ivy to the hospital, and called Nicola (23).
“When I got the phonecall I collapsed. I didn’t know what to expect,” she says. “By the time I got to the hospital, I was an absolute mess. Seeing the damage the dog had caused to my little girl was like a waking nightmare.” Due to the swelling, Ivy had to wait six hours before she could have surgery to fix her horrific injuries.
The stray dog, which has yet to be found, had ripped through Ivy’s nose, causing a wound that ran all the way down to her lip. Her forehead was torn open and the dog’s teeth had punctured her eyelids. Doctors say that if Ivy-Lee hadn’t kept her eyes tightly closed during the attack, the dog would have bitten through one or even both of her eyeballs, possibly blinding her for life.
Aaron says that during the attack and aftermath, Ivy didn’t cry or scream. And even in hospital she was more upset about seeing her parents in distress than her terrible wounds. “She was hugging Aaron and saying, ‘It’s going to be all right, Daddy’. She was trying to be brave for us so we wouldn’t freak out,” explains Nicola.
During two hours of reconstructive surgery, doctors feared Ivy-Lee might lose one of her eyes, which had been most severely bitten. They were also concerned that nerves in her face had been severed.
Fortunately, they were able to save the eye and so far her face is healing well. “Ivy is such a bright, resilient child, and we’re very lucky that she remained calm after what happened,” says Aaron. As soon as Ivy-Lee woke from surgery she was her bubbly self, joking and playing with younger brother Noah (2). The only thing she was worried about was missing her first day at kindy. But the biggest test for Ivy-Lee was seeing her face in a mirror for the first time after the incident.
“She looked, cried for a few seconds and then turned to me and said, ‘I’m still pretty, aye, oum?'” says Nicola. Ivy-Lee’s mauling is the latest in a string of terrifying dog attacks on Kiwi kids Last month, New Zealand Woman’s Weekly reported on another courageous little girl who survived a dog attack. Little oaddy (5) of Whakatane had 10 hours of surgery on her face after four dogs savaged her.
Aaron says that dog owners need to be extra vigilant when their dogs are around people, especially children. “Dogs need to be trained properly from an early age and people need to be a lot more wary with animals around,” he says. As he watches Ivy and Noah play with beloved family dog Izzy, Aaron says he is still deeply traumatised by the incident. He worked as a dog ranger for two years in the past, and never dreamed that anything like this could ever happen to his own child.
“I’m shattered,” he admits. “When Ivy-Lee is with me, she hardly leaves my sight. I dropped my guard for a second and this is what happened. I’ve just got to accept it as an accident otherwise I’d totally lose the plot. Thankfully, she hasn’t lost her rosy outlook on life – or dogs.”
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