Rhiannon Ingle
Anyone who owns a dog will no doubt know that they can often decide to chew on quite literally everything except their designated chew toys.
Whether it's your favourite pair of shoes, the corner of your expensive sofa or even toilet roll, dog owners have dealt with cleaning up their fur child's mess time and time again.
But not many have found themselves in the situation where their dog opts to chew their own body part - so much so that bone shows through!
Well, that was exactly the case for one puppy, who was able to 'save' his owner's life after chewing his toe 'to the bone' while he slept.
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Retired builder David Lindsay, who hails from Cambridge in the UK, woke up on the sofa, only to find that there was a bloody stump where his right big toe was.
The bone in his toe had been fractured by his seven-month-old bulldog puppy, Harley, as he slept, and his toe nail left hanging off.
David, who suffers from diabetes, recalled: "I was asleep on the couch when my wife walked in and shouted, 'Dave, the puppy's chewing your toe!'
"My puppy had nearly chewed my big toe off! It chewed down to the bone and cracked it.
"But because of all this, I discovered that my foot is completely numb, I can't feel anything."
David's horrified wife wrapped up his toe and rushed him to Addenbrooke's Hospital back in 2023, where he was kept for nine days.
He was then put on intravenous antibiotics to stop the infection, caused by the dog bite, from spreading to his bone.
However, the grim ordeal turned out to be a potential life-saver as medics later discovered, following CT scans for the fractured toe, that he had lost the feeling in his feet due to two blocked arteries in his legs.
The blockages could have put his whole leg in danger of needing amputation if the blood supply hadn't been restored.
Thanks to his four-legged friend, David was later assessed for stents, which would open up the arteries and allow the blood flow to return to his leg.
The father-of-five said he has no plans to get rid of the life-saving bulldog, having already lost his two large Neapolitan Mastiff dogs the year before.
"You've got to laugh about it. He's done me a favour by chewing my toe," David reflected. "So I'm waiting to find out if they can put stents in. I'll be keeping the dog.
"I'll try to keep my toe too, but if not, I told the doctor to cut it off, and I can take it home for him!"
Talk about a 'man's best friend'!