Woman Mauled by Her Own Dogs as Neighbors Watch

An Australian woman is recovering in the hospital after she was mauled by her two rottweilers last Saturday.

Nikita Piil, a 31-year-old woman from Perth, was attacked by the dogs, named Bronx and Harlem, at home. Neighbors saw the attack and tried to use leaf blowers, hoses and bats to fight the dogs off but were unable to do so.

Piil suffered major blood loss and serious bite wounds, according to a report by Australian website 7News. Newsweek reached out to Piil through Facebook for comment.

"I didn't have a knife, I didn't have anything really good to take this dog out," neighbor Bryn Spencer said, according to 7News. "I only had a bat. All I could really do was just watch this girl get mauled apart." When police arrived, they shot one of the dogs after a stun gun was unsuccessful. One of the dogs has been euthanized, and the other is in ranger custody.

In the U.S., around 4 million people are bitten by dogs every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. One in five requires medical attention. Deaths from dog attacks are rare, with children sometimes the victims. Between 1999 and 2020, 33 people died each year, on average, the CDC says.

Larger breeds like pit bulls are often associated with the more deadly canine attacks. Between 2005 and 2019, 521 people were killed by dogs in the U.S., and 346 of these deaths, or 66 percent, were caused by pit bulls. However, some say that these dogs are not more aggressive but are more likely than smaller canines to cause harm in cases of aggression.

Some countries have banned certain dog breeds, saying that some breeds exhibit more aggression. The United Kingdom plans to ban pit bulls by the end of the year because the breed is considered a "danger" to communities after a series of increased dog attacks.

The breeder who sold Harlem to Piil told The West Australian, a Perth newspaper, that it was unlikely rottweilers would attack someone for no reason.

"I think that in this instance there must have been a dog fight between the two dogs, and I feel that maybe the owner has got involved to try and separate the dogs and somehow gotten in between it.... That's how I possibly think it's happened," the unnamed woman said.

"It's not a temperament issue in the dog, it's obvious something's happened between the dogs on that particular day," she said.

Despite the breeder's theory, it is still unclear why the rottweilers attacked their owner, who described one of them as "loyal" and "protective" in a Facebook post in 2017.