'Hour of hell' as dog gets fishhook stuck in nose
When Cheryl Wild took her two dogs for one of their regular beach walks she had no idea that what she called "an hour of hell" lay in store.
Betty, her Bedlington terrier, was running on the sand when she began shaking her head frantically and yelping in distress.
Betty had an angling fishhook stuck firmly in her nose, which led to a "traumatic" 60 minutes on the beach in Conwy county, including the three-year-old trying to pull it out with her paw, and making the damage worse.
Eventually a friend turned up with tweezers to cut the wire, freeing Betty, and now Cheryl is warning other beach users to be vigilant.
The painful drama unfolded when Cheryl took Betty and her other dog Willow on the walk from Penmaenmawr to Llanfairfechan.
Cheryl sat on a rock to rest her bad knee when she saw Betty shaking her head, and assumed her dog was playing with seaweed as usual.
Then she went closer and realised the three-pronged hook was stuck fast in Betty's nose.
"She was really distressed," she said. "Trying to pull it out... and it was just making it worse. So I picked her up and held her legs so that she couldn't do any more damage."
Cheryl, who lives nearby and was with her friend Claire, wanted to go to a vet but realised it was closed because it was a Sunday.
"By the time I’ve rung round, she’s going to have made so much damage to her nose by trying to get it out herself," she said. "So I was really stressing."
Cheryl and Claire started walking off the beach as soon as they could. But it was slow progress because Betty was struggling and Cheryl had to stop because of her knees.
Eventually Claire called a friend, Berwyn, who arrived with tweezer wire cutters, they pushed the barbs away from the dog's nose, and they fell straight out after being snipped.
"So probably the whole thing lasted about an hour. It was an hour of hell," she said.
"It was so traumatic. I didn't know what to do for the best. I just wanted to end the pain for her."
She believes that the hooks washed ashore after a competition for anglers on the beach some months before.
But she did not think it was the anglers' fault they ended up on the beach. “It’s not because the fishermen are being untidy, it’s that they are unable to retrieve them once snapped,” she said.
However, she is concerned about their impact and if her friends had not been there, believed it would have been "disastrous" for her dog.
“They’re quite hard to see, they’re little but lethal," she said. "Not just for animals but also humans, maybe children running barefoot."
She used social media to warn others to watch out for the hooks. It led to an offer from one person with a metal detector to search the beach and get rid of them.
So how is Betty now?
"Back to her happy self," Cheryl said.
