Korinne Mortensen of Salt Lake City, Utah, was resting with her dog Niko in November 2022 when he suddenly lunged at her and mauled her face.
He had been “the world’s perfect dog” for four years before the incident, which left Mortensen with a gaping bloody hole in the bridge of his nose.
It wasn’t until after the attack that the Mortensens learned that their beloved pet had a serious and aggressive form of brain cancer.
They believe that the tumor is to blame for the drastic personality change.
Korinne is pictured with her dogs, including Niko on the left. The Mortensens euthanized Niko in January 2023 after learning he had a terminal brain tumor.
Korinne, pictured, suffered a serious injury after her dog Niko lunged at her face, breaking her nose and tearing off a piece of her skin.
The family felt they had no choice but to humanely sacrifice Niko, wanting to spare him pain and protect their children.
Mortensen, 30, doesn’t blame his dog for the incident.
The dog that attacked her, she said, was not the same one they adopted years ago.
Cancer had taken over his personality.
Tumors in the forebrain of dogs are known to cause abnormalities in their behavior, including becoming more aggressive.
The forebrain is responsible for “thinking,” behavior, and the final integration of sensory information.
Therefore, tumors in the forebrain can make dogs irritable, confused, and aggressive.
After Niko lunged at her face, Mrs. Mortensen didn’t immediately understand what had happened in those few seconds.
He went to the bathroom and saw his face covered in blood. The pain had not yet appeared.
Mrs Mortensen said: “It was half a second.” It was very fast and in one bite. It all happened so quickly and I was shocked because I never imagined my sweet little dog would do this.’
When he arrived at the hospital, he began to feel stabbing, stabbing pain. His nose was completely broken in half and a hole the size of a quarter had been torn out in the bridge.
She said: “I was worried if my face would be ruined in the long term and what we were going to do with our dog after this.”
‘In surgery, he re-broke my entire nose and rebuilt it so that it was functional and also filled the gaping hole.
‘He made a zigzag layer of skin to cover the scars. My surgeon told me at my follow-up that I had to put it (my nose) back together.
Before the attack, Niko had been suffering seizures. The family had an appointment to take him to the vet in the coming weeks.
Since Niko had never been violent before, the Mortensens weren’t worried about going to the doctor first.
The year after the strange attack, Mortensen struggled to look at himself in the mirror. She was afraid she would never see herself again.
And she wasn’t sure how Niko would fit into her growing family.
She had just given birth to her second child in September 2023, a month before he lunged at her face.
She said: “Then he started getting aggressive towards our other dog and we had to keep him muzzled 24/7 and we felt really bad about this.”
“How fast he was going downhill, there wasn’t much they could do for him so we decided to put him down because it was the best option as it wasn’t fair to him.”
Since having emergency surgery in November last year, Ms Mortensen has had two rounds of injectable fillers injected into her nose to restore its normal shape.
Since undergoing surgery to repair her nose, Ms. Mortensen has undergone two rounds of fillers to restore the shape of her nose.
Mrs. Mortensen is at peace with the fact that her nose will never look exactly like it did before the attack, but since the surgeries and fillers, she feels more confident in herself.
She said: “There are still scars and I always will have them, but the structural integrity now looks like a normal nose.”
“Now I feel safe going out and it’s not the first thing people notice when they talk to me.”
The Mortensens have since come to peace with the event and have cherished memories of their time with Niko before his unusually wild behavior.
He added: “I don’t blame our dog at all for the attack. When I think about it, it wasn’t our dog that did this.
“We got closure and now we can remember the good memories and the four years of the perfect dog we had.”