IT was like a scene unfolding in Casualty.

Sit back and feel your anxiety and your heart rate increase at the scene that plays out before you…

Enter stage left, Cara’s owner, who parks the car, reversing carefully between two vehicles.

Cursing his bad luck at not finding a space on the park side of the street, he opens the back door and, before he can get her lead on, Cara is out and heading over the tarmac to the green grass and her favourite play area.

An oncoming vehicle brakes hard, unbelievably narrowly missing Cara but succeeding in blocking her from his view. He shudders as he hears more squealing tyres, anticipating a sickening thud. But it doesn’t come. After what seems like an eternity, and a seriously angry glare from the driver of the vehicle, he suddenly sees her bounding free, joyous and safe across the park towards Jim, her black Labrador friend. Her owner breathes a sigh of relief then watches horrified as she screams and holds a leg up.

The curtain falls like a red mist and we wait for the next episode…

By the time he had waved his apology at the angry drivers and made his way hurriedly to her, she was bleeding profusely and he was panting hard. There was an obvious V shaped gash at the back of her hind leg and the blood was pumping like a hosepipe. He paled. After that he doesn’t remember much. The adrenaline kicked in and he went into automatic pilot. Speed became the key to everything. Scoop her up. Get her in the car. Drive like a mad thing. Wishing he had a blue flashing light. Why was everyone going so slowly and getting in his road?

The next thing he knew he was cradling Cara in his arms at our reception desk, which soon resembled an abattoir.

Cara was scooped from him and he sat with a cup of tea, unable to face the interior of his vehicle, which looked like a scene from a horror movie. It wasn’t good. Cara had severed the flexor tendons of all her toes. The arterial supply to her foot was slashed and her blood loss had been considerable. Under general anaesthesia the wound was flushed clean and the ends of the tendons painstakingly sutured together. The skin was closed and an orthopaedic plaster applied to the leg, which pointed the toes down slightly, so that pressure was taken off the damaged tissue.

It would remain in place for two months, during which time Cara would have none of the free running she loves so much.

Of course there are lessons to be learned. Her recovery would have been more favourable if her owner had stopped to consider applying a tourniquet of sorts to the limb. His vehicle would not have needed a new interior if he had thought of placing her lower leg in a simple polythene bag to catch the blood.

But then none of it would have happened at all if the absolute moron who casually dropped the broken bottle in the grass had any consideration for anyone else.