Pennsylvania woman survives bear attack while letting her dog out

Letting her dog outside one Tuesday evening turned into a terrifying ordeal for Lee Ann Galante as she discovered a huge mother bear in her backyard

A woman has survived by a “miracle” after she was attacked by a bear while letting her dog outside in Pennsylvania.

Sitting in Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh on Wednesday, Lee Ann Galante, 55, told NBC News that during the attack, “I just kept thinking: ‘I can’t believe this is happening. This can’t be happening. I’m being attacked by a bear.’”

“I thought, ‘This is it – I’m going to die,” she added.

Ms Galante was at her residence in Butler Township on Tuesday night, around 8.30pm, when her eight-pound Pomeranian named Smoky started causing a commotion. She then spotted the silhouettes of three large bear cubs in her neighbour’s tree.

All of a sudden, a giant bear jumped over the fence and charged at Ms Galante, knocking her over face first onto a concrete surface, and was pulling on the back of her head “so hard that I thought she was going to scalp me,” she told the outlet.

The bear turned its attention to Smoky, getting near the dog, before it rushed at Ms Galante, knocking her to the ground and biting her left arm.

‘I’m screaming at the top of my lungs. It was terrifying. I really thought that was gonna be it’ (WXPI)

Thankfully, Ms Galante and Smoky managed to get inside, crawling to her phone to ring 911.

“I’m screaming, ‘Someone please help me.’ I’m screaming at the top of my lungs. It was terrifying. I really thought that was gonna be it,” Mr Galante told WXPI.

“She was ready to charge again. Thank God we got in the house. I don’t know how it happened because I really thought – we would both be dead.”

Butler Township police chief John Hays told the local outlet, The Butler Eagle, that they received a call around 8.45pm relating to the bear attack and were able to get over the residence relatively quickly.

Mr Hays added to WTAE that he’s “been here over 40 years, and it’s never happened. We’ve never had anything like this”.

After the horrific attack, Ms Galante sustained many injuries, such as a broken nose, cuts inside her mouth, and puncture wounds, and injuries to her scalp, among others, NBCreported.

Police said that the mother bear has now been euthanised (WXPI)

Mr Galante’s trauma surgeon told WXPIthat she is expected to make a full recovery.

The adult bear was found with three cubs in a tree and the mother bear was eventually euthanised after she “continued with her aggression”, police told reporters.

Jesse Bish, the northwest region director at the Pennsylvania Game Commission, also told various outlets that it was hard to tell if one of the cubs was the one that grabbed ahold of the victim, “so we may decide to euthanise those three also, just for the safety of the public”.

If the cubs are not euthanised, Mr Bish said they’ll be tagged and transferred to a more remote location.

As for Smoky, the pooch managed to escape the whole ordeal with only a few scratches on his back.