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A 17-year-old girl who was critically injured in a vicious dog attack last week has died in hospital in NSW’s Hunter Region.
Annalyse Blyton was studying at a friend’s house in Singleton on Thursday morning when she was attacked by a dog, suffering serious injuries to her head, neck and body.
Annalyse Blyton, 17, was critically injured in a dog attack at a Singleton home on 4 September, 2025.
Witnessing the attack, passersby stepped in to help Annalyse, fighting to get the dog off her. They then provided basic first aid, stemming the bleeding and covering wounds before emergency services arrived.
The 10-year-old mixed-breed dog lived at the home on Broughton Street. The dog, a boxer-bull Arab-Irish wolfhound cross, was put down on site using a police firearm with the consent of its owners, to allow emergency services to treat Annalyse.
Blyton died in hospital on Monday.
Annalyse was airlifted to John Hunter Hospital in a critical condition, where she remained until Monday when she succumbed to her injuries.
“Emergency services were confronted with quite a confronting scene, and we’re providing support to them,” NSW Police Acting Superintendent Justin Cornes said at a press conference on Friday.
Cornes praised the bystanders who intervened given the vicious nature of the dog’s attack.
“Running into a scene which they didn’t have the full circumstances and to jump in there and remove the dog, which was at the time, very aggressive… [it’s] an incredible act.”
Police are continuing their inquiries into the incident, noting that there was no information to suggest the dog was a “significant risk” to the community, and that its owners described the attack as “out of character”.
The tragic death is the latest in a rising number of dog attacks in NSW. An inquest into seven fatal dog attacks from 2009 to 2023, including the death of a five-week-old baby in 2021, found that infants and toddlers were particularly at risk in the “concerning” upwards trend.
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“Infants or children are at greater risk because of their size and vulnerability and potentially because of their behaviour around dogs,” deputy state coroner Carmel Forbes said in January this year.
Forbes recommended the government consider requiring pet owners to hold a licence, with conditional licences for those seeking to own restricted breeds and safety training for dog owners, and harsher penalties for people who don’t comply with microchipping and registration requirements.
She also recommended that the council have stronger powers to seize a dog or require the dog to be muzzled or placed on a lead.
Hospitalisations from dog injuries across the country have more than doubled in the eight years to 2021, data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare shows, from 17 hospitalisations per 100,000 population to 37.
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