A woman died after she was bitten on the arm by one of her two dogs as they fought over McDonalds chicken nuggets, an inquest heard.
Michelle Hempstead suffered traumatic blood loss, leading to multiple organ failure following the incident at her home in Southend, Essex.
She owned two dogs, a mastiff rottweiler cross called Trigg and aPomeranian called Pom, the hearing in Chelmsford was told.
The 34-year-old mum-of-five was throwing chicken nuggets to them both on July 29 last year, when Trigg caught her upper left arm, severing an artery, while snapping at the smaller dog, Pom.
Essex senior coroner Lincoln Brookes said Pom ‘had a go at Trigg’ and Trigg ‘did go to bite him or snap at him, and this is a big dog with big jaws’
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He said he accepted Pom and Trigg were ‘quite well behaved’ and Trigg was ‘an otherwise gentle giant’.
Ms Hempstead was rushed to hospital but died the next day at the Royal London Hospital.
Her then partner, Samuel West, told Monday’s hearing that Ms Hempstead had bought McDonald’s food and ‘had her box of, I think, 20 nuggets’.
‘She liked to throw them up in the air and the little one, Pom, was going for the big one, not aggressively but he used to growl and snap when he wanted to get the nugget first,’ he said.
He said that as Pom went to get a nugget ‘Trigg’s done this thing where he chomps his mouth’.
‘It looked like to me it wasn’t a grab,’ said Mr West.
‘He just went to do a chomping thing and caught her under the arm.’
He described it as an ‘absolute freak accident’.
Mr West said Trigg ‘didn’t have a bad bone in his body’, never showed his teeth and would sleep on Ms Hempstead’s bed.
Ms Hempstead, who worked at Premier Inn, had previously fed Trigg food from her mouth, he added.
He said Pom ‘sometimes used to think he was in charge of the big dog’.
A police bodycam recording was played to the hearing, in which Mr West can be heard saying his partner ‘threw the nugget up in the air – she was just caught in the crossfire’.
Mr Brookes, recording a conclusion of accidental death, said: ‘Michelle Hempstead died of the consequences of traumatic blood loss following a single bite from her large dog in her home which severed an artery.
‘The bite was not malicious and occurred when she was caught during a brief fight between her two dogs over food.’
He continued: ‘The double tragedy about this is that she (Ms Hempstead) and the rest of her family suffered a terrible bereavement only a few weeks beforehand, of the death of her daughter.
‘She was still reeling from that.’
Police previously said two dogs were seized from the address, the victim was their sole owner and both dogs had been ‘disclaimed for destruction’.
Guidance from the Metropolitan Police notes dogs can be euthanised if they are disclaimed by the owner, which happened in this case as Ms Hempstead was the sole owner.
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