A DOG owner has been given a suspended jail sentence after her boxer bit another woman on the arm leaving an injury which a judge likened to a shark bite.

Lucy Ohlsen’s dog, brindle-coloured boxer ‘Billy’, left the 41-year-old victim, who rented a bungalow on the defendant’s farm in Hartlepool, with a two and-a-half inch long wound.

Judge Simon Hickey, sitting at Teesside Crown Court, said a photograph showing the injury was “horrendous”.

He said: “It is almost like a shark bite, so vivid, so deep, so wide.”

Prosecutor Emma Atkinson said the complainant had previously been bitten by the same dog in April 2015 when she suffered puncture marks on her body.

On the evening of June 1 last year the woman was returning to her car at Field House Farm, Dalton Piercy, when Billy and his younger sibling ran towards her.

She stood her ground, shouting at the animals, but while the younger dog backed off, Billy bit her on the right arm.

She received hospital treatment with the “deep wound” being stitched.

The woman described in a statement how she had been left with a permanent scar, which regularly ached.

The victim said that shortly after the attack she had been due to be a bridesmaid at a wedding and was now “paranoid” about her appearance.

Ohlsen, who admitted allowing a dog to be dangerously out of control, was said to be of previous good character and expressed remorse.

She set up an equestrian centre with compensation she received from a road accident and neighbours and people who kept their horses at her premises wrote references on her behalf.

Martin Scarborough, mitigating, said Billy had been back in the care of the defendant for the past year and she took measures since including creating a pen for the dog, while taking care to muzzle it.

Judge Hickey said Billy had not bitten anyone else and the victim’s own dog had caused difficulties in the past which may have been why the animal had taken against it.

The judge said Billy should be muzzled at all times when in public. If not, or if it bit someone else, the dog could be destroyed.

Judge Hickey said he believed 34-year-old Ohlsen was a fit and proper person to keep animals and suspended a four month jail sentence on her for a year.

She would also pay £5,000 in compensation.