A terrified mum and grandmother looked on in horror as a 10 stone Great Dane savaged a baby girl.

Michelle Eling was watching daughter Brittany, 23, and one-year-old grandaughter Olivia playing on the kitchen floor of her house in Alvin, Texas.

Suddenly the 45-year-old gran's rescue dog Harvey approached the baby and attacked her.

Before the hound could be stopped it had caused permanent damage to the young girl, nearly ripping off her right ear.

The three-foot-tall pooch since been put down after trying to get Olivia's whole head in his mouth.

Dog lover Michelle, an accountant, said: “I was standing in the kitchen, Olivia and Brittany were on the floor playing, Brittany was making her giggle.

“If he hadn’t and he had got hold of her head, I would have had to decide who to save, my pregnant daughter or my granddaughter.

"All that was going through my mind was, ‘she is not dying in my kitchen’.

At the time of the attack she was eight months pregnant with her youngest.

Regardless, she helped rush Olivia to hospital, where she was kept for two days undergoing one hour of surgery to reattach the tip of her right ear and a two hour skin graft on the top of her head.

The attack has left her with permanent scars on her face.

While Brittany remains hopeful that Olivia can’t remember what happened, the youngster is now wary and cautious around other dogs and sometimes wakes up in the night grabbing her ear.

“I’ve blocked it out so I only remember bits," the mum continued.

"I remember my mum and brother trying to pull him away and I put my arm in his mouth.

“All I could think was please keep crying because I knew if she was crying then she was alive.

“There was blood everywhere. I was pregnant but I wasn’t thinking about me. I just wanted to save my daughter.”

Brittany wanted the dog put down, as she realised how close she had come to losing her daughter.

But Michelle said she felt sorry for the pooch and blamed his previous owners for the way they had treated him.

Michelle added: “It was a complete shock because was a sweet dog, you could just tell he’d been abused.

“He didn’t know how to be a dog, he didn’t know how to run and didn’t like going on the grass.

“He didn’t have a good life, but he was sweet and he wanted attention.

“Shame on the people who owned him before, I just hope in the two months he spent with us it showed him a different life."

The grandma was conflicted when it came to whether the dog should be out down.

“You don’t want to see an animal put down but once they have done something like this there’s no going back," she said.

“It’s catch 22. You love an animal but you love your kids more.

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