In a bizarre incident, a father in the US shot dead his family dog and sliced open its stomach to retrieve his son's finger that was bitten off and swallowed by the canine.

Luis Brignoni (41) a landscaper in Bradenton, Fliorida, on Friday had to experience the horror when one of the family dogs bit off his son's little finger and swallowed it. Brignoni rushed out to his fenced backyard with a gun and killed the dog, cut its stomach open, and retrieved the finger, carefully sending it with his bleeding son aboard a helicopter to a St Petersburg hospital.