Richard Remme of Fort Dodge was encouraging his dog Balew, a cross between a pit bull and a labrador, to jump on his lap as he lay on his sofa when the dog apparently flicked the safety catch off the 9mm pistol he was carrying in his belt.

"I was lying on the couch, and we were horsing around, me and the dog. And I was tossing him off my lap, and he was jumping back on my lap," he told The Messenger newspaper after being discharged from hospital.

"Apparently he bumped the safety one time, and when he bounded back over one of his toes went right down into the trigger guard," the injured dog owner said.

"It has a trigger safety as well as a thumb safety, and he managed to hit both of them, and it discharged and went into my leg, did no major damage to anything."

Remme called 911 and told the emergency dispatcher, "My dog shot me."

"I've never heard of that," the city police chief Roger Porter told the paper.

"I've heard of guns dropping and going off on the floor, and horsing around and guns going off. I can't say I've heard a dog story before."

"Only in America can you get shot by your dog," said Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, an organization pushing for stricter gun controls in the United States.