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Three years ago Warren Masters heard screams coming from his neighbour's backyard.

Reacting instinctively, he leapt the fence to find a little boy on a trampoline being mauled by a large American Staffordshire cross.

“The dog had the little boy by the back of the neck,” Mr Masters said.

“I just bailed the fence and jumped up on the trampoline.

“I straddled the dog and grabbed it by the collar and just started punching it on top of the head to try and get it to let go.”

At that time passerby Anthony Jux popped his head over the fence to enquire if everything was okay before he rushed to help.

Both men wrestled with the vicious canine as it continued to shake the unconscious boy.

Despite a severely broken hand from punching the dog, Mr Masters jammed his fingers into the dog's snout in an attempt to pull the jaws open.

“We were struggling and the dog wasn't going to let go so I said, `Get a knife and cut its throat.' So we had to kill the dog to get the little fella out,” he said.

Now a Queanbeyan resident, Mr Masters was living in Canberra at the time of the attack.

The small boy made a full recovery from the terrible incident.

Mr Masters' severely broken hand, however, needed an operation that resulted in six pins and a plate being inserted into his hand.

As a result he missed 19 weeks of work.

After battling the dog, he then had an even tougher battle with the ACT bureaucracy over compensation for loss of income.

It was not until the media and politicians intervened before he was able to recoup some of his lost income as a result of rescuing the small boy.

The Commendation for Brave Conduct was announced on Monday by Governor General Quentin Bryce.