Dogs rescued from SH6
Two dogs running down a busy State Highway 6 turned a run-ofthe-mill morning upside-down for Nelson woman Tania Ferris.
The Fulton Hogan road worker and her colleague James had just pulled over their truck when they saw ‘‘these two little fur-balls running up the white line’’.
Ferris said she thought ‘‘Oh my God’’ when she saw the dogs, jumped out of the truck and kneeled down calling out ‘‘puppy’’ to get them to come over. ’’One had a collar so I managed to get a hold of her. I had trouble getting a hold of the other one but my workmate picked her up.’’
Ferris said the dogs ‘‘weren’t stressed or anything’’ and ‘‘didn’t smell, weren’t wet and didn’t have damp paws’’.
She said they had driven up the road about five minutes prior, seeing a woman beside her car at the first pull-over area at the bottom of the Nelson side of the Whangamoa Saddle, less than 1 kilometre from Hira School. Ferris said the pullover area was adjacent to a forestry gate where people often walked their dogs, but she had not noticed any dogs with the woman.
She said the bichon frisecrosses were ‘‘incredibly lucky’’ to not have been run over by trucks on the busy road at 8.45am on Tuesday. ’’There’s a heck of a lot of traffic on the road. Log trucks, TNL trucks … at that time of morning.’’
Ferris said after collecting the dogs, they walked down the road searching for the owner, thinking ‘‘obviously somebody is looking for these two’’. ‘‘We couldn’t see anybody. We drove down the road [to the pull-over area], but there was nobody, not a soul on the road.’’
They then checked the area up and down the road for the possibility of the dogs coming from a car that could have crashed through the road barriers and gone down the slope, but they did not see any cars and all the guard rails were undamaged.
Ferris said they then went to NPD Hira Store and Hira School to see if anybody had been in there looking for the dogs, to no avail. Close to the school was Abbeyblyth Boarding Kennel, where Ferris and her colleague dropped the dogs off.
Ferris said usually when they found dogs on the Whangamoa Saddle they were hunting dogs that would be reunited with their owners after a few hours. ‘‘I’m hoping [these bichon frise-cross dogs] haven’t been dumped, but it certainly looked that way.’’
"One had a collar so I managed to get a hold of her. I had trouble getting a hold of the other one but my workmate picked her up."