Canine saviours
More tales of deathless doggy devotion
Judy Owen, 60, was driving in February 2013 when her fouryear-old cockapoo Daisy started howling. “Minutes later,” said Ms Owen, “a man drove into the back of me and sent my car flying into a wall. No one was hurt, but it could have been worse if I hadn’t slowed down to calm Daisy.” The next example of Daisy’s apparent sixth sense occurred in Ms Owen’s flat in Worcester the following October. “Daisy suddenly began rushing around at 4am,” she said. “She jumped on my bed and lay pressing against me. She wouldn’t let me go, she just wanted to stay there. Two hours later the shower door in my bathroom exploded and sent glass everywhere. If I had been in the shower I would have been badly injured. Daisy sensed something and wanted to protect me. She’s normally placid, so I now strongly believe in her psychic powers.” The dog would also bark when the phone was about to ring. D.Express, MX News (Sydney), 12 Nov 2013.
A man who broke his neck outdoors survived lying in snow for 20 hours thanks to his dog. The man, named only as Bob, was alone when he left his Michigan farmhouse on New Year’s Eve to get firewood, slipped and broke his neck. His five-year-old golden retriever Kelsey kept him warm and awake by lying on him and licking his face. “She kept barking for help but never left my side,” said Bob. A neighbour found him and dialled 911. At the time of the report, Bob had recovered from the paralysis caused by the fracture. Queensland Times, 17 Jan 2017.
A three-year-old boy whose mother was too drunk to look after him survived by suckling milk from a pregnant bitch. The naked child was spotted on 3 September 2015 by neighbour Lauri Escudera, suckling at the teat of her dog Reina (Queen) in a junkyard full of wrecked cars in the desert port city of Arica in Chile. She called police who took the child to hospital, where he was found to be suffering from mild malnutrition, a skin infection and lice. He was passed into the care of a child welfare organisation. His mother, a 40-year-old Peruvian woman called Zulema Reyes, later arrived on the scene drunk, but couldn’t be arrested, as there was no “physical” harm to the boy. She said she had been drinking for two days in honour of the Andean mountain goddess Pachamama. She instead the ritual drinking was a Peruvian tradition. Sunday Sun, (Queensland) Sunday Mail, 6 Sept; Times, 9 Sept 2015. For
A heroic dog saved a wedding party from a suicide bomber after fighting with a teenager until she blew herself up. The young terrorist was attempting to infiltrate the wedding crowd when the dog arrived to save the day. The interception made the girl detonate the bomb while it was strapped around her body. The blast killed both bomber and dog, Victor Isuku, a police spokesman in Borno, confirmed to local media. The incident occurred a few hours after the killing of three suicide bombers in two foiled attacks by Boko Haram (West Africa’s Daesh equivalent) in nearby towns. mirror.co.uk, 5 April 2017.
When Lesley Hailwood began choking on chocolate, her dog Nell, a 17-month-old German shepherd-retriever cross, jumped on the sofa and pounced on her chest, dislodging the offending choc. “There’s no doubt in my eyes that Nell saved my life,” said the IT worker. “She’s never jumped up on me like that before. She knew I was in trouble and knew exactly how to wind me.” Lesley cares for guide dogs at her home in Liverpool as they are being trained. D.Mirror, 14 Jan 2014.
Bernadetta Henry, a grandmother in her 70s from Llangollen, Denbighshire, North Wales, suffered from sleep apnoea, which could cause her to stop breathing several times every night, but her trusty pooch Boris listened out for her. “If it wasn’t for him I would be dead,” said Ms Henry. “Boris sleeps next to me and can just tell when I stop breathing. As soon as I stop he comes up to my chest and puts his paws on me.” Ms Henry became almost completely deaf following a blood clot in 1982 and had Boris, a bichon frise, as her hearing dog. She was given warfarin to ease the clot but suffered an allergic reaction that caused a brain hæmorrhage. “I was told
“She kept barking for help but never left my side,” said Bob
I would never move again after the hæmorrhage but my children helped me,” she said. She underwent physiotherapy to help her movement but she needed a wheelchair thereafter. She was left with no feeling in her body but retained her sense of taste and smell. Since the death of her husband John five years earlier, she depended more on Boris and relied on him to alert her when the telephone or doorbell rang. Cascade News, 24 Nov 2009.
Beauty therapist Joanna Mellor’s five-year-old pet Labrador Leo sensed she had ‘died’ in her sleep at 4.30am, and his barking awoke her boyfriend Andrew Rayment, in bed beside her in Ilkeston, Derbyshire. He rang for an ambulance and fought to get Ms Mellor, 24, breathing again with chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth. When paramedics arrived she was hooked up to a defibrillator and rushed to hospital, where a faint pulse was eventually detected. Medics reckoned she was “technically dead” for half an hour, but she made a full recovery. She was subsequently found to suffer from Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, which causes the heart to go into overdrive – and in severe cases to stop. Sun, 10 Mar 2015.
German shepherd dog Storm saved the life of Donna Jeffrey, 31, by waking her up when she was struggling to breathe
during an asthma attack. Storm persistently tapped her with his paws on the chest, and Mrs Jeffrey managed to use her inhaler in time. “If I had woken up during a full-blown attack, with a blue face, I would not have been able to phone for an ambulance,” said the former nurse from King’s Lynn, Norfolk. Metro, 21 Jan 2016.
A pug called Olive ran off from her 16-year-old owner Saffron Mackeson on 4 November after being spooked by fireworks in Wick, a village in South Gloucestershire. Fears for the pint-sized pooch grew as more than a week passed. Ten days later, Nicola Jones, 48, took Bear, her 110lb (50kg) Rottweiler, for a walk when he began sniffing the air beside a hedge. “He wouldn’t move,” said Ms Jones. “I went through the hedge and found a [5ft/1.5m deep] well and there was Olive, just looking up. I climbed down and pulled her out. I was worried she might have hurt herself, she was petrified, but then her tail wagged. She was fine.” She then alerted Olive’s owner on the lost-and-found Bristol page on Facebook. Bear isn’t the first Rottweiler to come to the rescue. In 2015, a shivering pensioner who was stuck in a field for more than 15 hours was saved by a family of four Rottweilers in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. D.Mail, Metro, 16 Nov 2016. For other rescues by dogs, see FT199:22, 244:2627, 330:6, 353:8-9.