Dog Helps Save Another Dog That Fell Through Ice
A dog’s barks summoned rescuers to his drowning friend.
— -- Sometimes a dog’s best friend is … another dog.
The canine drama was in motion when maintenance workers at the Andalusia, Illinois, Water and Sewage Treatment were breaking for lunch when they heard a dog’s agitated barks.
“I had just sat down for lunch when one of our guys, Joe Dungan, came back to the building and said he heard dogs barking and he looked around and one was in the water,” Matt Stark, a worker at the treatment plant told ABC News. “The other was running around in circles in the ice trying to get to it and saying almost like, ‘Save my friend.’”
The men then called the emergency number, but in the meantime got to work trying to save the near-drowning dog, which has since been identified as Buck.
“The dog had been there a long time. You could tell when we first got there it was howling like giving its last goodbyes or it was in pain, because we think it had been in the water about an hour,” Stark recounted. “I told the guys we gotta hurry because the dog wasn’t holding its head up no more.”
Stark and his nephew, also Matt Stark, along with some other workers and emergency responders, pushed a boat up to the end of the ice and used a snare to drag Buck, a 10-year-old black Labrador, out of the freezing water.
“He just was shivering as can be,” Stark said. “I thought, ‘Good for you, buddy, you’ll get another day to hunt.’”
Buck was taken to the Rock Island County Animal Care & Control where a veterinarian checked him out.
“Our vet took a look at him said he was doing great. He didn’t look worse for the wear,” operations manager Samantha Deyoung told ABC News.
Buck’s owner came forward this morning to take his dog home, which is when Deyoung learned how he ended up in the lake.
“The owner and a friend were hunting with their dogs, and the dogs got separated from them,” she said. “The friend’s dog came back to them later [without Buck].”
Related Stories
ABC News Live