The Australian outback is harsh, so when some bushwalkers in Queensland came across a dog struggling in a rock pool, they knew they had to act quickly.
When Reddit user Dangerm0use and her husband and father were walking through Mt. Glorious National Park, they came across the tired puppy. They got to work, not knowing how long the dog had been in the water, where it came from, or even whether it was friendly.
“We couldn’t leave it in the freezing water in any case. It was absolutely exhausted from its efforts to claw its way out of the deep hole it had dug for itself, and there was no way it would have made it through the night,” the woman wrote.
The hikers looped a rope around the dog’s head and shoulders and pulled her onto a rock embankment with the largest stick they could find.
She said, “The dog wasn’t violent at all, and in fact lumbered away from us, up the bank, and into the thick lantana beside the lake.” “We reasoned that if she had been someone’s cat, she may have been abandoned or lost.”
The dog didn’t want to join the group, but they couldn’t leave her behind.
“She was in an inhospitable part of the bush, in a gully with a cliff face on one side and hectares of national park on the other, and a scrubby, rugged, unscaleable bank up to a busy road. There were also no houses within a 5-kilometer radius, and no easy way for her to get out of the gully on her own,” she explained. “When we saw her podgy little rump vanish into the lantana, we had no choice but to wade in after her.”
They attempted to console the dog and allow her to regain her strength. To get this 88-pound puppy out of the gully, he’d need more than just motivation.
She looked dejected and was clearly tired. I yanked the lantana away from her nest and moved in closer, allowing her to adjust to our presence. She was still wary, but not offensive, so I took a gamble and scratched her on the head… and she rewarded me with a lick on the hand,” the woman wrote. “Despite the fact that we had obviously been camped there for at least a few days, we noticed that our little companion had a lot of mass, prompting us to call her Miss Piggy. We spent a little more time getting to know Miss Piggy while we devised a strategy to get her out.”
They were able to make a harness out of a strong rope and a few slip knots and pull Miss Piggy out of the pit, over loose rocks and brush.
“The little sweetie wriggled over to me and rested her head on my leg, demonstrating her gratitude for our patience. I didn’t want to get too close to her at this point, but she gave me permission to give her a comforting hug,” the woman wrote.
“It was becoming clear that she wouldn’t be able to make it up the bank unless we brought her, so we started discussing harness and hammock setups made out of towels and ropes. My husband had a lightbulb moment when he remembered we had a big canvas bag in our car (15 mins walk back up the creek).We figured that if we could get her into the bag, we could MacGyver together some apparatus to transport her out.”
Miss Piggy was pulled out of the gully and brought back to safety by the woman’s brother and father, who secured the canvas bag to a large branch. The 3-meter vertical climb to the nearby street took less than 30 minutes.
Her owner was only hoping for the best about 15 kilometers north of where the dog was discovered.Elly-Bobby, the dog’s real name, had gone missing on June 30, and was found on July 23. The hikers had no idea what she had been up to during that time.
“For a dog that had been homeless for nearly a month, her condition was remarkably healthy. “We still have no idea how she ended up in such a remote part of the forest, with no obvious signs of injury and only the most basic signs of exposure,” the woman wrote. “We hypothesized that she had been kidnapped and then dumped, or that she had found a temporary home but had abandoned it.Whatever the story, we were just happy to have been in the right place at the right time to be able to help her.”
Bobby’s owner had never given up hope that she would return home, and had launched a large-scale Facebook and community poster campaign in the hopes of locating her. The couple, as well as many others who followed the tale, were overjoyed to be reunited. Dangerm0use’s photo journal went viral after she uploaded it to Reddit, where it has since been viewed over 500,000 times.
“Whatever the story was, we were just grateful to be in the right place at the right time to be able to assist her,” she wrote.
It’s never easy to lose a pet, but there’s nothing like seeing those happy tails wag their way back home.
Take a look at those stray dogs that have made their way back to their owners!
