The abandoned dog that Ohio garbage men took out of a dumpster is doing “great” in his new home.

Dave Carlson “saw a face looking at me” when he looked into a bin outside an apartment complex while emptying dumpsters in his truck on the east side of Columbus, Ohio.

A puppy with a brown and white face and a discarded Chewy delivery box was lying next to it, most likely a pit bull mix of some kind. He was afraid.

Carlson, a refuse operator for the Columbus Department of Public Service, tells Daily Paws, “He did not like the truck’s noise.”

He had good justification. The dumpster would have been lifted off the ground and emptied into the truck’s bed by the loud front-loading truck. If the puppy had been perched on top of the trash, it probably wouldn’t have made it.

Logan Sieg, a supervisor of refuse collection, showed up at the apartments after Carlson called for assistance. He used his secret weapon as he entered the trash can filled with trash from the back of a pickup truck.

Sieg claims, “I got him with some crackers and eventually picked him up.”

They brought him back to a public works station, where they gave the dog, which appeared to be dehydrated, some water and gave him some more peanut butter crackers, which were the only food they had available to him. In the roughly ten minutes he spent there, he seemed to be feeling better.

Sieg asserts, “It was almost like he was happy to be out running around.”

When Sieg asked him to sit, he was able to, indicating that the puppy probably belonged to someone. Sadly, his placement in the dumpster suggested that he had been left there by a person. He was too small and the dumpster’s walls were too high for him to walk there on his own.