Man’s best friend has once again proven its ability to detect someone in trouble and lead its human companion to the scene to summon life-saving help.
Dan DiCandilo in Richmond, Virginia suburb of Ashland told WWBT how a dreary, bitterly cold morning just after sunrise turned into a life-saving rescue during his daily walk around the neighborhood with his dog, Gozier.
“We walk five miles a day, every day, and we’ve been doing that for nine years,” said DiCandilo. “Gozier is the child we’ve never had.”
He continued, “We were about halfway up Henry Clay, heading towards the tracks as we call it here in Ashland, and she started barking wildly at a house that we pass every single day.”
But the bark was one he didn’t recognize, he said, explaining it “had a little cry to it.”
“It was different,” he said. “It wasn’t a bark I had heard from her before.”Gozier pulled DiCandilo towards the home.
Only when they became very close to the home could he see the situation that had alerted the large, short-haired canine.
A woman lay unconscious and unresponsive on the front steps.
“It was a woman who was on her back in a white robe, which camouflaged her and made it impossible to see from the road,” said DiCandilo. “She had no hat, she had no gloves, she had no shoes.”
The temperature was 15 degrees.
He quickly called 911 and then alerted the homeowner, who did not recognize the woman. While waiting for first responders, Gozier kept barking, as if trying to wake her.
The dog’s bark turned out to be a life saver.
Later, a camera on a neighbor’s door revealed the unidentified woman had shown up crawling on her hands and knees at 4:15 a.m. and had been in the sub-freezing cold for three hours when Grozier found her.good
Her body temperature had dipped to 78 degrees, DiCandilo was later told. She spent a week in intensive care and survived her ordeal.
This week the town of Ashland hosted a ceremony to honor Gozier’s actions.
Such uncanny alerts by dogs that seem to evoke the canine adventures in the 50s and 60s feel-good hit series Lassie are reported more often than one might suspect.
Just last month, as Brietbart News reported, a mysterious stray dog showed up barking during a police search for a missing three-year-old boy during frigid temperatures in Louisville, Kentucky.
The dog then led an officer to the toddler, hidden from view as he shivered inside a locked car in a stranger’s backyard.
Contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the best-selling author of the Los Angeles crime novel Below the Line and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.