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‘Good girl and true hero’: dog saves owner by leading US officer to her home (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 15 hours ago by [email protected] to c/news

15 comments fedilink hide all child comments

A dog saved her owner – who hurt his leg at home in rural Washington state, fell and couldn’t get up for hours – by walking to a road, sitting in the middle of it until a local sheriff’s deputy stopped, and leading the officer to him, according to authorities.

Gita, 13, had sat down in the middle of a road when a Stevens county deputy first encountered her. The deputy tried to get the dog into his patrol cruiser so he could then look for her owner, but she wouldn’t get in.

Gita at that point took off up a lightly traveled, unmarked path nearby when the deputy tried to get her off the roadway and away from potentially being hit by a motorist, the sheriff’s office said. The deputy followed Gita, who eventually led him to a small summer cabin.

The deputy soon heard an elderly man’s voice call out for help while on the ground a short distance from the cabin, according to the sheriff’s office. The man had medical conditions that required certain medications that he had not been able to take after falling and hurting his leg several hours earlier.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

Gita’s turn in the spotlight came about four months after a dog ran four miles to get help for his owner who crashed his car into a ravine in Oregon. That dog’s owner was ultimately rescued.

And in January, a man who fell through the ice on a frozen lake in Michigan was saved after his dog brought him rescue equipment at the behest of a state police officer who then pulled the creature’s owner to safety.

Man, dogs fucking rock. My kitties clearly love me, but they wouldn't have any ability to try to rescue me. They'd just sniff my face while I was lying on the ground.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (1 children)

There was that cat in the news a few years back who drove off that dog that was attacking and dragging a little boy in that family.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEa6jZv-Khc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSG_wBiTEE8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tara_(cat)

On May 13, 2014, Jeremy Triantafilo, a four-year-old boy, was riding his bicycle in his family's driveway in Bakersfield, California when Scrappy, a neighbor's eight-month-old Labrador-Chow mix cross, came from behind and bit his leg.[9] As the dog began dragging Jeremy down his driveway, Tara, who the family states was very attached to Jeremy, tackled the dog and chased him away before returning to Jeremy's side to check on him.

Jeremy needed ten stitches in his left calf following the attack. He quickly recovered and was thankful for Tara's actions calling her "my hero".[10]

If mean, if I were a cat -- smaller than the dog in question, and physically less-able to take on larger animals than a dog anyway -- and the dog was already doing a number on a human, that's not a fight I'd casually jump into. And while there are a few social cat species, like lions, I don't think that the wildcat ancestor of the housecat is a social animal, so it's probably not really geared up to be helping out other members of a pride or anything.

kagis

Yeah, it's solitary:

https://synapsida.blogspot.com/2020/03/small-cats-domestic-cats-closest.html

Among these three species, the one thought to be closest of all to the domestic animal is the sand cat (Felis margarita). This split off from the line leading to the wildcats and the Chinese mountain cat around 2.5 million years ago, just before the Ice Ages got going, while the other species (or their immediate ancestors) seem to have been around since the Late Pliocene 3 to 3.5 million years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_cat

The sand cat is solitary, except during the mating season and when a female has kittens.

[–] AngryCommieKender 6 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Housecats can be absolute beasts. We had a tortoiseshell that had a white tipped tail. Only bit of white on her, which got her named firefly, because that bit of her tail was all my dad could see one night coming back from the barn to the house as a kitten.

Fast forward a few years, and she's definitely the runt because she only grew to about 4 pounds, but she got into the pens of the next farm over's dog fighting rottweilers. She managed to absolutely terrorize two of the neighbor's dogs before being chased off.

Neighbor threatened to sue my dad, because she "ruined my dogs! Now they won't fight!" My father laughed in his face as he told him, "I'll see you in court." Dog fighting was illegal in Indiana even in the '80s

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 hours ago

Wow, Firefly saved the dogs!

[–] ikidd 6 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

They would feast on your corpse when you finally cratered. Cats don't give a fuck.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 hours ago

So would dogs if left to starve.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (2 children)

As the next logical step, we clearly need to arm every good dog with a gun.

~/s~

[–] TheTechnician27 9 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

>Arm good dogs with guns

>Bad dogs do not exist

>It's consequently impossible for the guns to fall into the paws of bad dogs

It's flawless.

[–] VubDapple 2 points 14 hours ago

That's the way to get other good dogs killed.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (2 children)

Honestly, given a canine's physical capabilities, I'm not sure that I could have done as well as she did in that situation.

And for a dog, what had to have gone into that...

Assess that her owner was in trouble.
Assess that another human could help. I'm not sure that that's an obvious conclusion for a dog to come to from an evolutionary standpoint. My guess is that most cases, in a pack of wild dogs, for most problems short of being attacked by something, there's not a whole lot that bringing another dog to help is going to do, if one gets hurt.
She had to plan out in advance a way to get a human to do what she needed them to do.
Assess that disrupting traffic would be a way to get attention. That is, she had to have a model of the mental state of other humans sufficient to predict how they'd act in a situation that I doubt that she'd seen before.
Evade capture when someone tried to capture her.
And keep them interested enough to follow her to the cabin.

[–] Seleni 3 points 7 hours ago

Some animals can figure it. At the nursery I used to work at, the new nursery cat decided to take a nap in a customer’s truck, and woke up in the nearby town (still several miles away).

She started to walk back, got part of the way, realized she didn’t know the rest of the way, and waited at an intersection. Then, when a local family stopped to put up some signs for a town festival, she accosted them and wouldn’t let them leave until they took her with them.

They recognized her and brought her back to the nursery.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Dogs seek humans for help when they cannot solve the problem themselves. It's one of the behavioural adaptations that distinguish them from wolves.

I can't find the video of it, but there's an experiment where a chunk of meat has a long piece of rope tied to it and placed in the centre of a cage so that only the end of the rope is accessible. Both both domesticated wolves and dogs are smart enough to start pulling on the reachable end of rope to get the meat to the cage edge.

Same experiment is repeated but this time the rope is nailed to the floor so that pulling on it will not work as last time. A wolf will eventually give up trying and ignore the cage. A dog will try every way it can think of and then seek out a human for help when all the attempts fail.

The behaviour of the dog in this article is more common than you think. What is impressive is that the human didn't get in the way and actually figured it out.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 12 hours ago

If my dog has poop stuck to his butt he comes over and whimpers at me for help. My cat smears it all over my floor.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Another poignant note that some other news sources have pointed out: it looks like she was a rescue dog. That is, in getting her, her elderly owner probably saved her from being euthanized.

https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/rescue-dog-stevens-county-returns-favor-saving-elderly-owner-who-fell/E54BZZERANB4FI2BN2ES7OUS2M/

Rescue dog in Stevens County returns favor, saving elderly owner who fell

[–] [email protected] 6 points 13 hours ago

It's also stated in this article.

But the agency described Gita as a “rescue dog and best friend of the gentleman in trouble”, and it explicitly credited her for “saving his life that day”.