Dempsey the Boxer Survives Nine Freezing Days Outside in Maine Only to Be Hit by a Car

He went 10 rounds in subzero woods and then got knocked flat by a car, but this fighter survived.

Dempsey the Boxer was named after the boxer Jack Dempsey, so you have to assume that this little guy is not going to go down without a fight. 

And last week, he was in the fight of his life: nine days alone in subzero temperatures, and then he gets hit by a car.  

It started a couple of weeks ago, when Dempsey and his owner Jamie Cyrway visited her parents' house in Maine -- a very cold Maine. Dempsey, for reasons known only to Dempsey, jumped a six-foot fence in the backyard and aced into the woods. Those woods were freezing. Dempsey was an out-of-town Boxer, unused to such conditions. It didn't look good. The family immediately started searching, offering a reward, putting up signs around the neighborhood and on Facebook.

“We went out on snow shoes,” Janet Boothby, Cyrway’s mother, told CBS News. “We went out at night. We took my dog on trails. Jamie and I went through the woods. We had scent stations set up.”

They did everything they could, in short. But still no Dempsey. Eventually, Cyrway, who is a single parent with three kids, had to get back to Maryland for work. She left with her kids, but her family continued the search. 

The days continued to pass, but they didn't give up hope. 

"Jamie and I never gave up on him," Boothby told WMTM.com. "We said, 'Until we have proof Dempsey is gone by being dead or something, we’re not going to give up. Because if we give up, he will die and we weren’t going to do that."

Then, nine days later, a break in the case. A man told others he hit a dog near a farm in the area where Dempsey vanished. Christine Pierce, who heard about Dempsey on Facebook but didn't know the dog, thought she'd go check it out. 

She found tracks in the snow, which led into a shed. She followed them and found Dempsey, who looked "horrible" and "skinny." 

“He wasn’t moving, and when I saw him, I said, 'Dempsey, I found you. I can’t believe I found you,'" Pierce said. “He kind of opened his eyes a little bit and then I knew he was alive. I scooped him up and put him in the back of my vehicle and called his owner Jamie and said, 'I found your dog.'"

Pierce took him straight to Madison Animal Hospital. Dempsey had a broken leg, he had lost weight, his heart rate had dropped, and he was having seizures, but he was alive. 

According to Dr. Darren Richards, Pierce found Dempsey in the nick of time. 

“It’s really a miracle. Nine days in the subzero temperatures that we had, and he’s not a very big dog, so he’s lucky,” Richards said. "I think when she found him, he was probably within an hour or two of dying.” 

Dempsey is recovering from surgery to fix his leg, and he's been reuinted with Cyrway. Her mother praised the community for helping them find the dog.

“We had so many people looking, so many people helping us look. So many people putting food out. People are good people,” Boothby said. “At church, our opening prayer was for Dempsey on Sunday morning, so Dempsey touched the hearts of many, many lives.”

Via CBS News

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What Kind of Jerkfaces Burn a Dog Alive? (He Survives, Thank Goodness)

Bo the Blue Heeler's crime? Nothing more than snooping around a chicken coop. Seriously.

Bo, a very alive three-year-old Blue Heeler, is being called the Wyoming Wonder Dog. Here's why. (Buckle up.)

A few months ago, Genevieve Gerber and her 18-year-old son, Wesley, returned home to find a dog in their chicken coop, according to the Los Angeles Times. 

It was Bo. Wesley grabbed his rifle and shot the dog twice. Bo was hit on the cheek and in the back. Wesley and Genevieve walked up to Bo and determined he was dead. Wesley dragged the dog outside, then asked his father, Mike, what to do. 

"Burn it," his father told him. 

Later, Mike Gerber was able to clarify his position on burning a neighbor's dog that your son had just shot and killed, to the Casper Star-Tribune.

"I said, 'Burn it,' because we have had other predators come around -- and even our chickens that the dog had killed -- how we got rid of them was we just burned them," he said. 

Okay, then. 

Dutiful son Wesley dragged the dog to the family's "burn barrel" in the front yard, put the dog inside, doused Bo with gasoline, and lit him on fire. 

"The next thing you know, the dog comes popping up out of there in flames," Mike said to the Casper Star-Tribune. Then he watched the flaming dog run in circles before bolting off. 

"I wish it never happened," Mike says today -- after the talks with the police and the restraining order Bo's family placed on him, and maybe due to the heavy weight of his conscience. "The decisions being made were made fast. Maybe if they would've been thought through more clearly, we would've done things differently."

Indeed. 

In any case, Bo had bolted home, to his loving family, who couldn't believe their eyes.

“Something looked very wrong. It was this terrible smell,” Abby Redland said, according to the Times. "His hair was melted and falling out. He was still smoldering.”

“He was semi-comatose, in frantic pain, flailing," she said to the Star-Tribune.

Abby rushed Bo to the vet. “Bo was in such shock, the vet didn’t think he’d make it,” she said. “I just sat there with him, touching his head, because I couldn’t touch any other part of his body."

But Bo made it. Bo survived. The vet covered him in ice and stitched up his face. He couldn't lie down on his own for a month and a half, and he cried, but he got better. His hair fell out, his damaged skin blistered and fell off. But after five laser treatments and many checkups, and a lot of pain medication, Bo slowly healed. The skin on his legs shrunk, so he limps now, but he's still Bo. 

“He’s still the same sweet dog,” said Abby. “If you don’t pet him, he nudges you. His hair is a lot shorter now.”

As a result of the Gerber family's insanity, the Redlands took out a restraining order on them. And the Redlands are trying to make it harder under Wyoming law to shoot a domestic animal, and to introduce stipulations requiring shooters to contact the animal’s owners, according to the Times.

They've also set up a fund at the Tharp Veterinary Clinic in Worland, highlighting their efforts on their Facebook page, Bo's Cause for Abused Paws. The fund will assist anyone whose pets are in serious need of medical attention.

“Bo’s alive because he came home,” Redland said. “He knew where home was.”

All photos via the Facebook page Bo's Cause for Abused Paws.

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Brandi the Beagle Survives 70-Foot Jump Off Bridge

After running away and finding herself on a crowded bridge, Brandi only had one way to go: down.

After Brandi the Beagle ran away from her owner and found herself running in traffic, her day went from bad to worse -- and then she jumped off a 70-foot bridge.

Let's back up -- but not before mentioning that Brandi is fine. She just has a lightly bruised tummy because she did a belly flop when she jumped off the bridge. (If you smiled just now, that's okay. It's okay to smile over a lightly bruised tummy sustained during a belly flop, if only for a moment.)

Brandi's trouble with the bridge started earlier that day, when she was taking her usual walk with her owner, Robert Lorenz, according to the New York Daily News. Brandi, who had been abused by her previous owners, doesn't like strangers much, and she didn't like the strangers who approached her on the walk, crowding around her and trying to pet her. She got out of her harness and bolted. 

Unfortunately, she bolted onto the Burlington-Bristol Bridge. It was a poor choice. The bridge was full of traffic, with people -- all of them strangers -- stopping their cars and trying to help her, and there was no way out. 

Except off the side of it. 

“She’s running down the middle of this two-lane bridge with traffic coming at her, she dodges traffic, and finally goes to the side,” Liz Verna, a spokesperson for the Burlington County Bridge Commission, told the Daily News.

It was a 70-foot drop, with swiftly moving currents below. It's a tough leap, for any creature. 

“We have had human jumpers,” Verna said. “I think at least one of them survived, but usually they do not.”

Brandi, however, handled it like a champ. Even with no previous experience on the high dive, or any dive, she nailed the belly flop, dog-paddled against the current, hauled herself ashore -- and promptly hid in the bushes along the riverfront.

Police and witnesses saw her make the jump, and they scoured the area with Lorenz's wife, Alexia -- who was still in her bathrobe, because she had run out of the house like a hero the moment she learned from her husband that their dog was lost. At midnight she finally went home to change out of the bathrobe, and when she returned ... well, let her tell it: 

“I pulled up, and in my headlights, there were her eyes glaring at me in the darkness of the night,” she told CourierPostOnline. “I didn’t want to do anything to scare her, so I slowly grabbed the leash and her treats.”

“I clipped the leash and that was it,” Alexia Lorenz said. “I couldn’t believe it. It was a miracle.”

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Dog Survives 53 Days in Wild After Accident, Reunited with Owner After Losing More Than Half of Bodyweight

A Shetland sheepdog/sheltie, like Dooley

A car accident in December on I-80 in Nevada claimed the life of Barbara Bagley’s husband and one of their two Shetland sheepdogs, and left Bagley in critical condition. But she never gave up hope that their other Sheltie, Dooley, was still alive after he bolted from the tragic scene.

“Something inside me told me Dooley was still alive out there. I wasn’t 100 percent sure, but I didn’t grieve for Dooley like I did for my husband and our other dog,” Bagley told the Associated Press.

There were occasional potential sightings of the 4-year-old dog, but the desert is a harsh environment any time of year, and it was hard to imagine Dooley was still alive as the weeks went by. But volunteers persevered in their quest to reunite Bagley and Dooley, just in case her intuition was right. Something that meant so much to her could not be given up on just because it didn’t look good.

Four  weeks after the accident, Bagley heard of a “Lassie-like” dog spotted very close to the scene of the accident, but the dog could not be found. Weeks later, a railroad crew sighted a lookalike dog, but it kept evading his rescuers, too skittish and quick for their maneuvers. It took someone on horseback working with someone in a Jeep to outmaneuver the dog and capture him.

It was Dooley all right. Bagley was overjoyed. The poor dog had gone from 44 pounds down to 20, and had apparently survived by eating roadkill, like a dead coyote along the road, and drinking from occasional puddles. Bagley herself was well enough, though, to start taking care of him again.”He couldn’t have survived much longer out there,” she said.

And as you have probably guessed, Dooley has been the best medicine for Bagley.

“He’s the physical and mental affection that I need to recover,” she said. “I owe him so much for the hope I have now and the renewed faith I have in prayer. Dogs are so great because of their unconditional love.”

Bagley believes her husband had a role in Dooley’s safe return home. “It’s a message from my husband who was looking out for him,” she said. “It was a miracle.”

What a great story to illustrate the power of hope. If Bagley hadn’t had hope, it probably would have been too late when, and if, Dooley was ever found. Welcome back, Dooley, and eat lots and lots of food, and keep Bagley very good company, please. She needs you now more than ever.

Source: Associated Press, via SFGate

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Holiday Miracles: Dog Survives Blast, and Other Happy Tales

Diva

It was miracle enough that the Diaz family survived a huge explosion that wrecked their home Tuesday. A little boy, his dad, and grandparents were home when there apparently was a natural gas pipeline explosion at their home in Haltom City, Texas.

But when they found their beloved dog, Diva, hiding among the ruins the next day, they finally called it a true miracle. They took her to the veterinarian right away and were hugely relieved that she had no serious injuries.

“We’re just blessed — Christmas miracle, I guess,” Maggie Diaz told NBC-DFW. Check out the video below the illustration to see just how bad the damage was, and you’ll see how very lucky they all were. (If you can call it lucky when you lose your home.)

On your way down to the video, take a look at this Holiday Pet Miracles illustration. The Dogster Dog Blog is the very first place you’ll find this on the Internet! The good folks at eBay Classifieds thought we were a deserving bunch because we write about these types of story pretty frequently. They thought you’d enjoy seeing some of these happy tales in illustrated form. It would be fun to see a poster like this at veterinary clinics this time of year, wouldn’t it? Some people taking their pets there really do need a miracle.

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