Jeff Bonnert had given up on seeing his poodle mix again after she disappeared in early June. Two months later, he received a text message from a neighbor: People exploring a nearby cave had found a dog. Could you be Abby?
Boehnert doubted this, but still curious, he went to the site of the cave near his country house in Missouri. That’s when he saw the photo taken by a lifeguard.
“I said, ‘This is my dog,'” Bonnert recalled on Monday.
What makes Abby’s story even more fascinating is the fact that she’s just weeks shy of turning 14. However, it somehow managed to survive about 60 days on its own, apparently most or all of it in a barren, barren, 58°F (14°C) cave.
Abby and Bonnert’s other dog, Summer, does everything together, including misbehaving.
Bonnert recalls that on June 9, the couple ran away from home. It had happened before, and in the rural area near Perryville in eastern Missouri, it was generally not a big deal. The dogs were wandering in the fields, perhaps chasing something, and then heading home.
When Bonnert woke up the next morning, it was summer back home but Abby wasn’t.
He said, “They never parted.” “I thought something bad had happened. I mean she’s too old. The heat can beat her.”
Bohnert posted about his missing dog on Facebook, reached out to neighbors and called the police, but no one saw Abby.
On August 6, Jerry Kane and five other adults, along with five children, had just entered Berom Mor Cave, to plan a day of exploration. One of the children ran in front of the group and shouted back to his father, “There’s a dog here.”
“Their dad was like, ‘There isn’t,'” Kane said.
Yes there was.
“She was lying there twisted into a ball,” Kane recalls. “She raised her head and looked at us but did not respond to verbal commands. She seemed to be about to finish.”
Kane enlists the help of another caveman who happens to be there, Rick Haley. They knew that Abby couldn’t walk nearly 500 feet to the entrance, especially because she was going through narrow lanes and going up a steep incline.
Trained in cave rescues, Haley retrieved a duffel bag and blanket from his truck. They put the blanket inside the bag, then put the dog, who immediately took the warm blanket weeks after being put in the cold mud.
However, taking out Abby was difficult given her fragility.
“It was important that we didn’t give her any harsh treatment,” Hayley said. In the rocky areas through little lanes, “we’d carry her a little distance, and put her down, and then move kind of in front of her, and put her hand back, and we bore her, and we put her in front of us.” He described it as “a type of frog hop.”
Soon after initially finding Abby, Ken went briefly to a few homes nearby to see if anyone had lost a dog. A neighbor made contact with Bonnert, who lives so close to the cave site that he can see it from his house.
He went there assuming it couldn’t be Abby – how could a 13-year-old dog survive such an ordeal?
To his surprise, she did, and about an hour and a half after the rescue began, she was outside. One of the rescuers gave Abby a morsel of beef.
“She almost ate his finger,” Kane said. Almost immediately, I began to recover.
The Boehnert Abbe figures end up in the cave after falling into a hidden hole or entrance. Hayley said there were paw prints all over, indicating that she tried to get out at first.
After that, Haley and Bohnert think she’s amassed, able to basically live off her own body fat.
“I think it was in saving mode,” Boehnert said.
Boehnert said Abby usually weighs about 50 pounds (23 kilograms), but he guessed she lost half her body weight in the cave. Since her rescue, she has regained her weight and started to recover the voice she may have lost barking for help.
She wiggles her tail again, to show that she is putting the shock behind her.
“It’s amazing how she’s actually come back,” Boehnert said. “She’s acting like herself again.”
Copyright © 2022 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
.
[ad_2]
