Gita, 13, sat down in middle of road in Washington state after owner hurt his leg, fell and couldn’t get up

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.

  • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
    31·
    3 months ago

    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.

    • ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      3 months ago

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

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      161·
      3 months ago

      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@lemmy.world
        7·
        3 months ago

        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