Meet Rosie the Puppy, a three-month-old German Shepherd who gets a little overexcited sometimes. And every now and then, she causes a bit of trouble for her human companion. Like Sunday, for example, when she jumped on the gas pedal of John Costello’s Dodge Neon and drove it straight into the nearest body of water.
First of all, no need to worry. No one was hurt, not even Rosie. Costello and a nearby Good Samaritan leaped into Bolivar Pond in Canton, Massachusetts, and pulled the rambunctious puppy out of the water before the car sank below the surface.
“She’s a handful,” says Costello of his puppy, in what can surely be called a major understatement.
So, what made this overeager, large-eared puppy think she could operate a moving vehicle?
It happened like this. Costello took Rosie for a walk around Bolivar Pond, in the town of about 21,000 just south of Boston. But apparently, even a walk through nature wasn’t enough to burn off all of the puppy’s energy.
When Costello placed Rosie in the back seat and started up the car, the puppy decided that the front seat looked like a much better place to be. So she leapt over the seat — and promptly got her leash tangled on the car’s stick shift.
In her frantic effort to break free, Rosie launched herself straight onto the Dodge Neon’s gas pedal. And then the car took off.
“The dog jumped in and hit the gear shift and the car jerked and she fell on top of the gas pedal,” Costello told Boston’s WFXT-TV . “It was just scary.”
The subsequent 911 call was a new one on the Canton police.
“I’ve never heard of a puppy driving a car into a pond,” said the responding officer, Robert Quirk.
The Canton police officer later tweeted about the incident:
The perp says he was just going with the flow of traffic. pic.twitter.com/DDLzyziRBR
— Rob Quirk (@RobQuirk1) June 1, 2014
By the time the police arrived, things were okay. But the situation was definitely touch-and-go. The car plowed forward about 15 feet before hitting the water. Costello managed to jump out. He tried to grab Rosie, of course, but she jumped out of his grasp into the back seat.
The car floated about 30 feet into the pond with Costello and a nearby worker, Eric Hermann, swimming in hot pursuit. A third man joined them to help rescue Rosie, as well.
“I’m glad they were there cause if they weren’t there, I don’t know what I would have done,” Costello said. “By the time we got the puppy out, the car had slid and we had to do a little swimming.”
Fortunately, everyone came out of the watery adventure just fine, and as for Rosie the Puppy, she was all like, “Who, me?”
The Dodge Neon was a total loss, but Costello had insurance. Puppy insurance, we hope, for his sake.