Dog Saves Another Dog Who Falls Through Ice; Disappears As Soon As Good Deed Done

The desperate situation came to the attention of maintenance workers at the Andalusia, Illinois, Water and Sewage Treatment when they were breaking for lunch and they heard a dog’s agitated barks, Matt Stark, a worker at the treatment plant, told ABC News.

“I had just sat down for lunch when one of our guys, Joe Dungan, came back to the building and said he heard dogs barking and he looked around and one was in the water. The other was running around in circles in the ice trying to get to it and saying almost like, ‘Save my friend.'”

Joe Dungan told WQAD 8, “I looked over in this hole over here and the other dog was in the water trying to get out, so I called 911.”

The men then called the emergency number, but in the meantime got to work trying to save the near-drowning dog, which has since been identified as Buck. The dog had fallen through the frozen ice, and the situation was quite dire already. Mark Stark said he wasn’t sure at first if the dog would recover.

“The dog had been there a long time. You could tell when we first got there it was howling like giving its last goodbyes or it was in pain, because we think it had been in the water about an hour. I told the guys we gotta hurry because the dog wasn’t holding its head up no more.”

Matt Stark, along with his nephew, also named Matt Stark, gathered men to help in the rescue. They pushed a boat up to the end of the ice and used a snare to drag Buck, thought to be a 10-year-old black Labrador, out of the freezing water. Stark rushed him to the veterinarian, who said he would be fine when he warmed up, much to Stark’s relief.

“He just was shivering as can be. I thought, ‘Good for you, buddy, you’ll get another day to hunt.'”

Buck’s owner was identified this morning, and explained how Buck ended up in the lake, operations manager Samantha DeYoung told ABC News.

“The owner and a friend were hunting with their dogs, and the dogs got separated from them.”

While the men were frantically working to warm up the shivering, freezing dog they had pulled from the water, the other dog, now hailed as a hero, ran away. It seemed to understand its work was done. This is not the first time the Inquisitr has reported on a dog coming to the aid of another dog.

Maybe dog, not man, is really dog’s best friend.