Gerry Keene was 500 feet underground on a cave exploration adventure in Missouri when his headlamp shone on something he’d never seen this deep in a cave: a dog. https://t.co/YdR55IIV6r
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) August 12, 2022
Special for the spelunker Jackals:
… “We realized it would be hard to get her out because she was too weak to walk,” said Keene, 59, who was on a spelunking trip in Perryville, Mo., on Saturday with a small group that included several children.
He snapped a photo of the dog, then headed out of the cave to call for help from emergency responders.
At the same time as an assistant fire chief arrived, Rick Haley, a caving enthusiast who happened to be nearby, overheard that a dog was found inside the cave and needed rescuing. He volunteered to venture back into the darkness with Keene and help bring out the pup.
“There’s no telling how long she’d been down there, but we knew we had to get her out,” said Haley, who had just been surveying 2,000 feet of passageways in the Tom Moore Cave system for the Cave Research Foundation.
Haley and Keene decided the only way to rescue the wounded dog was to go back down and carry her up.
“If we didn’t get her out, she would die in there,” said Haley, 66, a caver with 30 years of experience. “It would be a tough, vertical climb to get her out. But we were up for it.”…
They walked and crawled for about 15 minutes until they reached Abby, but it took them more than an hour to carefully haul her through low and narrow tunnels to the surface in a padded duffel bag, Haley said. The exhausted pooch’s head poked out of the top.
“We had to move her hand over hand because it was pretty tight and vertical coming out,” Haley said, noting that at one point he and Keene had to slither through mud in a long corkscrew tunnel…
Abby has been part of their family for 14 years, ever since he got her as a puppy for his daughter, Rachel Bohnert, then 8.
Abby is now able to take short walks on a leash, and she seems happy to be reunited with her pal Summer and the family cat, Fuzzy, he said…
Kristine
I read the story earlier this week. That poor pup–how it managed to survive that long at that age under those conditions.
rikyrah
Good people😪😪😪
OzarkHillbilly
Heh, Rick Haley is an old caving buddy of mine, tho it’s been a while since I’ve seen him.
DarkSiubhan
Wow, what a story! Is Ozark Hillbilly still around? I’ll bet he is familiar with that cave.
ETA: And just like that…!
Layer8Problem
Jeez, we saw Thirteen Lives here the other day. Just the description of getting that poor pooch out twists my insides. I’m always glad for happy endings and the reminder that good people are out there.
Immanentize
Missouri? Cavers? Sweet pup?
This is OzarkHillbilly beat sweetener if ever there was, well, such a thing!
Bravo to all and I like Fuzzy’s jaunty walk.
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly:
I immediately thought of you.
Immanentize
@OzarkHillbilly: of course he is — you should might give him a “holler?”
trollhattan
“And thus, science became aware of a new squirrel species, the cave squirrel.”
If only Abby could talk, there’s quite a story to be had.
Immanentize
@trollhattan: Abby’s story likely involves one “Precious.”
Dorothy A. Winsor
What a good story.
Alison Rose 💙🌻💛
Haha, I just sent this to TaMara last night with the subject line “KINDNESS OMG”
Sometimes people are wonderful.
Raoul Paste
“We could be heroes, just for one day”
raven
It turns out this was our HVAC guy!
Immanentize
@Raoul Paste:
Immanentize
@raven: Pup Rescue Patrol is everywhere!
Falling into an old abandoned well is gothic.
JPL
@OzarkHillbilly: Very cool!
Kristine
@raven: If husband or son are named “Timmy…”
lowtechcyclist
@Kristine:
I read the story yesterday. I figure she must’ve fallen into the cave fairly recently, to still be alive when they found her. Otherwise the combination of starvation and hypothermia surely would have killed her long before.
OzarkHillbilly
I didn’t do much caving in Perry County, just a little bit from time to time.
Turns out I have another connection to the story. My little Sis’s first husband was related to the Perry County Bohnerts*. His family had moved up to Jefferson county in the early ’60s iirc. They still owned the old homestead at the time of his death, used to go out there for holidays and such.
*hard to say how closely related he might have been, half the damn county is named Bohnert.
eta: want to add that Rick is just plain and simply a really good person, one of the best.
raven
So I have had two doggie mishaps in the last two weeks. We were up visiting our friends in Brevard last week. They have two aussie’s and one of them has issues with people in their house. This time last year she nipped me on the arm when I was visiting and it didn’t seem like a big deal. This year we went up with Artie and we knew we had to keep them apart so we carefully put their dogs in the fenced yard and went in to see the house. The women were up looking at the house, my buddy was in the kitchen and Artie and I were sitting on the couch. The dogs had been flinging themselves at the the door and, suddenly, it flew open and the culprit came right at me snarling and baring her teeth. I thought she was going for Artie and my reaction was to boot her in the head. I don’t know if she bit me before or after I kicked her but I got some decent bite marks on my leg!
Last evening we were having our old people dinner at the picnic tables at White Tiger when a friend with her 6 month old lad walked up the street. As I will I went to give the girl some treats and she jumped up on my arms and scraped it with her claws. Since I’m on statins I’ve bruised and cut easily and my arm turned into a bloody mess! Like the bit it wasn’t nearly as bad as it look but I’m on a real roll with pups!
lowtechcyclist
@OzarkHillbilly:
Cool!
I’ve been cleaning out the shed this morning, and I came across my old caving helmet and carbide lamp, the latter of which has to be a relic at this point – battery-powered lamps have to be orders of magnitude better than carbide by now, and no more dumping spent carbide in caves.
Ken
What, the Mole People can’t have Mole Dogs?
Somewhere a small Mole Child is softly weeping for her lost puppy…
Elizabelle
If you click on the WaPost story about Abbie, you will see a photo of her on a walk with the other family pup. And the family cat. Cat is right there with her dogs.
kalakal
@Immanentize: Love that song
OzarkHillbilly
@lowtechcyclist: There are probably a few carbide enthusiasts out there still. Came in handy for me more than a few times. You can’t build a carbide tent with an electric headlamp.
A couple friends of mine were crawling thru a tight IL cave passage when he got a little too close to her cave pack that she was dragging behind her on a tether. Her carbide dump had begun to leak gas and it blew up in his face. Other than a few singed eyelashes and a little embarrassment on her part there was no harm done.
BeautifulPlumage
I just watched this too many times
Physics, how do they work?
kalakal
@Immanentize: or a plot line from
Skippy the bush kangaroo Every 2nd episode was Skippy alerting people that somebody/a dog had fallen down an old well/mineshaft. I grew up thinking that you couldn’t walk a 100ft in Australia without inadvertantly plunging into the depths of the earth.
What a lovely happy ending, that really is a lucky hound
kindness
I saw this elsewhere yesterday. Shed a happy tear & made me thankful.
CaseyL
I saw the headline for this story didn’t want to read it, since I was sure it had a tragic ending. I am so glad I was wrong, and the pup is rescued and recovering!
Layer8Problem
@kalakal: Ooo, Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, there’s a memory. Outback stations! People with unfamiliar accents! School over the radio! Helpful guys with helicopters! One of my first indications the world was bigger than I knew.
Baud
@CaseyL:
The headline says “Luckiest Dog.” What kind of morbid person do you think Anne Laurie is?
Tony Jay
You know, the charming thing about driving through the Highlands & Islands of Scotland is that everywhere is sideways and either uphill or clinging precariously to the edge of one.
Very lovely though. Lismore’s empty tidal beaches (haggis-eating crabs notwithstanding) and near total solitude was a boon we could have definitely done with more of, and not even the utter, utter t#€¥s booming their rented jet skis across the pristine horizontality of Loch Lomond could quite spoil the royal blue magnificence of the scenery.
Off home now, boooooo. Tory England and it’s steady decline into a downmarket Orthanc won’t bring me down, try as it might, regardless of Dizzy Lizzie and her Triumph of the Shite, White Right.
CaseyL
@Baud: When I saw the story yesterday on news sites. That was the one I was afraid to read.
Baud
@CaseyL:
Gotcha.
mrmoshpotato
@BeautifulPlumage: What were they thinking? (Ya, they weren’t.)
Layer8Problem
@Tony Jay: “rented jet skis across the pristine horizontality of Loch Lomond”
Romantic with a capital ‘R’ associations slam into the 2020s. Ow is all I can say.
randy khan
@lowtechcyclist:
That’s what I thought, too.
Yutsano
@Tony Jay: I was trying to figure out which force is stronger in the Tories: the racism or the misogyny. The polls are answering.
bbleh
@mrmoshpotato: All I can figure is, maybe they were trying to split the branch they were carrying in half?
At first I thought it was deliberately funny, but apparently not…
bbleh
@Tony Jay: @Yutsano: Well the real scandal is that those are their only choices…!
trollhattan
“We returned them, in fact we handed them all to those nice young FBI men who came after we asked for some help.”
Even for a Trump lackey this is lame.
zhena gogolia
@raven: Wow. That’s upsetting.
CarolPW
In the middle of the night one winter I woke up hearing an upset dog whining in the distance and thought “Why don’t they let that goddamned dog in?” I finally got up, put on my sweats, and marched off towards the noise. It was an ancient fat dog that had fallen into the duck pond and could not get out. When I hauled him out I saw he had worn down his nails to bloody stumps. I picked him up and walked back to the house covered in blood and pond water, and cried the whole way.
He was cold all the way through. Put him in front of the heater vent, put a hot pad on him, and fed him sips of warm milk for several hours. Took him to our vets when they opened and his temperature was still sub-normal but not too bad. I went off to school, the vet managed to contact the owner (he had tags) and she picked him up. She brought me a bouquet of flowers that weekend, and said he was still stiff but was doing pretty well. It was the dog she grew up with, and her parents had moved recently so she took the dog. She had no idea he could get out of the yard and had been panic-stricken looking for him.
Baud
@CarolPW:
Wow. You’re the hero.
Roger Moore
@trollhattan:
That’s a very genteel and polite way of saying they’re lying through their teeth.
Dorothy A. Winsor
My preschool age son and I once pulled a dog out of the neighbor’s swimming pool. They’d left the gate to the yard open, and I heard a splash when the dog fell in. I could see the poor thing in the water from my upstairs window. We ran around to that yard and pulled it out. It had been in the water only a couple of minutes, so it shook itself off and ran away. Son and I were both more distressed than the dog.
Baud
@Roger Moore:
They’re using the Reporting on Republicans stylebook.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Roger Moore: No kidding. I read that and thought “No shit.”
MattF
@Roger Moore: …and Jay Bratt, the top counterintelligence official in the Justice Department’s national security division, just happened to be at Mar-a-Lago. Hmm.
Jharp
I wouldn’t go 500 feet below ground in a cave if you threatened me at gun point.
bbleh
@trollhattan: @Roger Moore: Fk no. That’s a very genteel and polite way of offering them at least three EXCUSES (“possible,” “indication,” “not fully”) for OBVIOUSLY lying, and not just through their teeth but on paper.
“Liberal media” my fuzzy ass!
bbleh
@Jharp: Yeah, the vertical-corkscrew-through-the-mud sounded particularly nightmarish.
MattF
@MattF: Also, people were wondering why Bratt was in the group of officials that signed off on the search warrant. Being lied to, prolly.
Alison Rose 💙🌻💛
@Jharp: When I was 11, my family took a road trip up to Oregon, and one thing we did up there was tour the Oregon Caves in Grants Pass. I thought it was pretty awesome.
Would I do it now? FUCK TO THE NO. Not if you told me there was a dragon’s hoard of gold and jewels down there.
WaterGirl
@Roger Moore:
I snorted when I read that. Had I been drinking a beverage as I was reading, it would not have been pretty.
Spanky
@DarkSiubhan: Shouldn’t your name be DorchaSiubhan?
Va in SC
mrmoshpotato
@WaterGirl:
The classic Coke-up-the-nose!
Tony Jay
@Layer8Problem:
So. Many. Tourists.
The northbound lane was gridlock for miles as half the population of the leafy Home Counties tried to squeeze itself into a few square miles of Tartan Disneyland.
@Yutsano:
I laid my bet a loooong time ago. Whoever ended up on the other side of the Vs Sunak ticket, as long as they weren’t also male and brown, was going to be the next failed Prime Minister. Everything else was just kabuki for the punditariat to obsess over.
And lo, it was so.
Tony Jay
@bbleh:
It’s the Tory Party, so it’s bad choices all the way down.
Meanwhile the NuNew Labour Party are taking this opportunity to pound the Tories day after day for their comprehensive awfulness….
Nah. They’re on holiday. Poor things. Waging a maniacal civil war on the only part of their Party that has any popular ideas must be exhausting for them.
WaterGirl
@mrmoshpotato: I did that once in high school when i still drank coke.
*For the record, we are not talking about the other kind of coke up the nose.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Roger Moore: The quote doesn’t indicate whether there were any “cross-our-hearts” or pinky swears, so I’m not sure of the legal weight of this signed declaration.
zhena gogolia
@Alison Rose 💙🌻💛:
Thorin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpJj0RhHeQg
prostratedragon
@Roger Moore: The level of restraint I find best when the alternative is to go upside someone’s head with an iron skillet.
bbleh
@Tony Jay: Hmpf! They could at least have considered a nice normal, you know, white man. [shakes head despairingly]
Layer8Problem
@Tony Jay: Ow. I said ow, Sir!
And in re the romance of glen and burn, I once shared more than a few pints with a Glaswegian gentleman of some discernment, resident at various times in Shanghai, Singapore, and Milwaukee; and I asked him why he so rarely went back to Scotland to visit. “I’ve seen it in movies and read it in books, it’s got Romance coming out of its ass,” I said (did I mention we’d had at least a few pints at this point?). His response was “it rains at least three hundred days a year.”
J R in WV
Regarding caves, Wife and I have traveled way deep into subterranean West Virginia in both wild undeveloped caves and the farther reaches of well known commercial caves like Organ Cave. I gave it up when I developed lower back issues that (rarely, thankfully) could cause me to lose all feeling in my legs. While in a kayak on New River actually. Another great outdoor hobby I gave up.
Anyways, some of these caves have mineral formations inside that can beat anything man-made including cathedrals. Walls covered by refractive and reflective crystals, stone formations the size of a giant pipe organ, colors, etc. And back then all the light was the traditional open flame of the carbide lamp. Beautiful surroundings. A Caver dog went with us on one of those trips, green glowing eyes peeking around a corner being SHOCKING indeed a couple of miles into it.
Also have an acquaintance who had a huge boulder shift under her, instant broken leg, trapped until rescuers brought in hydraulic jacks to move the boulder, wrap her in warm blankets and stretcher her back out to civilization. So there is danger down there. That was her last trip into a wild cave! But of course three people were killed by lightning in Lafayette Park just last week, so everywhere you go…
PaulB
Funny that you should mention a pipe organ, as there is a cavern in Virginia where they have created a “stalagpipe organ.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXnb6QKNMPE
Tony Jay
@bbleh:
The problem the Tories have is that they don’t want any kind of nice or normal. Half the Party are there to network, the other half are there to serve the Conservative Union of Nationalist Tribalists, and the membership are there to make up for the Error of 1936.
Tony Jay
@Layer8Problem:
Such ‘romance’. I’ve been reading on the history of the Highlands & Islands while I’ve been up there and FFS, it was like crabs armed with machetes in a barrel made of more machetes up there for centuries. They like to blame ‘The English’, but 99% of it was entirely homegrown bastardy.
Glidwrith
@Alison Rose 💙🌻💛: Visited as a kid and went back again roughly five years ago. The most fascinating thing I had forgotten was that because of volcanic activity, much of the limestone had been changed to marble.
bbleh
@Tony Jay: the Conservative Union of Nationalist Tribalists
Yes we have a lot of them here too.
They consider themselves nice and normal. They belong to the right churches and everything!
[lunges for liquor cabinet]