K9 Tracker Finds Elderly Dog down a Hole
16-year-old dog Billy's Life Saved by Tracking Dog!
I’ve been training dogs to track lost pets since 1998 and love sharing amazing lost pet recovery stories, especially when a search dog is responsible for finding a missing pet.
In this case, Billy, a 16-year-old Cocker Spaniel, was missing from his home in Maple Ridge, British Columbia for two days. This story (written by MAR K9 handler Karen Nixon from Halo’s Pet Rescue) is about how her search dog Halo tracked up to a hole in the ground, gave a full-blown alert that there was dog scent down the hole, and Karen discovered that it was Billy!
Here’s Karen’s story:
This is the face you make when you extract a 16-year-old dog from a very deep hole and he is alive and seemingly uninjured!
Many are asking for more details about Billy’s rescue, so here are the details.
Billy is a 16-year-old Cocker Spaniel whose home is on large acreage. He had been missing for two days when his family contacted me and asked for our tracking assistance.
When we started tracking from Billy’s property, Halo led me along Billy’s usual daily route which ended on a neighboring property but we could not cross through. I brought Halo down to the road and she quickly picked up Billy’s scent trail again. Halo worked along the road then crossed it and led me to a creek and a ravine. She turned to the ravine and started sniffing at a hole in the ground. I could see that Halo was balancing herself and suddenly, her foot punched through an area by the hole!
I panicked and pulled Halo away because I knew the ground was unstable. I learned this first hand because I myself had just fallen up to my hip in a similar hole! I decided to check this hole out but with Halo safely in the van. But she insisted that she needed to go back to this area though and tried to drag me there. While I was pointing at the hole and telling the property owner about my dog’s interest in the hole, Halo climbed down the embankment and alerted that Billy was in there by starting to dig from the side of the ravine!
The homeowner started digging from up top and Halo and I from the side. Then I heard the property owner say, “Oh my God! There is something in here, I think it’s the dog!”