After hearing a dog's distant barks and whimpering for several days, a renter of a duplex in Longview, Texas, placed a call to animal control that ended up saving the animal's life. The unidentified renter had started to sense the sounds weren't coming from a neighbor's property but instead from under his own floorboards. After a Feb. 24 phone call, animal control officer Bobby Jumper arrived at the duplex and noticed a hole leading to a crawl space under the aboveground home, per the Washington Post. He slid inside, following the barks to an old 12-foot-deep water well, now empty apart from a dog who instantly began wagging his tail.
"He was about as happy as could be to see me," Jumper tells the Post. But Jumper couldn't get the dog out of the well alone. In all, eight rescuers from the local fire department and animal shelter worked together to dig around the home's floorboards so they could awkwardly slide underneath them and access the well. For a while, they thought they might need to rip up the floors of the home to get the dog out. But they ended up making two slings out of some webbing and rope, which were used to lift the dog to safety after about three hours. "It was an amazing feeling," says Jumper.
The basset hound mix weighing just over 50 pounds, believed to be around 2 years old, was "shaken but unharmed," the Longview Animal Care and Adoption Center said, per UPI. It's unclear exactly how long he was in the well. He lacked a microchip or tags and didn't appear to have an owner. But he did have plenty of love to give. "He became a favorite among staff," says Jenna George of the Longview Animal Care and Adoption Center, per the Post. "He's very sweet, very good, just wants loving and pets." A firefighter initially hoped to adopt the stray, named Timmy by rescuers, before discovering he didn't get along with the man's cats. But no matter: A Dallas resident adopted the dog on Thursday, per the Post. (More uplifting news stories.)
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