Dog News

Reporter stops broadcast to help woman rescue therapy dog from flood waters

by Amy Drew

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With Hurricane Florence bearing down, a reporter for a local ABC station interrupted her Facebook Live broadcast to help rescue a dog caught in the storm’s flood waters.

WTVD’s Julie Wilson was in the middle of streaming live in New Bern, North Carolina, when she saw a woman struggling to save a dog, a Rottweiler, from the deep water. The dog had been injured.

Wilson was amid assessing storm damage when she noticed the woman having difficulty steering the dog through the deep water. Wilson asked the woman if she could pick up the dog.

“Can we pick this one up?” Wilson asked the woman. The reporter gave the woman the camera and carried the dog.

“You are OK, baby girl,” Wilson told the dog.

“Nobody is leaving the dog in this mess,” Wilson said. “That’s what we are doing out here.”

The woman thanked the reporter for her help.

The dog, it turned out, was the woman’s child’s therapy dog.

“That dog wasn’t going to budge, it was just standing there. And quite frankly, [the woman] was just going to get hurt because she wasn’t going to be able to lift that dog. That dog wasn’t going to go, that dog wasn’t going to walk. The only thing we could do was lift it up and get it out so she could get out before more people got hurt in that situation,” Wilson said.

Hurricane Florence has been downgraded to a tropical storm and has weakened on Saturday since it made landfall on Friday. The storm has been blamed for at least six deaths. Many animal rescue operations and animal lovers have been out en force doing what they can to rescue animals who have been displaced by the storm