5 Dogs Who Just Would Not Die

5 A Cop Shot a Dog, and They Put the Corpse in the Freezer. It Returned

This story out of California starts with a car hitting a dog, and it escalates from there. The dog was Dosha, a 10-month-old pet who got out of the family yard and into the street one day in 2003. When a car slammed into her, someone called the police. The officer, Bob McDonald, examined the injured dog and saw no collar identifying who owned her. So, he took out his gun and shot Dosha in the head. 

That’s standard procedure, apparently. An officer will see an injured animal, obviously won’t have a euthanasia syringe handy, and will put the beast out of its misery with a bullet. A shot through the head usually kills any small animal, of course. With Dosha, the officer had an animal shelter take control of the corpse, and the staff put it in a body bag and chucked it in a freezer, for later disposal. Two hours later, someone opened the freezer and saw Dosha, still in the bag, now standing upright. 

Famous horror stories talk of pets returning to life. Those are only horror stories, however, because they are about cats. Dosha defying death was a pure happy ending. Vets looked her over, assuming she’d need some kind of intensive treatment, but she didn’t. She recovered just fine. She ended up with just some scars on her nose, from where the bullet went in, and some hearing loss, since the gunshot had been so loud. 

4 A World War II Dog Survived a Crocodile Attack and Became a POW

In 1942, the men of the H.M.S. Grasshopper (a British gunboat) stumbled into a Japanese village and all got locked up in a prisoners’ camp. Their dog Judy got locked up in the camp with them, and during the next days, when guards stepped up to give the men their daily allotment of beatings, Judy would rush between the two groups to offer protection.

The most obvious response from the guards facing this obstacle would be to simply kill Judy. Aircraftman Frank Williams, who’d sort of appointed himself Judy’s owner, came up with a solution. He’d get the camp to declare Judy an official prisoner-of-war. Then, beatings would remain on the table, but they could no longer straight-up kill her. Crazily enough, this actually worked. He waited till the camp commandant was really drunk and got him to sign off on it. The war had a whole lot of animal soldiers, but Judy was the one and only animal POW.

That was just one bit of Judy’s extensive war adventures. She survived the sinking of a ship (that’s how the Grasshopper’s crew wound up wandering toward that village), then after they got out of that camp, she survived another. In the jungle, she emerged intact after a fight from a crocodile, and she barked to keep away tigers. Despite her POW status, guards at another camp fired a bullet into her, and they later sentenced her to execution, but she hid and survived. 

Eventually, she made it out of the war. And back in England, she had multiple litters of puppies. 

3 An Owner Abandoned His Dog Up a Mountain

In 2012, Anthony Ortolani went hiking in the Rockies, and he took his German shepherd Missy with him. That’s just a bad idea right there. If a dog’s not conditioned for mountain climbing, it probably can’t handle it. And sure enough, Missy didn’t seem to be keeping up, so Ortolani left her behind on the mountain and came down alone. A storm started up, and he assumed she died up there. 

Eight days later, a couple hikers ran into Missy. She was injured by this point, and though they’d have liked to carry her down, the dog weighed 112 pounds. They went down alone, but unlike Ortolani, they didn’t just give up on her. They contacted other hikers to see who could manage to get up the mountain next — which wasn’t an easy question, since another storm was approaching. 

A nine-person rescue party (including Scott Washburn, the hiker who earlier found her) headed up the mountain through the storm to find her. Blood on the rocks helped guide the way. They got her down, Missy got better, and when the rescuers tried to find who she was, they learned Ortolani now wanted her back. 

He didn’t get that wish. The county charged him with animal cruelty, and as part of a plea agreement, he gave up custody of Missy to one of the rescuers. For just a second, let’s give Ortolani the benefit of the doubt and imagine he had a reason to leave Missy behind on the mountain. We’ll still pull a King Solomon, and say if he was willing to give her up as part of a plea, he never deserved to have her in the first place. 

2 A Dog Survived Being Shot by Pirates

It’s inevitable: One day, you will be attacked by pirates. For Peter and Betty Lee, from England, it came in 2008, when they were sailing off the coast of Venezuela, bound for the Caribbean. It was a round-the-world voyage, interrupted by some armed men who wanted to join them on their yacht. They started by tying up Peter. Then in stepped Kankuntu, the couple’s dog.

We’d love to tell you about how Kankuntu, in biting these pirates of the Caribbean, fought them all off and retained the title of captain. But, see, these were five men with guns. So, they shot Kankuntu. They also stabbed him between the shoulder blades with a gut hook knife. With the dog out of commission, they seized all the boat’s cash — which added up to almost nothing, angering them. Next, they tried pulling off Betty’s wedding ring, but it was stuck fast. The pirates now took off, not really having got enough to justify their trouble. 

If they were smart, they would have looted the navigation system, but they hadn’t, so the couple had little trouble getting to safety. As for Kankuntu, he’d been stabbed by a cursed blade and shot by a flintlock pistol (sources don’t describe the weapons this way, but we can make some assumptions). That might have meant a swift death. But Peter patched up the stab wound on the boat itself, and as for the gunshot? “The bullet almost came out on its own,” he said, and the dog was soon fine. 

1 A Dog Fell Overboard and Lasted for Months on an Island

And now, another story about a dog on a boat. Only, this dog fell off the boat and seemed to vanish without a trace. The year was 2009, and Jan and Dave Griffith were sailing off the coast of Queensland with their dog Sophie Tucker. The water got choppy (or, as Australians would put it, the sea was full of chops, mack bombs and barrels). Sophie went over the edge, and her owners tried really hard to spot her again, but they couldn’t. Surely, the dog was lost forever. They were miles from shore, and she must have drowned. 

Sophie actually swam those five miles, to St. Bees Island. She survived there for the next four months, until rangers captured her, thinking she was a wild dog. The Griffiths, though they’d almost abandoned all hope, had still seemingly been following up on every report of dogs found anywhere. They heard of the rangers’ discovery, they made contact and the rangers brought Sophie to them. 

Here’s the real question you should be asking yourself: How had Sophie survived on that island so long, without anyone feeding her? She hunted baby goats, as adult goats would be much too large for her to successfully kill and eat.

Today, we shared with you some heartwarming stories about dogs who lived. But balance must be maintained. The world can only be so cute, and so for dogs to thrive, baby goats must die. This is the true meaning of sacrifice.

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