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In August 2014, conservation biologist Steve Krichbaum was searching for wood turtles on a small plateau in a West Virginia forest. His dog Henry was exploring below, near a stream, out of sight. Henry – a fluffy former stray so joyfully affectionate Krichbaum’s former partner nicknamed him the “Love Dragon” – accompanied him everywhere, hiking, swimming and camping together.
“I hear these sticks snap,” Krichbaum says. “And there are these two bear cubs running up the slope.” Concerned Henry might chase them, he turned and started shouting for him, then, turning back around, saw an adult black bear running towards him. Krichbaum tried to appear “big and loud”, waving his arms and shouting, but the bear kept charging. He ran down the slope to try to escape, but “she ran down the bank and immediately grabbed my thigh in her jaws and knocked me to the ground. She’s biting both my thighs, and I’m hitting her, then she’d grab and bite my forearms. I’m in a foetal position and her head was literally a foot away from my head and I’m thinking to myself my God, if she keeps doing this, I’m afraid she’s going to get my femoral artery … I’m going to die down here. Then I see this white flash over to the right of me and it’s Henry.” Henry jumped on to the bear’s back and started biting her. “Well, that got her attention.” She let go of Krichbaum, turning on Henry. “She’s biting him in his chest and stomach and he’s literally screaming.”
Krichbaum managed to pick up a rock and as the bear turned back to him, hit her with it, “hard enough to make her stop.” The bear ran off with her cubs, but he realised Henry had also disappeared. Staggering back towards his car, Krichbaum called and called for him. “I was just, oh my God, he’s hurt, and I don’t know where he is. Is he going to die out here? That was one of the most miserable two hours of my life.” When he finally reached the car, “there’s Henry, waiting for me”. They were both seriously hurt – “I ended up with 50 stitches, Henry had 40,” – but recovered well, spending another eight years inseparable, before Henry died, aged 18, in 2022.
“I just miss him so much. Words don’t even come close to how great that guy was,” says Krichbaum. “He was an absolutely extraordinary being.”
“Forty pounds and fearless”, Henry joins the roll-call of heroic dogs who saved their owners and others. Lassie might be fiction, but real-life Lassies have, it seems, always saved humans, from 19th-century-Newfoundlands pulling drowning sailors out of icy water, to Rip, the stray terrier who saved a reported 100 people during the blitz, scrabbling and barking where he detected signs of life.
On 9/11, dogs offered a glimmer of light in the darkness. Roselle, Michael Hingson’s guide dog, led him and 30 others down the over-heated, fume-filled, crowded staircase from the 78th floor. Omar Rivera’s guide dog, Salty, became so agitated he persuaded Rivera (who had stayed at his 71st floor desk following fire service advice) to leave. During their arduous descent, Rivera, fearing he would not make it out, took Salty’s harness off to let him escape, but his companion came back. The two made their way out together. “He was telling me, I am with you. No matter what,” Rivera said.
Scott Bailey’s guide dog Milo, a Kennel Club Hero Dog award finalist, is also a life saver. After Bailey lost much of his sight to diabetic retinopathy, he was matched with Milo, “a cheeky soft gentleman” who gave him the confidence to navigate the world again. In 2022, the pair were walking and Bailey wanted to cross a road; he gave Milo the command to find the crossing, and the button, which he did, as usual. But when the green man beeper sounded, “I asked him to go forward,” Bailey says. “But he didn’t move at all. Normally he’ll walk off with his tail wagging, but he was concrete to that floor. So I asked him again, he still didn’t move and all of a sudden, I hear distant sirens and two cars fly past on my side of the road. Then straight after, the police car went speeding past.” The pair then crossed to safety. “It wasn’t till I got to the other side and started walking that I thought, bloody hell, what has he just done? If Milo hadn’t been there and I’d have done that with my white cane, I’d have walked out into that road and been hit.”
Dogs don’t need to be trained to be heroes, though. Researchers at the Canine Science Collaboratory at Arizona State University shut the owners of 60 untrained pets in large boxes with a door dogs could, technically, open and told them to mimic cries of distress. Of the dogs who managed to open the door, more did so to “rescue” their owners than to retrieve food. Dogs also expressed more stress behaviours (whining, barking, yawning), when their owners pretended to be in trouble. “What’s fascinating about this study is that it shows that dogs really care about their people,” said the Collaboratory director, Prof Clive Wynne. “Even without training, many dogs will try to rescue people who appear to be in distress.”
One such caring dog is Rocky, a “weird looking thing … tiny stumpy legs, a very stocky body and this massive furry ruff-like neck,” as owner Sue Calver affectionately describes him. Despite spending his early life chained up in Bosnia, Rocky formed a deeply affectionate bond with Calver and her husband, Paul, as soon as they adopted him. “On the way back, it sounds corny, but I just looked at him and said to my husband, I love him already.” In December 2023, as Calver and Rocky headed home from a walk, she was hit by a delivery van as she stepped off the central reservation on a zebra crossing; according to a witness, she was thrown into the air and knocked unconscious. Rocky ran straight home, 100 metres away. “He stood outside the door, barked his head off,” Calver says. “My husband opened the door and he came into the hallway and was just howling. He grabbed his lead and Rocky pulled him along the road to where I was.” Rocky continued barking as Calver was loaded into an ambulance. They remained separated while she was in hospital (with two broken ribs and a head wound), but as soon as Calver got home, “he didn’t leave my side”. Rocky stayed with her as she recuperated in bed.
There seems to be a bottomless reserve of heroic dog stories: take Toby, who somehow performed a modified Heimlich manoeuvre on owner, Debbie Parkhurst, saving her from choking; or Clover, who stopped traffic to get help when her owner Haley Moore suffered a seizure; or Polo, who protected his owner’s infant daughter from fire with his own body, dying in the process.
Matt Nelson of the WeRateDogs podcast, receives countless submissions on canine heroics. “I was constantly surprised in the beginning,” he says, but “these days it’s really difficult to surprise me or my team with a heroic dog. We’ve seen a lot.” The podcast features Bentho, a German shepherd who saved his owner, Shivam Bargaiya, from a tiger, dying from his injuries (“I owe my life to Bentho,” Bargaiya told the Times of India).
But the most moving stories aren’t necessarily dramatic. “I’m always deeply affected by comfort dogs,” Nelson says. “Those who fly in to simply be hugged by those experiencing trauma.” WeRateDogs featured Jacob, a golden retriever who has comforted people affected by mass shootings. “There was something so poignant about a dog coming in to ‘fix’ something that our government has chosen not to.”
For Bailey, Milo saves him in ordinary ways daily. “Mental health-wise, when I first lost my sight, I was in a really dark place,” he says; he felt “useless”, unable to continue farming, exist independently, or parent his daughters as he wanted. After Milo arrived, Bailey’s world opened up again: he took up judo and is part of the GB Paralympic potential squad. “That’s because of Milo giving me the confidence to do that.” With that newfound confidence, Bailey says, “I decided that we – I always say ‘we’, me and Milo – needed to start work.” A college course led to university, where Bailey completed a master’s in counselling and psychotherapy; he now has his own psychotherapy practice. Milo has been by his side throughout, from lecture halls to the counselling room (“He’s fantastic with clients, really calming.”).
For Krichbaum, while having his life saved by Henry was extraordinary, sharing life with Henry was a gift in itself. “People would ask me if this whole bear thing changed our relationship. Already when this happened, I loved Henry as much as it’s possible for me to love anybody. And I certainly got the feeling that he loved me.” That bond is the driving force behind many astonishing rescues, but as any dog owner knows, it’s actually enough on its own. “All the corny stuff they say about dogs – man’s best friend, woman’s best friend – it’s true, isn’t it?” says Calver.
