A few weeks ago, employees at a Goodwill donation center in Chattanooga, Tennessee, started hearing strange noises echoing through the building. At first, they didn’t know where the sounds were coming from.
“[T]he workers at Goodwill were just hearing
whimpering and cries early in the morning … and then they realized there must be something in the walls, potentially in the drain, that got caught,” Aerial Brown, marketing coordinator at McKamey Animal Center, told The Dodo.
As the workers kept hearing the noise, they realized it sounded like a dog, so they called McKamey Animal Center for help. An officer from the center worked to find the pup, but it was difficult to pinpoint his exact location.
“I think the first day he went to Goodwill, he spent six hours just trying to figure out where the dog could have entered the building and trying to locate him based off his cries,” Brown said.
It quickly became clear that McKamey Animal Center was going to need help from the city of Chattanooga and the Chattanooga Public Works Department. Together, they worked together to find and save the dog.
The rescue team realized that the dog must have fallen into a large, uncovered drainhole and gotten injured during his fall. Because the pup was hurt, he wasn’t able to make his way back out and fell deeper and deeper into the water-filled hole.
“[T]he hard part is he was under water most of the time,” Brown said. “The only thing that wasn’t covered in water was his nose … He really fought so hard down there for days.”
The dog’s rescuers worked hard to remove the wall around him bit by bit so as not to injure the already traumatized animal. Finally, when enough of the rubble was cleared, they slowly lifted him to safety.
“[I]t was a very thorough and careful process,” Brown said.
Back at the McKamey Animal Center, the staff examined the dog and found that his fur was severely matted. They got to work giving him the medical care he needed and made him as comfortable as possible.
“We removed the mats that were painful,” Brown said. “We gave him antibiotics and pain meds for the pain that he was experiencing, then he really just chilled out in his kennel in our clinic.”
Just two weeks after the dog, named Georgie, arrived at the shelter, someone who’d actually met him before took an interest in adopting him. One of the city workers who helped save Georgie’s life realized he couldn’t stop thinking about the sweet dog. So he and his wife decided to welcome Georgie into their family and put a perfect cherry on top of his rescue story.
“It was a great full-circle moment,” Brown said.
