For a Great Dane, Kora has some amazing climbing skills.
Her dog dad, Wes McGuirk, couldn’t find her when he returned to his Louisville, Neb., home Saturday night. But he and his roommate, Jack Armstrong, could hear her whimpering in the distance.
“Then all of the sudden we realized it was coming from up there,” Armstrong told KMTV. They shined a flashlight up a tree, and there was Kora looking down at them. She had somehow managed to jump a 5-foot-high fence and climb the tree, perhaps chasing a squirrel or raccoon.
After trying unsuccessfully to get Kora down from the tree, they called the Cass County Sheriff’s Office. The first responders suspected it could be a prank.
“I’ve been doing this job for 12 years and when they told us it was a 120-pound Great Dane, 20 feet up a tree, that math usually doesn’t add up,” Lt. Jon Hardy of the Plattsmouth Volunteer Fire Department told KMTV. “It’s one of those things that will be talked about down here for quite a while, I’m sure,”
Using a rope, ladder and a harness from the Cass County Sheriff’s Office K-9 handler, rescuers from the Plattsmouth Volunteer Fire Department and Elmwood Volunteer Fire and Rescue were able to lower Kora from the tree. But before she reached the ground, the harness broke. Fortunately, some of the firefighters were holding a tarp just in case she fell.
“She never hit the ground,” Hardy told USA TODAY. “It worked like we hoped.”
Kora bounced off the tarp and “trotted away as if she’d never been stuck in a tree,” KMTV reports.
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