Imagine walking up to your house and seeing your dog happy to greet you…from up on the roof.
That’s what happened this week to a family in Helston, a town in Cornwall, England. Cathryn and Phil Wood left their Cockapoo, Maple, home alone with Phil’s parents’ dog, Tammy, a Sprocker Spaniel, when the four went out for tea on July 20.
As they were walking home about an hour later, they saw Maple running down the main street.
“We picked her up and as we got closer to home, there was a fire engine outside,” Cathryn told Cornwall Live. “I thought there had been a fire, but as we got closer, we saw a crowd of people and Tammy was on the roof.”
The two dogs had apparently climbed on bedroom furniture and out a window on the roof. Maple had somehow been able to make her way down to the street.
“Maple had already jumped down but Tammy was too scared. She was petrified,” Cathryn told Cornwall Live. “They’ve never done anything like this before. She’s escaped over the fence before but she’s never gone onto the roof.”
It wasn’t the firefighters but Phil’s step-dad, Steve, who was able to rescue Tammy by climbing out the window and urging her to come back inside.
During the rescue, a neighbor sang, “Who Let the Dogs Out?”
“It’s lucky that no one was injured and that there was no fire,” Cathryn told Cornwall Live. She said the bedroom window is left open because the attic gets so hot, but from now on, the bedroom door will be kept closed.
The family expressed their gratitude for the Helston Fire Station. “We want to thank them very much for their speedy timing coming, and say sorry,” Catherine told The Packet. “We are a bit embarrassed!”
Speaking of amazing four-legged escape artists, while none of our dogs has ever ended up on the roof, our Pit Bull mix Sophie did manage to make her way inside the house after I left her in the backyard while I ran a quick errand. We had just adopted her and she was still recovering from being spayed the day before. Imagine my surprise when she greeted me at the front door, even though the back door was still closed and locked!
Sophie had climbed up on boxes in a storage area outside a bedroom casement window (the kind that swing out) that had been left slightly open. She managed to squeeze in through that opening and into the house. Fortunately, she wasn’t injured and didn’t chew up anything in the house.
Here’s the video of Tammy’s rescue. Nice work, Phil’s step-dad!
Photo: SWNS/YouTube