AR-News: (UK) Two Day Bid to Rescue Puppy Fails

[Animalara2003 at aol.com]

http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=2500052

By John-Paul Ford Rojas, PA News 


Fire officers today gave up a two-day rescue effort to save a 12-week-old 
puppy which fell down a 40ft hole in the ground.

Sasha, a Staffordshire bull terrier, plunged down a natural fissure on 
farmland at Cassop, near Spennymoor, Co Durham yesterday.

A mechanical firm lent a digger as a fire crew aided by RSPCA officers 
carried out a painstaking attempt to free the pet.

The team was carefully trying to move earth around the hole, at times using 
buckets to shift it manually, so as not to cause a collapse on to the dog below.

John Percival, 43, from nearby Newton Hall, had been walking Sasha with his 
son Stephen, 20, yesterday afternoon when the puppy fell, and he called 999.

Rescuers began their efforts yesterday but were forced to call off the 
operation as night fell and it became too dangerous to continue. They resumed at 
first light today.

A spokesman for Durham and Darlington fire and rescue said this afternoon: “
We are closing down the incident now. The situation is we have been out there 
all day and last night.

“We took advice from the RSPCA and our officer at the scene had decided that, 
as we haven’t heard from the dog in two-and-a-half hours and the hole seems 
to be falling in on itself, we are going to have to close it down.”




 
"The world is a dangerous place,
not because of those who do evil,
but because of those who look on and do nothing.",
Albert Einstein

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