Hero dog saves owners from house fire by barking until family wakes up
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A Maryland dog is being praised as a hero after helping save his family from a house fire.
A home in Frederick County, Maryland, caught fire early Monday, getting the attention of the family's dog. He barked until his sleeping family woke up, saving them from the blaze, officials said, according to ABC7 WJLA.
Members of Frederick County Fire & Rescue responded to calls about the fire around 4 a.m. local time. The home was ablaze when fire crews got to the scene, Battalion Chief Rusty Hahn said.
Nearly 60 firefighters were on hand to put out the flames, which took an hour.
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Before the firefighters arrived, Bear, a Cairn terrier, barked to wake up his family, Hahn told the outlet. The two people in the home saw the flames after waking and immediately got out of the house with Bear before calling the authorities.
Unfortunately, the home was destroyed in the blaze, but, thanks to Bear, no one was hurt.
The cause of the fire has not been confirmed.
Frederick County Fire & Rescue did not immediately respond to PEOPLE's request for comment.
The pup's fast-acting instincts come just days after a North Carolina English Labrador helped a local sheriff's office find a missing child.
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A scent was all Maverick, a K-9 with the Union County Sheriff's Office in North Carolina, needed to find the boy, who had been reported missing by his parents, according to WBTV.
"Being that there was a risk for the juvenile to be in a bad situation, we put Maverick on a scent article, the kid's blanket, and he was able to track based off that smell," Deputy Sheriff Joshua Dye told the outlet.
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Dye, Maverick's handler, added, "We tracked down to a pretty busy highway, made one turn, went down another road. When the juvenile saw us coming down the road, he actually came out of the woods and came to us, and Maverick ran right up to him, and that's how we found him."
Dye said that without Maverick's keen nose and can-do attitude, the sheriff's office would've had a much harder time finding the missing boy.
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"In that situation, we were out on, we tried to ping the juvenile's cell phone, and the cell phone was actually off, and we wouldn't have anywhere to start if we didn't have the dog with us," Dye shared.
He added successful rescues like this show why K-9s like Maverick are "very important" to law enforcement.
"We do a lot of training with him —every week with him — to make sure he stays sharp on what he's doing," Dye said, adding that Maverick is trained in narcotics detection, tracking, article searches, and basic obedience.
