‘A four-legged hero’: Chihuahua helps rescue owner who fell into glacier

An unnamed hiker who fell down a crevasse while traversing a glacier in Switzerland has been rescued thanks to a very obedient little companion, his chihuahua.

The man was hiking on Friday on the Fee Glacier in the south of the country with his white and brown long-haired dog when he stepped on a snow bridge, an often unstable mass of snow that forms in an arch shape over a gap in a glacier, and tumbled 26 feet down between the ice.

While stuck, he used his amateur walkie-talkie to radio for help. Meanwhile, his faithful companion was left perched at the edge of the crevasse.

According to Air Zermatt, a Swiss helicopter rescue company, a person nearby picked up the rescue call but was unable to locate the exact location of the accident.

“At 3:00 p.m., an Air Zermatt crew with three KWRO rescue specialists on board then took off in the direction of the Fee Glacier. …The search for the collapse site proved difficult. The glacier surface was wide, and the hole was barely visible,” the rescue service said in a statement on Sunday.

Then, a member of the rescue team spotted a small movement on a rock; it was the man’s dog sitting patiently next to the hole down which its owner had fallen.

“Thanks to the dog’s behaviour, the crew was able to locate the exact site of the accident. The rescuers abseiled down to the casualty and were able to save him,” the statement says.

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Both the patient and his dog were flown to a hospital in Visp, a nearby southern town.

According to the rescuer’s account, the dog did not move from its position on the rock for the entirety of the rescue mission and closely followed the entire procedure.

“It is fair to say that his behaviour contributed significantly to the successful rescue. The dog is a four-legged hero who may have saved his master’s life in a life-threatening situation,” the statement concluded.

Last June, a dog in Oregon ran over six kilometres to save his owner, Brandon Garrett, after the man accidentally drove his truck into a ravine.

Garrett had been travelling north on U.S. Forest Service Road 39 with his four dogs when he failed to negotiate a curve and plummeted off an embankment.

Due to the crash, he never made it to the campsite where he was supposed to meet his loved ones that day, so his dog, Blue, leapt into action and sprinted the almost six-kilometre distance to alert the family.

Garrett was able to crawl about 100 yards away from the truck, where police said he spent the night in the bushy wilderness.

His family knew something was wrong when Blue arrived at the campsite with glass in his snout.

Garett’s family were able to locate him and his three other dogs, who all survived the next morning and were rescued with the help of emergency services.