When a mom was awakened by her pit bull’s “odd grumble,” she never imagined the nightmare that she was about to discover. After leading her down the hall, she soon laid eyes on a horrific scene unfolding in the bathroom that she will never forget.
Tracy Goosey Daniels, an Ohio mom, knew the negative stigma that sometimes surrounded pit bulls, but that didn’t stop her from adopting Ember, the family’s second dog of the breed, as a pet. Then, almost a year from the day Ember was rescued, the formerly homeless street dog decided to repay the family for saving her life.
As Tracy lay in bed on a Sunday and tried to sleep, Ember simply wouldn’t let her rest. Instead, the dog sat by Tracy’s bed, making noises, and she was unrelenting. That’s when Tracy decided to get up and see what the family pet was trying to tell her. Little did she know, she was about to walk down the hall to her worst nightmare.
“We were sleeping and she just sat down next to the bed and she was doing this real low grumble,” Tracy recalled. “It wasn’t even a growl, it was just this odd grumble.”
After Tracy crawled out of bed, Ember led her down the hallway to the bathroom. That’s when she saw her 10-year-old son Tre’s legs hanging over the edge of the tub and immediately knew something was terribly wrong.
“Then I saw Tre’s legs just hanging over the side of the tub there. And, as I looked into the tub, half of his body was out and the other half was in the tub and his head was fully extended back,” Tracy said, recalling the horrific scene.
Tre was having a seizure and had fallen in the tub, putting his life in imminent danger, which Ember seemed to realize when the family dog refused to let Tracy sleep. Thanks to Ember’s persistence, Tracy was alerted and able to call for help.
“I guess I fell in there cause my head was right here and my head was going back and forth,” Tre told Local 12.
Medics arrived and rushed Tre to the hospital, where doctors ran some tests before reassuring the family that the boy would be fine. Of course, the Daniels family credits Ember, the rescue dog, for rescuing the child.
In a Facebook post, Tracy also credited “Adore-A-Bull,” the pit bull rescue in Cincinnati that united Ember with her family. The organization hopes that stories like this one will help the negative stigma surrounding the breed.
“It’s a very proud moment not only for our organization but more so for this dog that was abandoned,” Libby Power from Adore-A-Bull said. “She was a lone puppy on the streets. She had no family, nobody to be her advocate.”
According to the Daniels, if it wasn’t for Ember, Tre’s medical emergency could have been so much worse. They are thankful that the rescue pup had a special bond with the boy, which was evident from the time they adopted her. They also said that the bad rep that follows these dogs is about the owners, not the breed.
“We’ve dealt with a lot of really nasty accidents with pit bulls,” Tony Daniels, a Cincinnati firefighter, said, explaining that he understands why some people don’t like the breed. “But I would say 99 percent of the time, it’s always, you know, you look at the owner.”
When Tre got home from the hospital, Ember proved she was a loyal and loving pet by staying by the boy’s side for the entire evening, Tracy recalled. Regardless of how you may feel about pit bulls and their reputation, you have to admit that it’s wonderful to see how a previously abandoned and homeless street dog can become a valuable family member.
In hopes of having fewer pit bulls abandoned and ultimately euthanized, advocates have used this opportunity to ask owners to please remember to spay and neuter their pets because not every abandoned dog sees the same happy ending as Ember. Instead, many meet an untimely and unfortunate fate.
While a rescue story with a happy ending is heartwarming, the fact that so many dogs don’t find a forever home, where they can live happily ever after, is not. Admittedly, the thought of an unwanted dog put to death is gutwrenching. So, in the famous words of Bob Barker, “[H]elp control the pet population — have your pets spayed or neutered.”
