“She’s acting like herself again.Several breweries were built atop these natural caves, which were altered to suit their purposes.
“It’s amazing how she’s springing back already,” Bohnert said. She's also wagging her tail again, showing she's putting the trauma behind her. Since her rescue, she has regained weight and started to get back the voice she likely lost barking for help. “I think she was just in a preservation mode," Bohnert said.Ībby normally weighs about 50 pounds (23 kilograms), Bohnert said, but he guessed she lost half her body weight in the cave. Haley said there were paw prints everywhere, indicating she initially tried to get out.Īfter that, Haley and Bohnert believe she hunkered down, able to essentially live off her own body fat. Almost immediately, she began to perk up.īohnert figures Abby ended up in the cave after falling into a sinkhole or a hidden entrance. “She almost ate his finger off," Keene said. One of the rescuers gave Abby a bite of beef. To his amazement, she did, and roughly an hour-and-a-half after the rescue began, she was out. He went there assuming it couldn't be Abby - how could a 13-year-old dog have survived such an ordeal? One neighbor reached out to Bohnert, who lives close enough to the cave site that he can see it from his home. Soon after initially finding Abby, Keene briefly went to a few homes nearby to see if anyone was missing a dog. In the rocky areas through small passageways, “We would carry her short distance, set her down, then kind of move in front of her, reach back, pick her up, and put her in front of us." He described it as "kind of a leap-frog kind of thing.” “It was critical that we not give her any rough handling,” Haley said. Still, getting Abby out was tricky given her fragility. They put the blanket inside the bag, then the dog, who immediately took to the warm blanket after weeks laying in the cold mud. Haley was trained in cave rescues, and he retrieved a duffel bag and a blanket from his truck. They knew Abby couldn't make the estimated 500-foot walk back to the entrance, especially since it was through tight passageways and up a steep incline. Keene enlisted the help of another caver who happened to be there, Rick Haley. She looked like she was pretty close to being done.” "She lifted her head and looked at us but she didn’t respond to verbal commands. “She was just lying there curled up in a ball,” Keene recalled. “Their dad was like, no there’s not,” Keene said. One of the kids ran ahead of the group and yelled back to his dad, “There's a dog in here.” 6, Gerry Keene and five other adults, along with five children, had just entered the Berome Moore Cave, planning a day of exploring.
She could just get overcome by the heat.”īohnert posted about his missing dog on Facebook, reached out to neighbors and contacted police, but no one had seen Abby. When Bohnert awoke the next morning, Summer was back home but Abby was not. The dogs would scamper through the fields, maybe chase something, then head home. It had happened before, and in the rural area near Perryville in eastern Missouri, it was generally no big deal.
On June 9, the pair ran away from home, Bohnert recalled. Yet somehow, she managed to survive nearly 60 days out on her own, apparently much or all of it in a barren, pitch-dark, 58-degree Fahrenheit (14-degree Celsius) cave.Ībby and Bohnert's other dog, Summer, do everything together, including misbehave. Making Abby's tale even more amazing is the fact that she's just weeks shy of turning 14.
“I said, ‘that’s my dog,'” Bohnert recalled Monday. That's when he saw the picture one of the rescuers took. Could it be Abby?īohnert doubted it, but still curious, he went to the cave site near his rural Missouri home. Two months later, he got a text from a neighbor: People exploring a nearby cave found a dog. Jeff Bohnert had all but given up on seeing his poodle-hound mix again after she went missing in early June.
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