Missing dog found after two months underground

Gerry Keene was 150 metres underground on a cave exploration adventure in Missouri when his headlamp shone on something he’d never seen this deep in a cave: a dog.

She was skinny with matted fur and had curled up on a slab of cold rock, too weak to wag her tail or whimper.

Keene had seen fish, frogs and other small amphibians on his previous trips underground, but the last thing he expected to see was a dog. There was no telling how long she had been stuck down there.

``We realised it would be hard to get her out because she was too weak to walk,’’ said Keene, 59, who was on a caving trip in Perryville, Missouri, on Sunday with a small group that included several children.

He snapped a photo of the dog, then headed out of the cave to call for help from emergency responders.

At the same time as an assistant fire chief arrived, Rick Haley, a caving enthusiast who happened to be nearby, overheard that a dog was found inside the cave and needed rescuing. He volunteered to venture back into the darkness with Keene and help bring out the pup.

Haley and Keene decided the only way to rescue the wounded dog was to go back down and carry her up.

``If we didn’t get her out, she would die in there,’’ said Haley, 66, a caver with 30 years of experience. ``It would be a tough, vertical climb to get her out. But we were up for it.’’

Before Keene went back into the cave with Haley, he showed the photo of the dog to residents who lived near the cave. One of them recognised her as Abby, a neighbour’s mixed-breed poodle who had gone missing on June 9.

Haley and Keene speculated she might have chased an animal into the cave or was perhaps swept inside during a flash flood.

When the pair surfaced with Abby, her grateful owner, Jeff Bohnert, 55, rushed over to get her and gingerly bring her home. He said a neighbour had alerted him about the photo taken by Keene.