I love stories of rescues, no matter who the rescuer is or the situation, it always gives me a little more hope that we will all do the right thing to help an animal or a another person for that matter. Dogster blogged about the New Jersey Mayor, Cory Booker, saving a freezing dog. Literally, he drove to the house where the dog was freezing, got the dog and put it in a warm car. The whole story is below. Three barks and howl for you Mayor Cory Booker!
Newark, New Jersey Mayor Cory Booker was passing his evening
mayorally one night this week when he noticed a tweet he'd been included
on. It was by a reporter, saying that a dog was out in the cold.
It said, in part: "Make pet owners get their dogs out of the cold. Saw 2 dogs freezing."
Cory Booker
knew why the dogs were freezing: it was freezing outside. So, like
Batman, he got up, got in his car, and went to save the dog.
Singlehandedly. The mayor went to the house himself, petted the dog,
lifted up the dog, and carried her to a police car.
“If you’d crank up that heat, I’d appreciate it,” he told the police officer.
This man knows how to be mayor of a city. Who knows how long that dog
-- named Chacha -- would have had to sit in the bitter cold had the
mayor not decided it was his responsibility to make the dog warm?
(Note that Booker also cares deeply about the human residents of his
city. When Hurricane Sandy hit, he spent several days responding directly to his constituents via Twitter, driving through the storm to deliver emergency supplies.)
The ordeal started when ABC 7 reporter Toni Yates
and a camera crew noticed a dog out in front of a house, left out in
the cold. Later, they passed by again. The dog was still there. Yates
decided to do something, which is commendable. She took to Twitter,
calling out the mayor specifically. Then, to her credit, she "asked the
block captain to do something, call someone," as she wrote in another
tweet.
The buck, however, does not stop with either Yates or the block
captain. The buck stops with Mayor Cory Booker. And Mayor Cory Booker
was en route to save Chacha.
"This is brutal weather," Booker told WABC. "This dog is shaking
really bad and you just can't leave your dogs out here on a day like
this and go away and expect them to be okay. Hypothermia on any animal
including a human animal will set in pretty quickly. So this is very
sad. You can just feel the dog shaking pretty badly."
Of course, the whole thing was captured on film, by the very
newsperson who sent out that tweet. Booker is getting a good run of
publicity from the act -- which is fine with us.
The dog is warm. She also has puppies. (Editor's Note: Sigh. Of course.) The cameraman made sure to get good shots of that:
As for the owners, the mayor called them himself (of course), ready
to chastise them for leaving their dog outside. They pled ignorance; the
dog had allegedly gotten out on her own when they were in Queens.
