Most canines have a strong instinct to protect their owners from harm. They would even risk their lives to save their loved ones from dangerous situations. If it wasn’t for their amazing family pet, Aussie couple David and Lisa Kenney’s precious little boy would most certainly have drowned.
A few years ago in 2015, David Kenney and his family were visiting friends in the small village of Nana Glen in New South Wales, Australia, when suddenly their 9-year-old Staffordshire bull terrier, Leala, ran up to the house from the dam. The dog had obviously been in the water, and she was frantically barking and running around.
Not able to drag the toddler out of the dam, the dog quickly ran up to the house to alert David. For the next half hour, along with friends, Jason and Joshua Cluff tirelessly performed CPR on Alexander. Their persistence paid off, as they were able to restart his heart.
Meanwhile, Lisa was returning to the house when she saw an ambulance rip past. “I didn’t think it was my kid,” she said. “I didn’t think it had anything to do with us, and then I came to [see] a helicopter in the sky and the whole place just alive with police and ambulances and my son just lying there completely comatose.”
“They pulled me aside and told me this is as bad as it gets, there’s not a lot of hope, you should prepare for the worst possible outcome,” she said.
Alexander was helicoptered to Brisbane’s Lady Cilento Hospital and placed in an induced coma. “The doctors said, ‘Be prepared, you may not be taking this boy home, and if you do take him home he’ll probably have some brain damage,’” Lisa recalled.
Miracles do happen though, and within two days, he was awake and breathing freely. “The thing that I think got everyone was that he wanted kisses, that was the first thing he wanted—he wanted kisses off us,” David said. “It was quite miraculous that he came back so soon and so clear and fine and unchanged.”
Doctors credited David and his friends for saving Alexander’s life. “We had them in tears,” Lisa said. “They said, ‘This just doesn’t happen.'” She added: “The doctors put it down to CPR being administered correctly when he was pulled from the water.”
But in his heart, David knows that without quick-thinking Leala’s canine instinct, the end result would have been something unthinkable. “Without obviously the dog and my two mates, he would be…,” David tearfully said.
After the heroic rescue, the Kenney family rewarded Leala with extra breakfast treats of bacon and premium scotch fillet steaks. Leala was certainly a heroic dog that deserved all the treats for saving her little human master from a perilous circumstance!
