*I guess you’d have to speak bark to know exactly why an 8 lb Bichon Frise dog that was snatched up and flown away by a big ole eagle is alive today. “Zoey” had been playing on the banks of the Lehigh River in Pennsylvania, when an eagle swooped down, snatched her little body up, and flew away with it. Felipe Rodriguez — who was visiting his sister, the dog’s owner, at the time — saw the frightening sight from the window and thought he had just witnessed a scene from a movie.
“It seemed like something from the ‘Wizard of Oz,'” he told the Associated Press on Wednesday. “I’m a city boy. This doesn’t happen in my world.”
The eagle snatched the little white dog, flapped its heavy wings and flew over the trees.
Wow! You don’t even have to be watching to envision the scary sight.
As unbelievable as such an act might sound, apparently its not the first time it has happened; at least not according to biologist Laurie Goodrich, who works at nearby Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, a ridgetop preserve that annually records tens of thousands of migrating hawks, eagles and falcons.
Goodrich says, “It has been documented before, but not that often.”
“Food is scarce right now, particularly with this cold snap,” she said. “The waterways are freezing up. They’re going to be looking a little more widely and taking advantage of whatever might be out there.”
But wait! This story actually has a happy ending!
After Rodriguez’s sister cried mountains of tears assuming the dog’s demise, she and her husband scoured the woods looking for his little body. They even posted a photo of Zoey on social media.
The photo was seen by a woman named Christina Hartman, 51, who had found the little doggie four miles away. Zoey looked like a lump of white fur on the side of the road, according to Hartman.
“I notice this little frozen dog, icicles hanging from all over. It could hardly move,” she said.
After noticing scratches on the little dogs body, and seeing that it walked with a limp, she picked Zoey up; wrapped her in a blanket and took her home — where she nursed her back to health with warm chicken and rice soup.
The Associated Press reports Hartman said to herself…
“This dog belongs to a family, and I’m gonna find out who owns it.”
It didn’t take long. She came across Newhard’s public Facebook post Wednesday morning and made an excited call.
“I said, ‘It’s a miracle! I have your dog!”
All’s well that ends well, thank goodness.
“She is not really herself but she is getting lots of love,” his sister, Newhard, texted the AP late Wednesday.
“She doesn’t want to go out. … I really can’t blame her.”
Me neither.
