We’ve all heard stories about the heroic acts of dogs.
The ones about thwarting criminals and saving babies.
Stories about hero cats are lesser-known, but they do exist.
Tara the cat is one of those hero cats.
The Triantafilos adopted Tara as a stray six years before she saved their 4-year-old from an unprovoked dog attack.
Erica Triantafilo, the child’s mother, described the attack as a “blur.”
Jeremy was walking his bicycle up the family’s driveway when their neighbor’s dog came around the side of their parked car and latched onto the boy’s leg.
Tara ended up pouncing on the dog and actually scared it off. But Tara wasn’t satisfied. She ran after the dog to make sure it didn’t come back for the boy.
“I just remember hearing him and the next thing I know, I see my cat flying out of nowhere, onto this dog, and just remember trying to get my son and get the dog away and back in its yard, away from both of us that it was trying to attack,” Erica told TODAY.
Jeremy sustained two lacerations in his calf which he needed 10 stitches for but was otherwise OK thank goodness!
“He’s just bouncing back from this,” Erica saod. “He tells us it feels better. And he’s just ready to get out there and run around and play with the other kids again.”
The family was pretty surprised by Tara’s reaction.
“Every once in a while she puts our dog back into her place, but for the most part, she’s just the most mellow cat you’ve ever met,” Erica said. “All our boys love her and pick on her occasionally. She just loves them right back anyway.”
The ordeal was captured in a one-minute video that Jeremy’s dad, Roger Triantafilo, posted online.
“I was like, ‘Well, you know, I’m going to check the tape and see if we got anything, and see if it even caught what happened,’” he said.
The video ended up going viral and was viewed more than 2o million times on YouTube.
“It was pretty amazing to see a cat take on a dog so selflessly,” Jeremy’s father, Eric told PIX 11. “I think that dog did not even know what hit him.”
People on the internet couldn’t get over how brave this cat was when fighting up against a dog.
“That cat needs free Friskies for life. Seriously,” wrote one YouTube commenter.
“Cats get really irritated when their sense of peace is disturbed, even to the point of death. The cat considered the human as family and when its family was being attacked, the cat went crazy!” said another.
Some of them kind of felt bad for the dog.
“Imagine that dog going back to his dog friends and having to explain that he got absolutely bodied by a cat,” someone commented on YouTube.
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