Ralph Dorn of Tallapoosa County, Alabama, was wondering where his dog Harley had gone.
It was the evening and Ralph wanted to make sure that Harley was OK.
That’s when he happened to look out onto the lake outside his home and saw his dog in the midst of a rescue mission.
Not only did Ralph find Harley but he also found a little fawn in distress.
And Harley was bravely trying to rescue that fawn.
Harley saw the fawn struggling in the water and didn’t hesitate to jump in and try to save it.
“Not sure how the fawn got out there but Harley obviously didn’t ask why, he just jumped into action,” Ralph wrote on Facebook.
Harley had swam all the way out to the middle of the lake.
From there he was trying to herd the fawn back to the shoreline.
And Harley’s heroic act succeeded. He was able to safely get the fawn back on land by encouraging it and never leaving its side.
Once Harley and the fawn were back on land, Harley must have known that the baby deer was scared.
So, Harley stood by the fawn’s side and licked the baby to comfort it and get rid of some of that excess water.
Thankfully, Harley didn’t have to play mom to the fawn for too long because his real mom came back.
But that wasn’t the last time these two unlikely friends spent time together as the baby fawn came back for another visit.
“This morning Harley got restless running from window to window. I opened the front door and we could hear the fawn bleating,” Ralph explained.
“Harley ran into the tree line and found the fawn. The little one stopped bleating, tail wagging, they touched noses sniffed each other and Harley came calmly back to the house with me.”
Ralph ended up posting Harley’s story on Facebook where it went viral. More than 261,000 people shared Ralph’s post praising Harley’s heroism. Studies find that dogs are actually no stranger to being heroes.
When they see that their owner is in distress, most of them will try to rescue their owner.
The only thing that stops them from taking that heroic leap is knowing how to make the rescue.
“If you look at only those 19 dogs that showed us they were able to open the door in the food test, 84 percent of them rescued their owners. So, most dogs want to rescue you, but they need to know how,” researcher Joshua Van Bourg explained.
“Simply observing dogs rescuing someone doesn’t tell you much. The difficult challenge is figuring out why they do it,” he said.
I’m just going to go with: because dogs are good.
And they can sense danger and are willing to help if they can.
In the meantime check out the adorable moment between Harley and the fawn that he saves in the video below.
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