For a waste management worker, you probably don’t want to look too closely at what you’re dumping in the trash – it’s probably pretty gross. We all know the things we throw out and after a couple of days sitting out in a hot garbage can, things can get pretty funky.
Jermaine Jackson is a garbage man who happened to take a closer look while working and ended up saving a life.
Jermaine works in Petersburg, Virginia, and his job entailed driving around in his garbage truck and keeping the streets of his city clean. As a 26-year veteran on the job, he had seen pretty much everything you possibly could see. It was on a random Friday, however, when he saw something new.
While picking up trash at the dumpsters near Old Street, he noticed some movement.
https://www.facebook.com/CBS6News/posts/10158665884407426
Part of his Friday routine included heading to Old Street and taking the full-sized dumpsters to his truck to be cleaned. He was about to load one particular dumpster up on the truck when he noticed some movement in the bin. Incredibly, there was a bulldog-looking pup looking at him.
“As I pull up to the can, I went to, to dump it, a dog popped out,” Jackson later recalled to WTVR-TV.
The dog was incredibly lucky!
Jermaine had JUST barely noticed the dogs head sticking out before he hit the switch to dump the trash. Things could have gone south VERY quickly if he hadn’t seen the poor pup stuck in the dump.
“It, it’s kind of sad because she’s sitting there, you know, with a sad face, you know, like get me out of here,” Jackson continued. “[I]f I didn’t see her, she would be in the back of the truck right now or she, she could have got crushed.
Jermaine’s truck has a trash compactor and it would have surely killed the dog.
Lots of modern garbage trucks have built-in compactors that help them stay out on the roads longer and get more trash. After the trash hits a certain point inside the truck, it triggers and squishes everything into a tiny spot (think of the trash compactor scene in A New Hope).
After seeing the dog, he wanted to see if she was a nice pup.
“So I put the can down to make sure she was nice, you know, I called her. Her tail started wagging.”
It was a good sign. Jermaine felt safe approaching the pup and soon he had pulled her out of the trash and built her a temporary shelter.
“She just, just got a great attitude, you know, no problems, you know, she just smiled when I lifted her up like, ‘Thank you, thank you for getting me out of here.’”
She was soon taken to a shelter where they hoped to find her a loving home.
The dog was clearly a recent mom (she was still full of milk) and the owners had probably bred her to sell the pups and didn’t care much about the mom anymore. Thankfully, there are people in the world who didn’t view her as a financial opportunity, but as a creature to be saved.
Check out the video below!
Please SHARE this with your friends and family.
