It’s not every day that a mysterious pit bull bounds into your life and changes it forever, but that’s exactly what happened to Pittsburgh resident Gary Thynes.
Thynes was enjoying a day at the park with his own dog when a leashed male pit bull trotted up without an owner in sight. The dog kept just out of reach, barking and running a few steps ahead before turning back. “Something put the idea in my head, VERY STRONGLY, that this dog wanted me to follow him. So I did,” Thynes wrote on Facebook.
That decision, and the intuition he credits to his 16 months of sobriety, led him down a secluded, overgrown path to a tent encampment, where two people lay unconscious. “At first I saw just the one gentleman… he was completely unresponsive,” Thynes recalled. “Then I turned around and I saw a pair of legs sticking out of the tent… it was a woman who would not respond to me either.”
Thynes quickly called 911, and first responders rushed the pair to the hospital. “As someone in recovery myself that’s dealt with similar, I’m assuming, issues that they have… I know how quick you have to react to save someone’s life,” he said.
The story didn’t end there. After he shared it online, a commenter revealed she was the woman whose life he’d saved, and she wanted to meet him. Thynes agreed, telling her that her brave pit bull was safe with him. “It is an honor for me to take care of this guy until his humans are well enough to reunite with a dog that loves them very much,” he wrote.
For now, the “persistent little puppy” is still by his side, and, as Thynes put it, is “amazing, and… definitely saved some lives.”
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