Onlookers cheered and her owner breathed a huge sigh of relief when four-year-old Jack Russell Tig scrambled to safety after spending two days trapped in an underground tunnel in Dundee.
It was the end of a worrying overnight ordeal for owner Ged Kennedy and firefighters from Macalpine Road, who had spent the day frantically trying to entice Tig close enough to pull her out of the narrow rabbit hole.
Eventually, after some 26 hours stuck inside the pitch-black warren, some pieces of chicken provided by girls from a nearby riding centre did the trick and Tig scratched and scrambled through a tiny opening some four feet into the hillside and out into the arms of a hugely relieved Ged.
As our video shows, shaking the dust and earth from her tiny body, Tig immediately wolfed down the chicken and thirstily gulped some bottled water from the hands of crew manager Mark Lowe, who finally enticed her out with the chicken.
”It was a great effort by the team,” Mark said. ”It’s good to get a nice result and she doesn’t seem any the worse for it.”
Holding his pet tight in his arms, Ged praised Mark and his firefighters, Karen Goodwin and Johnny Robinson for their efforts in rescuing the dog.
”Big thanks to them, they did really well,” he said.
The drama began around 2pm on Saturday when Ged and Tig were out walking in the hilly fields just north of William Fitzgerald Way in Claverhouse, a few hundred yards off the A90 Dundee to Forfar Road.
”She was chasing rabbits as usual. She never normally goes down the holes, but she went right in after one,” Ged said. ”She never came out. I sat there from two o’clock till about seven, shouting in to her and trying to coax her out.
”I came back later but eventually I had to go home. I never slept all night and I was back at half six this morning shouting on her.
”I dug a big bit around the front of the hole but she was really stuck quite far into the hill. The woman from the SSPCA was here with a noose but she was too far back.
“We just thought it might be the case that with a couple of days without food she might lose a bit of weight and be able to scramble out herself.”
The firefighters had initially attended around 10.30am on Sunday but left the scene to attend to other duties before returning around 2pm. Using a fibre-optic camera on a 5ft pole, they were able to see Tig inside the tunnel and hear her barking.
Just less than two hours later she finally emerged, dust-covered and exhausted but otherwise unaffected by her ordeal.
”I’m surprised she got out there,” Ged said. ”That’s the last time she goes chasing rabbits she’ll be on an extended lead from now on.”
Crew manager Lowe described the difficult task of firstly locating the dog in the warren and then trying to entice her out.
”She was very distressed and tired and we could see she was able to move about but she couldn’t get back through the hole she went through. It’s about four and a half inches in diameter.
”We’re using a Scubar camera, which is used for urban incidents where there is a collapsed structure. We could see her on the monitor but we couldn’t get to her.
”The problem is that the tunnel goes down then goes back up the hill and there’s a bend. We didn’t want to dig too much in case it collapsed and we wanted to give her the opportunity to come out by herself.”
In the end it was the dog’s hunger and the irresisible smell of the chicken which finally saw her poke her head through the tiny opening four feet underground before forcing her body towards the waiting arms of crew manager Lowe.