49-year-old Alan Whitton from Essex went through “hell” and back after losing his beloved dog Mitzi down a fox hole for whole three days!
Luckily, Alan was reunited with his one-year-old Jack Russell after digging her out and freeing her from her ordeal.
Alan, who works as a life coach in Whitton Green, first acquired Mitzi while he was dealing with the loss of his previous pet, Tinker.
The ordeal happened when Alan and Mitzi were out for a walk in the forest. Mitzi was chased off by another dog, only to go missing without a trace. Thus began every dog owner’s worst nightmare for Alan.
He told Essex Live, “This is the first time she had ever gone missing, I call her my business partner because she is always with me, by my side. It was about 8.30 am on Wednesday, during our morning walk when we came across a lady with two dogs, one of them was a Basset Hound wearing a Christmas jumper. The lead slipped out of the lady’s hand and her dog chased Mitzi.”
Alan frantically searched everywhere for Mitzi, but the little dog was nowhere to be found. That is when he began thinking the worst. He kept searching for hours, but then the late hour and bad lighting forced him to give up for the day.
“I didn’t want to go home without her. But it was late, we had to. It was a really cold night, I couldn’t sleep, it was hellish, I thought she was going to die,” he said.
The following day, Alan returned to the search site but still couldn’t find Mitzi. Then, after ten hours of searching, he decided to stop at some nearby houses with some leaflets – hopeful that someone might know something.
As he recalled, “I broke down crying to anyone I spoke to about Mitzi, I was missing her so much.”
Alan endured another sleepless night before getting up to continue searching yet again for Mitzi.
By now, he was already contemplating the reality that he may never see his dog again. But that is when fate intervened in the form of another dog owner he encountered with a little bit of information.
Alan said, “She said her dog had been sniffing around a fox hole, and it never sniffs fox holes, so I dropped everything and went to investigate.”
He went to investigate, and that is when he could hear a faint whimpering coming from inside the hole. He immediately took action.
Alan said, “I needed shovels, the lady who called me kindly gave me one and I started digging. The people started turning up to help, it was amazing.”
A little after 1 pm that afternoon, both he and Mitzi were reunited.
Alan added, “I just broke down, I was overwhelmed with joy and disbelief, I had started to lose hope. It was like a Christmas miracle, all the time it felt like a nightmare I couldn’t wake up from.”
Given her ordeal, Mitzi was relatively unharmed. All that the little dog needed was to have a few ticks removed, but before she “smashed her way through a Greggs vegan sausage roll” – a very well-deserved treat, no doubt.
The near-tragedy taught Alan a very important lesson.
“Fearing I might have lost her taught me such a deep lesson, not to take anything for granted – to love big and to love hard. I would like to offer anyone who helped find Mitzi a free coaching session, as my way of giving back a debt I feel I owe. From the bottom of my heart, I am so grateful and overwhelmed with the depth of compassion people have.”
He concluded by saying, “We are capable of so much when we work together. It really has restored my faith in humanity. The prospect of not having Mitzi here at Christmas, I couldn’t even contemplate.”
May Alan and Mitzi never have to go through a misfortune like that again.
