A shelter dog who detected a man’s oncoming seizure, having never been trained to do so, has found a forever home after applications flooded in.
Sweet Sienna, the pit bull-lab mix made headlines around the country in June for her medical instincts, on display all-unexpectedly at an adoption event in Rustburg, Virginia.
On that fateful day, Sienna broke away from the crowd of dogs, appreciative attendees, and familiar caretakers—walking right up to a man at a slight distance from center of the event.
She sat down, looked at him in the eye, put her paw on his leg, and refused to leave his side.
“She sat quietly at his feet, refused to budge, and softly placed her paw on his leg,” Sienna’s shelter, called Friends of Campbell County Animal Control of Virginia, said in a Facebook post at the time. “It wasn’t a trick. It wasn’t prompted. It was pure intuition.”
She then started pawing at his leg. Despite never receiving training on how to detect medical emergencies, Sienna knew something was wrong.
The man, Josh Davis had forgotten to take his epilepsy medication that morning, and it seemed Sienna knew before anyone else did.
“It looked like something you’d see in the movies,” Kristen Davis, Josh’s husband, told ABC News. “She kept putting her paw up on his leg, and like, ‘Hey, are you paying attention to me? I’m trying to talk to you.’ We were all kind of standing around, like, ‘Did that just happen?’”
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After the shelter announced what happened on Facebook, the story was featured on news networks nationwide, and applications for adoption came in by the dozens.
However good Sienna’s intuitions were about Davis, they were at most as good as Sharon Sweeney’s intuition about Sienna. The Virginia resident had an outstanding adoption request before Sienna became dog of the day, and she took the 60-pound-pooch home this week.
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Jackie Poppe, a volunteer at Friends of Campbell County, was walking Sienna around on the day of her heroics, and she says it’s a reminder of the unique powers that shelter dogs have.
“Don’t overlook the stray dog that’s in your local shelter,” said Poppe. “All of them have amazing traits about them.”
WATCH the story below from ABC News…
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