Shelter Adoption Event Turns Heroic When Rescue Dog Senses Medical Crisis

A shelter dog is being praised after befriending a man who was about to experience a medical emergency.

A former stray dog named Sienna was making her rounds, greeting people at a Campbell County shelter event in Virginia when she noticed something was off with one of the visitors, The Friends of Campbell County Animal Control wrote in a Facebook post.

“Sienna knew. Before any human saw the signs, she knew,” the shelter team wrote about the “extraordinary” moment that took place over the weekend.

Sienna proved her intuition when “all at once, she gently broke away from the crowd and walked straight up to a man she had never met,” the post continued. “She sat quietly at his feet, refused to budge, and softly placed her paw on his leg. It wasn’t a trick. It wasn’t prompted.”

A few minutes later, Sienna began pawing at the man’s leg,” Barbe Shackleford, Director of Friends of Campbell County Animal Control told CBS affiliate WDJB.

Soon after, the man’s wife returned to her husband’s side finding that he was experiencing a medical emergency.

“My husband is either having a seizure or is about to have one!” she said.

The four-legged hero was never trained to detect seizures, but somehow she just knew something was wrong.

“This is the kind of magic that shelter dogs carry inside them — unspoken wisdom, deep empathy, and an unfailing ability to connect with us in our most vulnerable moments,” the shelter’s Facebook post added.

In the comments section, a woman named Kristen Davis wrote that it was in fact her husband who Sienna approached and befriended that day.

Davis said that morning her husband experienced multiple “myoclonic seizures all morning,” and that after they left the event he “went home to rest and he felt a lot better.”

According to Davis, their family has searched for a dog that can detect seizures, but since they already have three dogs they aren’t able to adopt a fourth.

“We simply don’t have the room or resources to take on another pup,” Davis wrote. “We pray someone finds her a forever home!”

The shelter gave an update that Sienna’s heroic story brought donations that covered her adoption fees, but that she is still in search of a forever home.

“A family out there needs her as much as she needs them!” FCCAC wrote in the update.

The shelter found Sienna in downtown Altavista and she was never claimed, WDJB reported. The shelter believes Sienna is around 4 or 5 years old and that she’s mothered multiple litters of puppies.

“She’s totally house-trained, which is always amazing anyway, but we have no idea what her training was. Somebody had taught her to sit, they had taught her to give a paw, and then to just sit there nicely. So maybe she had a background in it, we have no idea,” Shackleford told the news station.

“I know there are dogs that go to training to learn to identify different odors and different electrical pulses in people, but I’ve never seen one do it innately,” Shackleford continued.

Since Saturday’s event, Sienna has already received multiple applications for her adoption.

“We’ve always known Sienna is special. But today, she reminded us that sometimes the ones we rescue are the ones who end up rescuing,” the shelter wrote on Facebook.