A heartwarming moment between a mother dog and her ill newborn puppy was captured on security camera footage — and tons of social media users are celebrating the dog’s quick thinking.
On Monday, Jan. 13, a veterinary clinic in Istanbul, Turkey, shared a post to its Facebook page recounting how a stray mother dog — who veterinary techs at the clinic would later name “Mom” — was caught on camera walking through the rainy streets of the Beylikduzu neighborhood with her puppy in her mouth and approaching the front door of the clinic.
A vet technician who was working at the time, Emir, noticed her approaching quickly sprung into action, grabbing the puppy from Mom’s mouth, the video footage shows. At first, the tech and a veterinarian thought that the pup, a male, was dead.
“My friend Emir notices that there is a dog waiting outside the door,” Baturalp Dogan, a veterinarian at the Beylikduzu Alfa Veterinary Clinic, said per the Associated Press. “He opens it immediately and looks.”
“At first, he can’t understand the situation because it is very strange. A dog comes with a puppy in its mouth and drops the puppy on the ground. It is not possible to understand at first whether the puppy is alive or not,” Dogan recalled. “The animal is already cold as ice.”
According to Dogan, Emir was ready to declare the puppy dead when he heard a faint heartbeat via his stethoscope.
“When I checked it with a needle, we noticed a very slow heartbeat,” Dogan told the AP, recalling how he and his vet tech began frantically working to revive the dog. “That’s why I said ‘It’s a hope, maybe he’ll live,’ and we started the fight.”
The AP reported that the pair administered an adrenaline shot to the puppy and began warming him up with a hair dryer. As they worked, Mom stood nearby, peering over the counter to get a look at her puppy.
Dogan told the outlet that all was successful — the male puppy lived, and the veterinarian also believes that some people in the neighborhood had brought in one of her other puppies, another male, earlier in the day. The two were the only surviving members of her litter of six, per the AP.
“They are doing very well right now, they are in good health,” the vet added of Mom and her two pups. “They are getting better day by day.”
Video footage shared by the shelter shows Mom nursing her two puppies, as all three of them get healthier and healthier each day.
“Of course, this is a process, it is wrong to say that they are doing very well right now and that they will live a long time,” he added. “This is a process, we will see as the days go by, but I think they will get better.”
Social media users have had nothing but hope for the puppies and her mom, with many writing that they hope the family of three can be adopted and taken care of.
“Wow. All kinds of heroes on the globe,” one commenter wrote on an NBC News Instagram post.Another added: “Wow…she knew what to do. Amazing.”