A desperate dog was trapped, covered head to paw in thick black tar. She cried and whimpered to no avail – until other dogs heard her, and started barking.
The poor pooch, Aloe, found herself in a life-threatening situation: completely soaked in solidified tar, without a soul in sight to help her escape.
Luckily, Aloe managed to catch the attention of some other dogs in the area, whose barks raised the alarm to local kids.
The incident took place in Libertad, in the city of Merlo, in the Argentina capital Buenos Aires. After the youngsters failed to pull the dog free, they called their parents, who in turn raised the alarm with the police. It took nine hours for emergency services to rescue and clean the trapped dog.
Through the work of the police, firefighters and volunteers of animal protection organisation Proyecto 4 Patas (Four Legs Project), Aloe was set free – unsurprisingly, she was exhausted afterwards.
According to the animal group, the dog ‘fell or was thrown in a tar well in an abandoned area in Libertad’. The whole rescue operation took around nine hours, 50 litres of oil, and a lot of soap together with many willing volunteers who washed Aloe afterwards. She was entirely covered in the tar that had started to set hard leaving her petrified.
The animal group explained:
Aloe was stuck in the ground and petrified. 100% of her body was hardened. Her mouth, eyes, ears, everything. We were shocked, we had never been in front of an animal in this condition, but it was a time to get focused and use our will and love to get her out of this nightmare situation as soon as possible.
We were already informed about how to work, we had hours and hours in front of us of work. We gathered volunteers, we organised ourselves in teams, we bought litres and litres of oil and for nine hours non stop we cleaned the tar.
After the initial clean-up at the scene, the dog was then taken to a clinic for further treatment, where she was finally restored to her tar-less state.
Sharing pictures of the dog after her ordeal, the group wrote: ‘And here you have Aloe, this is the day of her second birth, because there is not doubts she was born again.’
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After graduating from Glasgow Caledonian University with an NCTJ and BCTJ-accredited Multimedia Journalism degree, Cameron ventured into the world of print journalism at The National, while also working as a freelance film journalist on the side, becoming an accredited Rotten Tomatoes critic in the process. He’s now left his Scottish homelands and took up residence at UNILAD as a journalist.