The rescue made him a hero. He then won the six-year-old Anatolia Pyrenean, Buford, a dinner for the hero.
“He got two pounds of ribeye last night,” Buford owner Scotty Dunton said Wednesday. “He’s just a cool, cool dog.”
The Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office said Tuesday morning that he had been wandering around the house with a two-year-old boy who disappeared the day before from his home in Seligman, Arizona.
The state’s remote Dunton ranch, about 100 miles south of Grand Canyon National Park, is seven miles from the boy’s home, and found dozens of search and rescue workers and deputies spent the night searching for the boy, according to the Sheriff’s Office.
The Sheriff’s Office posted details of the disappearance Monday at 11:08pm. As of 8:20am on Tuesday, the sheriff’s office said the toddler had been found and was safe.
Buford, the Anatolian Pyrenean, usually patrols his lands and is far from Coyotes.kpnx
Danton said he learned about the missing boy that morning. His age, outside temperature – it was in his 40s – and the rough terrain combination that made Danton worried that the toddler was not alive. He said the area surrounding his ranch is “all the big thick trees and mountains, canyons and rocks.” “It’s not really friendly to a two-year-old.”
In a post that announced the boy had been found, the sheriff’s office said the helicopters involved in the search had found two mountain lions in the area.
Still, when Dunton said he had arrived at the pickup to drive to town that morning, he saw Buford walking down the driveway. He recalled a little boy with blonde hair, pajama pants and a tank top with his dog.
It was around 7:30am
“I knew it was him,” Danton said. “He was all confused and crying, so I ran out and grabbed him, and said, ‘You’re fine, you’re fine,’ and took him inside and got him some water and food. ”
“He calmed down pretty quickly and turned 2,” Danton said.
When he asked the boy if he was walking all night, Danton said, the boy replied “No.”
“He kept saying, ‘Tree, tree,'” Danton recalled. “So I said, “Did you lie under a tree? And he said, ‘Yeah.” And did my dog find you?
The boy was not injured, Danton said, and despite him getting him a blanket, the boy didn’t want it.
“I said, ‘You’re the toughest two-year-old I’ve ever seen,” he said. “There’s no way he made it far away. And there’s someone who says something is shady about this story. And I physically went and found his little foot truck.”
“He walked that way,” Danton added.
He said the Anatolia Pyrenees are essentially guard dogs, and Buford usually sleeps all day, patrolling the ranch at night to keep coyotes away.
Danton wasn’t sure if the dog heard the boy cry and found him, but he followed the child’s footsteps a mile. He said Buford was with him the whole time.
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