,type=downsize)
Meet Kobe, a Philadelphia pup that saved his neighborhood after discovering a dangerous gas leak. This 4-year-old Husky lives with his owner Chanell Bell, and her 8-year-old daughter Juliana, and recently became a local hero after noticing a gas leak and getting his owner’s attention, who quickly realized something was wrong.
The family lives in a townhouse located in the Germantown neighborhood in Philadelphia, and Kobe had never been a digger, as revealed by his owner. “He has never just randomly dug a hole,” Bell said, adding that the smart pup is “definitely not a digger.”
Days later Kobe dug another hole in the same spot, leaving his owner puzzled as she didn’t understand the reason for his strange behavior. “It totally threw me off,” she said, adding that the pup looked at her trying to communicate something.
“Kobe, why are you doing that?” she asked. “You know when a dog does something wrong, and he knows he did something wrong? He didn’t give me that look at all,” Bell continued, “He was giving me a look like ‘I did it, and I don’t regret it.’”
The family had a small gas leak fixed weeks prior, so she decided to use a gas detection device, as she suspected that it could be a similar incident. “My intuition told me to take the reader down there to the hole. I didn’t expect to find anything at all,” she explained. However, after getting close to the hole “it went off like crazy.”
“I was shocked beyond words,” she said. Kobe’s owner quickly called the Philadelphia Gas Works, and the company found the leak, caused by a rusting pipe, and going directly underneath the hole dug by Kobe. “I always thought he was special, but I really have a newfound respect for his intelligence,” his owner said, crediting him for saving their home and the neighborhood.
The situation was “really serious,” they explained, adding that “the dog’s nose is far more sensitive than a human’s, and they’re usually only an inch off the ground, whereas our noses are five to six feet off the ground.”