When it was time to say goodbye, she was given a hero’s farewell.
Firefighters and rescue workers lined the sidewalk as her body, draped in an American flag, was carried out. Tears streaked down some faces.
Bretagne, believed to be the last surviving 9/11 Ground Zero search dog, was euthanized Monday.
The golden retriever was 16. Old age had slowed her down, and it was time to put her to sleep.
Panting at the end of a thick leash, the elderly dog was gently lifted from a truck and placed on the sidewalk outside the veterinary office. Then she hobbled toward the building, passing more than a dozen men and women dressed in blue, their hands raised to their foreheads in a somber salute.
Back in 2001, Bretagne (pronounced, “Brittany”) and Corliss were fresh graduates of Disaster City when they were deployed to New York shortly after the World Trade Center attacks.
Corliss joined hundreds of other search and rescue teams sent from around the world to find survivors at Ground Zero, working 12 hours a day for two weeks straight.
We know now there were very few survivors found in the rubble of the twin towers, and Bretagne, like so many other searchers, worked hard — only to find none.
But Corliss discovered something unexpected: rescuers and firefighters would approach Bretagne and pet her. Soon they’d be sharing their personal stories with Corliss, describing the missing friends, loved ones and colleagues they were searching for. Bretagne had become a kind of therapy dog. “Dogs can be so comforting, so it makes sense to me now,” she says. “I just didn’t anticipate that, then.”
9/11 was only the first of many national disasters that called Bretagne and Corliss into action.
Deployments followed for Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and other storms. Once Corliss watched Bretagne risk her own safety when the dog found herself standing on the end of a dangling staircase.
“She walked to the edge of it and she stopped — turned — and she came back down,” Corliss recalled to CNN in 2014.
“She did exactly what she was supposed to do, but it scared me a bit.”
Despite all that training, Corliss admits “there were still times when I held my breath and said, ‘I hope she does this right. I hope she’s OK.’ ”
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