Cyclist Piggybacks Hurt Dog To Town And, Ultimately, Salvation

COLUMBUS, GA — Getting banged up when he was hit by a car might have been the best thing that ever happened to Columbo. The 5-month-old Great Dane mix was in sad shape when Jarrett Little and a group of mountain bikers found him in the woods near Columbus, Georgia. Bleeding and broken, he was rail thin and hungry and had road rash and a broken leg.

Little and his group shared their food and water with the poor pooch. But that wasn’t enough. He needed to see a veterinarian, but without a car to transport the dog, the group had to get resourceful.

Chris Dixon, one of the cyclists, tried putting the dog on the handlebars of her bike. That didn’t work.

So Little scooped up the dog, put him on his back and began pedaling the 7 miles to town. Little’s first stop was at his local bike shop in Columbus, where they ran into Andrea Shaw, a Maine woman who was in town on a business trip.

Her heart melted and she made a promise to the dog: That would be his last terrible, awful day.

“I’m saving this dog — he’s bleeding and broken and I’m not leaving him,” she told her husband, Joel, in a phone call. She paid to have the dog patched up, then arranged with Canine Freedom Transportation to bring him to her home in Maine, where he has a couple of dog siblings.

Since then, Columbo, or “Bo” as Shaw calls him, has become a social media sensation. He’s settling in at his new home, and has his own Facebook page, Adventures of Columbo, where he picked up about 6,000 followers in a matter of days. Folks from all over are rooting for the dog and cheering Shaw and and the cyclists for bringing Bo to her.

Little told CBS News the timing of his arrival the bike shop with the dog on his back was serendipitous. If he had gotten there five minutes earlier or later, he and his bike group “wouldn’t have crossed paths with her.”

Timing is everything, and this wasn’t the first chance encounter of the day, Dixon told the Ledger-Enquirer. She and Little were leading the pack when they stopped to wait for the others to catch up. That’s when they saw movement at the edge of a forest.

Dixon thought it was a fox, but “then this dog started running across the road toward us.”

“He looked terrible. He was hungry. He was in bad shape, but he seemed happy to see us,” Dixon said of the dog, which the group began calling “Sprocket.”

When Dixon’s attempt to carry the pup on her handlebars failed, Little came up with the idea of piggybacking him to town. He was wearing a cycling jersey with pockets in the back, which he used as stirrups of a sort.

“I just picked him up like I would my little girl when I put her on my shoulders,” Little told the Ledger-Enquirer. “He was injured, so he wasn’t trying to fight a lot. He was also happy that we were there, touching him and hadn’t taken off on him.”

Bo is making a great recovery. Here are some posts from Facebook that are guaranteed to make you smile.

Lead photo by Chris Dixon courtesy of Adventures of Columbo