One clever pup came to the rescue of his dog mom after she didn’t realize she had an infection while pregnant, the New York Post reports.
Helping His Mom
On her TikTok account, Brittany Welsh posted a video of her Golden Retriever Charlie nudging her stomach with his nose and trying to lift her legs by resting them on his back. In light of his behavior, the 30-year-old from Missouri decided to seek medical attention. As it turns out, she had a urinary tract infection – eight months pregnant at the time, her clever canine’s intervention came at an important time.
“I seriously don’t deserve him,” she wrote in the caption of her video.
UTIs are fairly common in pregnant people, but if untreated they can lead to kidney infections. In turn, a kidney infection can mean an early labor and a low birth rate. Fortunately, Welsh was able to treat her UTI with medication and has since given birth to a healthy baby girl.
Clever Pups
In a 2016 study, researchers trained Labradors and Golden Retrievers to identify infected urine, and then gave them hundreds of samples. They found that they could detect contaminated samples with more than 90% accuracy.
Some dogs are even able to alert their parents if they’re about to have a seizure, while TikTok users in the comments section under Welsh’s video shared the ways in which their own pups had alerted them to various medical conditions.
“My dog told me once trying to tell me I had a heart issue and sure enough, I did,” said one. Another said that their dog woke them up knowing that they were about to go into labor – ”I stood up and my water broke,” they explained.
It’s no secret that dogs are among the most intelligent animals, but perhaps they’re even more clever than we give them credit for.
