Alan Whitton had been searching for fifty hours when he squeezed a dog toy outside a fox hole in a wood in Essex and waited.
What came back was a faint whimper.
He dropped to his knees and started digging.
Mitzi, his Jack Russell terrier, had vanished on Wednesday morning during a walk through Knighton Wood in Buckhurst Hill after being chased by a Basset Hound and ran off into the bushes. Whitton, 49, spent the rest of that day searching, left at 6.30pm, and came back an hour later. He returned Thursday. He returned Friday. At some point between rounds, he forced himself to do a grocery run at Aldi — the kind of normal chore that feels strange when your mind is still in the woods.
At 11am Friday, another dog walker called. Her dog had been nosing around a fox hole not far from where Mitzi disappeared. Whitton, a life therapy coach, said he dropped everything and drove straight there, grabbing one of Mitzi’s toys on the way out.
He squeezed it at the entrance to the hole. The whimper that came back was faint, but it was there.
The two of them dug. At 1.13pm, he pulled Mitzi out.
In the video filmed at that moment, Whitton clutches her against his chest and weeps — not the controlled relief of someone who expected a happy ending, but the kind of breakdown that only comes after fifty hours of convincing yourself the worst had already happened. “I just broke down,” he told Essex Live afterward. “I was overwhelmed with joy and disbelief. I had started to lose hope. It was like a Christmas miracle — all the time it felt like a nightmare I couldn’t wake up from.”
Mitzi was unharmed. A vet visit turned up a few ticks and nothing else. Her first act as a free dog was to work her way through a Greggs vegan sausage roll, which, under the circumstances, seems entirely reasonable.
Alan is now buying her a GPS collar so she doesn’t get lost again. He is also offering free coaching sessions to the neighbors and strangers who helped search for her, saying the response from strangers in the area restored something in him he had not realized he was losing. “Losing Mitzi has taught me not to take anything for granted,” he said, “and to love big and love hard.”
The fox hole is still there. The toy that found her is presumably not going anywhere either.
All comments are subject to our Community Guidelines. Opinions belong to readers.