TEXAS — A 911 dispatcher received an urgent call about a barking dog trapped in a sewer in The Woodlands — a suburb of Houston. Fire officials arrived to discover something else making the noise.
“There’s a dog in the drain,” said Sheila Remmert, who reported the sounds outside her home on Gallant Oak Place, where she and her husband Glen reside. “My husband came out, then I came out, and you can hear him barking.”
Sheila says they alerted the neighbor next door.
“He had his sprinklers on. We thought the dog was gonna drown, so Glen tells him to turn his sprinklers off. We thought we’d throw treats in there.”
According to the firemen, the noise came from a green tree frog.
“I did not believe them,” Sheila chuckled.
The Woodlands Fire Chief Palmer Buck said his department receives lots of calls regarding frogs that sound like dogs barking in the drainage system. He says it happens mostly during June and July — also known as mating season for the frogs that thrive in hot and rainy weather.
“They sound much bigger than they are,” said Buck, showing photos of the frog he pulled up on his cell phone.
The Woodlands Fire Department posted a Facebook video of a fireman checking to make sure it wasn’t a dog by barking at the sewer. The frog returned the favor by “barking” back.
“Our experience has been dogs will whine or whimper. They’re not gonna have the same type of bark without any kind of excitement or whatnot,” Buck said.
Sheila says she’s still thankful for the emergency response.
“They were fabulous, I must say,” she said. “My husband, still to this day, doesn’t believe them. He still thinks there’s a dog down there.”
Buck said emergency crews will still respond if someone is convinced it’s a dog.
“If you’re not missing a dog, and nobody’s talking about a dog being missing, it’s gonna be frog,” he said.
Sheila says she’s already planning how she’ll respond the next time she hears barking from a gutter.
“I’m walking right past it. OK, I’m ignoring him, and I’m gonna know it’s a frog,” she said.