Jaylynn, just 3 years old, wandered away from his baby-sitter at Friday afternoon in 20 degree weather and was missing for more then 20 hours despite the frantic search efforts by hundreds of friends, family and law enforcement combing the woods for him in Halifax County Virginia.

“The only thing we wanted to do was just keep searching until we found him,” Halifax County Sheriff Stanley Noblin told reporters.

Jaylynn’s terrified family knew time was not on its side as the temperature fell below 20 degrees.

Officials said the little boy and the families two puppies wandered up to a mile in the dark, even across a highway, but it wasn’t until Saturday afternoon that members of the search team found him sitting by a tree, the two puppies nestled against him helping to keep all three of them warm and alive.

“When I first saw him, he was like, ‘Momma, I got cold. I slept in the woods last night. The puppies kept me warm.’ He told me that … the dogs slept up against him. And I’m sure the body heat kept him warm,” said his mother, Sarah Ingram.

Billie Jo Roach, another member of the search party that found the boy, said the puppies refused to leave his side.

As the child was placed in an ambulance to be taken to a local hospital for examination, “The puppies were watching where he went.

“Where he went, they went,” Roach said.

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The moral of the story is go ahead and buy your kids a puppy if they don’t already have one!

Source: NY Daily News

Many of the rescued pups are finding new homes thanks to the help from a lot of animal lovers. Gerti, for example, was lucky enough to be adopted by Barbara in Montgomery County MD where she’s certain to be as happy as her new “mom”.

We don’t have the ability to solve this problem completely, but the more pet lovers know, the better in the long run.
The short video below contains more information on this story and the problem.

Click here to view the embedded video.