3-Year-Old Miracle Girl Found Alive After 11 Days in Siberian Taiga – Thanks to Her Puppy!

We report on a lot of animal rescue stories here at One Green Planet. But usually, the rescuer is human and the rescuee is an animal. This time, it’s the reverse.

This three-year-old girl, Karina Chikitova, went missing in the remote Sakha Republic in Siberia, part of the Russian Federation. She was missing for a full 11 days in a region almost as harsh as you could possibly imagine. Karina and her puppy got lost, probably trying to follow her father, who had left for his native village, the Siberian Times reported. Her mother did not learn that she was not with her father until four days had already passed, due to poor phone connections.

A search was immediately launched, though the family knew chances of finding her alive were slim. Little Karina and her pup were lost in a region known to be home to bears and wolves, and the temperatures at night were known to descend into the negatives. So, how did Karina survive?

Nine days after they first went missing, Karina’s puppy turned up back at home.

“That was the moment when our hearts sank,” Afanasiy Nikolayev, spokesman for the Sakha Republic Rescue Service, told the Siberian Times, “because we thought at least with her dog Karina had chances to survive – night in Yakutia are cold and some areas have already gone into minus temperatures. If she was to hug her puppy, we thought, this would have given her a chance to stay warm during nights and survive. So when her dog came back we thought ‘that’s it’ – even if she was alive – and chances were slim – now she would have definitely have lost all hopes. Our hearts truly and deeply sank.”

But the puppy had come back on a mission: to guide the rescuers to Karina. And that’s exactly what she did.

Karina was found two days later, not only alive, but conscious and in surprisingly good condition. She had no major injuries, other than some scratches and a lot of mosquito bites. Karina apparently survived by drinking river water and eating berries, and kept warm in a bed of grass with her puppy at night.

It is a miracle that she was able to survive all that time in the harsh taiga. A miracle made possible by her pup’s loyalty and care, and the risk that the pup took to bring help to her girl. Karina is now being cared for in a hospital and being brought back to health. She will make a full recovery with no lasting damage, thanks in large part to her hero puppy.