Teachers, save “Animal Heroes! 🐶🐱🐬🐘🐖” to assign it to your class.

Read about 4 animal heroes below! A hero is someone who makes a difference by doing something that helps another living being or the community. LuLu the Pig LuLu was a big pot-bellied pig who lived with a woman named JoAnn and a dog named Bear. JoAnn had a weak heart. One day her heart problem flared up and she fell on the floor, unconscious. Bear, the dog, barked for help for JoAnn, but nobody heard him. So, LuLu squeezed her body through the dog door, scraping herself, to get out of the house. She ran into the road and laid herself down in the street to get people’s attention. She kept getting up to run to the house to check on JoAnn, then back to lie in the street. Finally, someone stopped their car, followed LuLu to the house, and saw JoAnn on the floor. The person called 911 for an ambulance. The medics were able to revive JoAnn and get her to the hospital. Fortunately, she recovered, thanks to LuLu, the pig, who got her the help she needed. Olivia the Goat Olivia was a goat who lived on a farm sanctuary in New York after a human family abandoned her. Olivia spent her days at the sanctuary making rounds of the farm, napping and grazing on grass. One day, a tiny baby cow named Dylan came to live at the sanctuary. Dylan had been rescued after he was taken away from his mother on a dairy farm just after he was born, so the farm could sell his mother’s milk to people. He was very scared, shaky-legged and hungry, mooing sadly and looking for his mom everywhere. The staff at the farm sanctuary fed Dylan milk, but they couldn’t seem to console him. Then, he met Olivia the goat, and he stopped his sad mooing and began to follow her on her walks around the farm. Olivia let Dylan follow her around and sleep next to her, and she became his stand-in mother. She didn’t have to do this, but, the sanctuary staff say, she clearly saw that Dylan needed it. Dylan counted on Olivia as a mother even when he grew to be much, much bigger than her! He finally moved on to be with the other cows when he became an adult. Olivia then became an “orphan magnet,” acting as a stand-in mother to several more scared, lonely baby animals of all kinds who came to the sanctuary. The sanctuary staff said she never, ever turned any of them away. Willie the Parrot Willie was a Quaker parrot who could squawk a few words and mostly lived quietly in an apartment with his guardian Meagan, her roommate, and her roommate’s little girl. One day Meagan was babysitting the little girl, two-year-old Hannah. Meagan had to go to the restroom, so she left Hannah happily watching cartoons on TV in the kitchen. She was only gone a moment when she heard Willie the Parrot making a huge racket like she had never heard before. Willie was screaming, “Mama! Baby!” Meagan ran out of the bathroom to find that Hannah had climbed onto the kitchen table, grabbed a Pop Tart (cookie), put the whole thing into her mouth, and was now choking on it, turning blue in the face. Meagan ran to Hannah and got the Pop Tart quickly out of her throat so she could breathe again. A few minutes later, Hannah’s mom, Samantha, came home to Hannah playing happily again, and to babysitter Meagan shocked and shaking. Meagan told Samantha about Willie’s call of “Mama! Baby!” alerting her to Hannah choking, thus saving her life. Samantha couldn’t believe it as both women said Willie had never used those two words together before. Willie was given an award from the Red Cross for his heroic actions. The Dog and The Harbor Seal This is a story of a dog not being the rescuer but of being the one rescued. This dog was a German Shepherd mix who lived in England near a large, deep river. One day he got out of his home and ran down to the riverbank, somehow getting himself both lost and injured. A man named Chris saw the dog and went toward him to help, but the scared pup tried to run away from Chris and fell into the river. Because the dog was injured, he couldn’t swim well, so he started floating away and getting pulled underwater. Chris became alarmed and called other people to help. But, then, as the people tried to figure out how to help the sinking pup, they saw him come up to the surface of the water and start moving toward the shore. However, the dog wasn’t swimming; he just seemed to be floating across the water without moving a muscle. That was when the people realized that a harbor seal, who lived in the river, had helped him. The seal got underneath the dog and swam him all the way to the riverbank, delivering him to the people now waiting to help. Once the dog was safely on shore, the seal dove back underwater and swam away. The seal didn’t stick around to hear all the people thanking her for saving the dog.