A dog’s tragic and unnecessary death is serving as a painful reminder of the importance of leash use during hikes. On Monday, a small dog, who wasn’t leashed, got away from its owner, slipped, and died after smashing into a fence.
The death happened in Greene County, New York, at Kaaterskill Falls, a popular hiking destination. A website about the popular attraction outlines the risks to those who stray off of the designated pathway…noting that there are “treacherously slippery rocks” and warnings to not climb on the rocks:
Injuries are common in areas where the rock or ground is slick.
According to multiple sources, the dog’s owner reached out to forest rangers on Monday afternoon with a “recovery request” for the deceased dog’s body. Responding rangers used technical gear to access the dog’s body in “icy conditions.” The warnings are for good reason – through the years there have been 200 confirmed deaths at the falls, reports Q1057.
A Facebook page for Kaaterskill Falls recounts perhaps one of the first canine deaths at the popular destination…a dog named Vite who leaped to his death after his owner and friends hiked to the bottom of the falls, causing the dog to jump in a deadly effort to reach him. A portion of the Facebook post reads:
The legend of Kaaterskill Falls involves the ghost of a dog who is said to have leapt to its death from the top of the falls in 1868. As the story goes, a spaniel named Vite was left at the top of the falls, while his master and some friends decided to hike down to the foot of the falls. The dog lost sight of them and began to panic. When they finally emerged nearly 280 feet below, Vite began barking for joy, and seeing no other way to reach the group, leapt to his death.
Read more about the legend here
(Image of falls via Wikipedia/Jeffrey Pang from Berkeley, CA, USA, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
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