Canadian military veteran says one-year-old Bear saved his life by performing CPR

In what could have been the final moments of Darren Cropper’s life, a miracle unfolded. He had a massive heart attack. But his one-year-old puppy, Bear, saved his life by jumping on his chest.

The dog seemed to have been jumping so hard and long, paw prints were embedded in Darren’s torso.

Later, paramedics would tell Cropper that Bear must have been leaping up and down for hours. And that kept him alive.

The late August 2022 adventure began when the retired Canadian Forces weapons specialist woke up in the middle of the night unable to sleep. He wasn’t feeling well.

“Once I’m up, I’m up,” says Cropper, now 57.

Unable to go back to bed, he made himself a coffee in the kitchen and started down to the basement to watch TV.

He never made it.

After stepping on the bottom step, everything went black.

The next thing he recalls was his dog, Bear, howling and jumping on his chest.

His wife, Janice, 59, was there too. Their son, Matthew, 29, heard Bear howling and woke his mother. They followed Bear’s howls to the basement and discovered Cropper flat out on the floor. Janice called 911.

First, he was transported from his Bonfield, Ont., home to the small North Bay Regional Health Centre and then on to the cardiac unit at the hospital in Sudbury, where he had open heart surgery. Scans showed that the arteries from his right lung to his heart had shut down, he says.

“If Bear hadn’t jumped on my chest, I wouldn’t be alive,” says Cropper. “Basically, he did Puppy CPR and got my blood flowing. No one taught him that, but both his parents were service dogs. I guess it’s in him, his instinct.”

Bear is half Siberian Husky and half Golden Retriever. His coat is brilliantly multi-coloured, as are his eyes, with one a bright crystal blue inherited from his Husky father, and the other a dark brown.

He is well-loved by the Cropper family with three full-sized beds in different parts of the house where Bear likes to lay down.

Cropper loves the outdoors, and Bear is always happy to accompany him on the large plot of land the family owns. As Bear is a big, strong dog, Cropper made him a heavy-duty 20-foot leash for their romps in the woods.

When Cropper was recovering in hospital, he spoke with Bear on video calls. It was mid-pandemic and that was the only way Cropper could communicate with his family. “He saw me on the video. He just went nuts!”

It was Cropper that brought Bear to the attention of the Purina Hall of Fame. He had read about it years before Bear saved his life and wrote to Purina. He didn’t hear from the company. But then a few weeks ago he got a call.

A Purina representative asked for medical proof of the heart incident, information about the paramedics who transported Cropper to hospital and photos of him and Bear.

Purina gets thousands of submissions every year, Cropper says. The company narrows it down to two dogs to induct into the Hall of Fame. For 2024, one of the inductees is Bear. The second inductee is Maggie May, a nine-year-old Labrador Retriever that saved the life of his owner when he wandered outside in the cold, due to a medication that caused hallucinations.

Next week, Bear and Cropper are invited to a Purina picnic in Toronto where Todd Cooney, the president of the company will put a hero medal around Bear’s neck. Purina is a division of Nestlé Canada Inc. The company says the Hall of Fame is the longest-running Canadian pet recognition program of its kind. So far, 194 animals who performed outstanding acts of heroism have been inducted.

“My wife calls him our Care Bear. I call him my Hero Puppy,” says the proud puppy dad, grateful for Bear’s life-saving instinct.