PEOPLE Pets | Sit. Stay. Play!

When Coweta County, Ga., firefighter Jim Cadenhead got a call on June 29, he didn't realize it would end up changing his life. Animal Control was dealing with a cat stuck in a 40-foot well, and Cadenhead had been deployed to help.

"We took the roof off of the well house and hooked up a little system to go down into the well," the La Grange, Ga., resident tells PEOPLEPets.com. "Then I grabbed the cat. It was very simple."

What wasn't so simple was figuring out the cat’s future.

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Ric O'Barry spent a decade of his life capturing and training dolphins that he would work with in the 1960s TV series Flipper. But he has spent the rest of his life trying to do exactly the opposite, and has for 40 years been fighting for dolphins' lives.

The dolphin trainer turned activist starred in the Oscar-winning documentary The Cove, which showed the annual capture and slaughter of dolphins in a Japanese village called Taiji. Now, working with his son Lincoln O'Barry, Ric continues where The Cove left off, in a new series with Animal Planet called Blood Dolphins.

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They say a dog is man's -- or woman’s -- best friend. And never was this made more clear than early last Wednesday morning when Princess, a five-year-old pit bull/Rhodesian Ridgeback mix, was stabbed multiple times as she tried to protect her owner from a violent boyfriend.

"I feel like she's my hero," Marie Wells, 31, of Southbridge, Mass., tells PEOPLEPets.com. "If she hadn't been there, I don't know what could have happened. [My boyfriend] snapped."

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For her first two years, Gina was a typically happy German shepherd puppy. She loved going up to people with tail wagging and ears up. As she trained to be a bomb-sniffing dog, Gina enjoyed checking out new sites at her home on Peterson Air Force Base. But all that changed following her six-month tour of duty in Iraq from December 2008 to May of 2009. "

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He had eight beers and two 32-oz. margaritas before calling it a night and falling asleep. So when Jerry Douthett awoke an hour later to a pool of blood beneath his right foot, he thought it was a nightmare. "But when I got up and rinsed my foot off, you know what a shock it was?" says Jerry of the moment he discovered the top half of his big toe was missing. "I still can't believe it."

As Jerry, 48, yelled to his wife, "My toe is gone," the couple's 1-year-old Jack Russell terrier was following him, licking up the trail of blood, his face smeared with it. "Right then and there, I knew Kiko ate it," says wife Rosee, 40, a registered nurse. "It was so bizarre."

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A regular morning romp through the yard turned into a nightmare for a young Chihuahua named Buster when he was suddenly attacked and taken by a wild coyote in the suburban town of Littleton, Colo. But thanks to two brave pit bull neighbors, the dog survived the frightening encounter and is on the road to a recovery.

Four-year-old Buster had just returned from his morning walk with mom Jodi Robinette on July 31, but wanted a little more play time outside. Having already checked the surroundings of her back yard, Robinette felt it safe to let Buster burn off some active energy while she kept an eye out from her living room couch. But not even 30 seconds later, Robinette was back on her feet.

"I heard him scream like I've never heard an animal scream before," Robinette tells PEOPLEPets.com. "I instantly knew that an animal got him."

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Call it the will to survive: One cat is on the road to recovery today after she was left for dead in a pet carrier that was apparently put into Boston's Charles River last week. Nicknamed Grandma Moses by staffers at the MSPCA-Angell, where she's recuperating, her potentially tragic story became a small miracle, thanks to one very good Samaritan.

While kayaking in the Charles with his family last Thursday, a man noticed something bobbing in the water, caught on a branch. "He wasn't sure what the object was, because there was very little of it above water," explains MSPCA-Angell spokesman Brian Adams. "When he lifted it, he discovered it was a pet carrier — with a full-grown cat inside."

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