A Little Mouth-to-Snout Saves a Chihuahua's Life

Chiquilla the Chihuahua wasn’t breathing. Her eyes were blank and her body was lifeless. She was dying. That’s when Krisna Torres stepped in.

Torres, 35, and her husband Diego, 31, were the first guests to arrive at a birthday party for friend Maricruz Cisneros's daughter in Huntington Beach, Calif., on Aug. 2. With the backyard gate open for guests, Cisneros had put her two dogs in her small treehouse, tied them inside with harness leashes and arranged chairs around its entrance so they couldn’t get out.

But Chiquilla, a 6-year-old Chihuahua mix, did. Shortly after arriving, Torres heard a child screaming in the backyard. When guests ran back to check on the dogs, they found Chiquilla dangling from her leash, which had slipped off her body and was choking her neck. Panic set in and one guest said the dog was dead. Torres rushed over to the unconscious pooch and picked her up. “Everyone was crying for the dog, but I wasn’t; I was concerned,” she told the Orange County Register. “I was never nervous.”

Torres calmly put two fingers in Chiquilla’s mouth, pressed down her tongue and gave her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. She has no formal CPR training; she just did what she had seen countless actors do on TV. After about two minutes of trying to breathe life into Chiquilla, the dog suddenly gasped. Her eyes opened and she began breathing on her own.

Cisneros rushed her to a nearby pet hospital, where a vet pronounced the pup perfectly healthy and sent her home. The vet credits Torres’s quick thinking with saving Chiquilla’s life. “We are just so happy Krisna was there,” Cisneros told the Register. “She’s our angel.”

Torres, who doesn’t have a dog of her own, has been low-key about her mouth-to-snout heroics, saying only that little Chiquilla’s breath could have used a little freshening. “I didn’t think,” she told the Register, “I just reacted.”

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Alex Tresniowski