Plano Officer's Dog Rescue a Facebook Hit

A Plano police patrolman who saved a dog from drowning is drawing kudos from around the country.

Officer Eric Elliott pulled the 15-year-old dog from a pool after the pooch fell in and couldn't get out.

"As I got closer to the gate, I could hear the bark, and he was definitely getting tired, and you could hear the stress in the bark," he said.

Elliot was working a special traffic detail when he heard a call that a dog had been clinging to the edge of a backyard pool for 20 minutes and couldn't hang on much longer.

"Just reading the notes on the call, it sounded like the dog was in some serious trouble," Elliott said.

It wasn't his call, but Elliott took it anyway.

"He really didn't want anything to do with me," he said. "He turned his head away, and I just said, 'If he's going to bite me, he's going to bite me, but I'm going to pull him out anyway, so I did and was just glad I was close enough to help."

The Plano Police Department posted the story with Elliot's picture on its Facebook page, and the story quickly took off.

"It's gone viral," Plano police spokesman David Tilley said.

The department's Facebook postings normally get between 150 and 200 views, but hundreds of thousands of people have seen the post about the dog rescue.

"As of right now, we're sitting, we're about 333,000 people across the nation have actually seen this post because over 2,000 people have shared it on their Facebook page to their friends," Tilley said.

Even people whom Elliott has arrested are posting about the rescue, saying they forgive the officer for arresting them because he saved the dog.

"It's actually a lot of fun to be part of it, and it's good to let people see the other side of what we do," Elliott said.

NBC 5's Randy McIlwain contributed to this report.

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