Plane used in dog hunt to keep deathbed promise to mother

A man has gone to extreme lengths to find his lost dog after making a promise to his mother. When Dana Neal’s dog Topsy ran off from him on the Washlands on Saturday, February 12, he launched a full-scale recovery mission for it — which included an aircraft and the use of night vision equipment. Thirteen-year-old Topsy had belonged to Mr Neal’s mother, Nina, and when she died in November last year he had promised to look after the dog.

Mr Neal said: “A promise is a promise and you can’t make a promise to someone on their deathbed like that and then break it two months later.” Mr Neal, 55, contacted his local paper to put an advert in, appealing for information on Topsy’s whereabouts and also went to both East Staffordshire Borough Council and South Derbyshire District Council for help. He borrowed some night vision equipment and bought some binoculars to carry out a search of the area.



Unable to find any trace of the little dog, he paid to have an aircraft from Tatenhill Airfield fly him over the Washlands, in the hope of seeing her. Mr Neal said: “I don’t know how long I was up there for. I didn’t spend as much as I would have been prepared to spend to keep my promise.” Mr Neal was walking over Burton Bridge on Wednesday, having still had no sighting of Topsy, when he saw some men from the Environment Agency working on the Washlands.

“I asked them if they had seen her and they hadn’t, so I gave them my number and asked them to ring me if they did. About 30 minutes later they rang me and told me they had found her.” The workers had found Topsy on a deserted part of the Washlands five days after she had gone missing. Mr Neal said: “These gentlemen found her in such an inaccessible place that I would never have found her and she would have died.” Topsy was hungry, but otherwise unharmed by her experience. As a gesture of thanks to the Environment Agency workers, Mr Neal will be making a donation to Water Aid.