Lassie to the rescue as OAP thrown from horse

A 13-month-old cattle dog named Lassie helped rescue its elderly master after he fell from a horse in eastern Australia.

George Crowther, a 90-year-old farmer from Queensland state, broke his hip and pelvis when he was pitched from a bucking horse and his foot became caught in the reins, his son Austin said today.

In a case of life imitating fiction, Lassie came to the rescue, snuggling in next to Crowther to keep him warm.

When darkness fell, Crowther’s wife came searching in the fields with a flashlight, but could not hear his feeble cries.

“She went out and called for the dog and Lassie came up to where she was and (started) whimpering. She said, ‘Where’s George?’,” Austin Crowther said. The dog then led her to the paddock where Crowther lay, cold and injured.

Crowther is recovering in hospital after having 37 screws and two metal plates inserted into his pelvis and hip. His family hopes he will return home next week, and expect he will continue to go out riding with his horse and dog.

“He named her properly,” Austin Crowther said of his father’s four-legged friend.

Lassie, a collie, became the canine star of a string of movies in the 1940s and a TV series that started in the 1950s and ran for about two decades. In the series, the faithful dog regularly saved her human companions from various accidents and mishaps.