06/29/2026
🐾🔥 The Foster Dog Nobody Adopted Yet Just Saved a Family From a Burning Houseboat.
He was only ever supposed to stay for one afternoon. Moose, an 8-year-old Great Pyrenees, was one of the shelter dogs in Portsmouth Humane Society's day-foster program borrowed for a few hours by Chris Cushna and Sheila Janes and their three kids just to get him out of his kennel for a bit. The program pairs community members with a shelter dog for a "field trip" that can last a few hours or a few days. They liked the gentle giant so much they asked to keep him one more night aboard the houseboat they called home at Portsmouth's Tidewater Yacht Marina.
Just before 8 a.m. on Sunday, August 6, 2023, Moose wouldn't settle. Cushna and his daughter Anya figured he just wanted a walk until they stepped onto the deck and saw the boat tied up beside theirs already overtaken by fire. Cushna sprinted back inside to wake the rest of the family. Within minutes, glass was breaking and batteries were exploding as the flames swallowed their own houseboat.
"If Moose hadn't gotten Anya and Chris up, we would not be here," Janes said. Every person on that boat made it off alive. Almost everything they owned didn't.
Moose's own happy ending nearly slipped away, too someone else adopted him the very next morning on a trial basis, but it didn't work out, and he was back at the shelter within the week. Then, on a five-acre farm three hours away in Franklin, Virginia, Ciara Hill came across his story on the humane society's page. "That dog, the one who rescued the people from the fire," she told her husband and drove to Portsmouth the next morning to bring him home for good.
