Elderly pit bull survives encounter with bear

Smith went running after the dog, but by the time he arrived a yearling bear had Monkey in its jaws.

Smith keeps a harness on the aging pit bull to lift him on and off his fishing boat.

Smith started throwing rocks at the bear to get him to leave the dog alone.

[...] I picked up a bigger rock with two hands, took a few running steps and threw it over my head at the bear.

The vet worried about internal injuries, but only found a partially collapsed lung, so the dog was relatively easy to treat.

"All you do is sew up the hole on the outside and load him up," Bauder said, who gave Monkey a cocktail of painkillers and antibiotics to ward off infections.

In over 40 years of being a vet, Bauder said most bear encounters end with the dog either being too quick for the bear to grab, or the bear killing the animal.