It wasn’t quite Alice in Wonderland, but two Jack Russells' adventure down a rabbit hole has come to an end after the pair was dug out by CFA volunteers over the weekend.
The dogs went missing from their home between Johnsonville and Bruthen, in East Gippsland.
Their owners found them down a rabbit hole at the back of the property on Saturday afternoon, but thought a night on the tiles might teach them a lesson.
But when the two dogs hadn’t appeared by the next morning, they called CFA to get them out.
“They’d got about six to eight feet deep down this rabbit hole and had managed to get themselves stuck,” firefighter Chris Seymour said.
“We started using crowbars bar to loosen the dirt, but were scared of hitting one of them, so I ended up on my hands and knees, scraping dirt out of the hole.
“We’d find a tunnel, dig a bit, and then that would turn into a dead-end, so we’d try another, and so on.”
“We just kept chasing holes,” Chris said.
"We were working alongside SES crews from Bruthen so there was a fair bit of effort going in to get these dogs out.
He said gradually the barks were becoming louder.
“I was carefully using a shovel to dig around some rocks and all of a sudden I see a snout, and then a leg, and then slowly the dogs were able to dig themselves out,” Chris said.
But despite spending the night in the rabbit warren, he said the dogs didn’t seem fazed at all.
“They were as good as gold,” he said.
“We had to block off the hole with rocks because they tried to get back in.
“There was a chance they got the rabbit while they down there, because they weren’t hungry at all.”