Alex Cajio was finishing up his letter carrier shift Saturday, June 17, on a humid day in Pinellas Park, Florida, when he noticed a small black dog stuck in a canal.

“I just happened to see it out of my truck,” said Cajio, whose U.S. Postal Service truck has the driver’s side and steering wheel on the right side of the vehicle.

Otherwise, Cajio might not have spotted a barely visible elderly pug stuck in the swampy and muddy canal in an area near Freedom Lake Park in Pinellas County known for occasional alligators and coyotes.

“I was like ‘what the fudge'’” said Cajio of spotting the small, dark dog in the canal sloped approximately 8 feet down from the roadway and its guardrail.

The older female pug had very limited eyesight and mobility. The perilous pooch also could not bark loudly. The USPS carrier just happened to notice the dog down an embankment and the swampy canal.

“I just saw it,” Cajio said.

USPS mail carrier rescues dog stuck in Florida canal

The postal worker traversed the canal’s incline and Florida brush and then used a bar fetched from his USPS truck to help rescue the pug from its swampy and dangerous predicament.

“I did not want to go into the water,” said Cajio, adding it was his first animal rescue on the job as a mail carrier for the Post Office.

It was also a new and meritorious twist on the age-old and sometimes adversarial relationship between mail carriers and dogs.

Cajio was able to leverage the pug out of the shallow water and mud of the canal. Good Samaritans from the nearby Mainlands neighborhood then got the dog some water and food and transported the senior pug to the SPCA Tampa Bay’s shelter in Largo.

Eric Keaton, chief marketing officer for the regional SPCA, said Wednesday the dog was being transferred to Pinellas County Animal Services which handles lost-and-found pets and connecting with owners. The pug is among a number of found dogs at the county animal shelter.

Keaton said the regional SPCA takes in 8,000 animals per year including dogs, cats and occasional livestock.

The rescued pug has cleaned up showing black and white fur and is listed on the found dogs site operated by county animal services.

The unlikely alliance of dog and mailman was also not lost on Cajio.

The USPS carrier said he’s had to avoid a few aggressive and unfriendly dogs on his mail routes. He was worried how the pug would react when being retrieved from the canal.But the pug was peaceful, friendly and grateful to be rescued from what could have been a watery grave.

“It’s a good dog,” Cajio said.