After rescuing children lost in the Colombian jungle for 40 days, the army searches for the rescue dog Wilson

With the slogan that “no one is left behind,” Colombian army officers announced this Saturday that they will now continue into the jungle in search of Wilson, a dog who helped rescue the four indigenous children who had been missing for more than a month.

After a plane crash that killed his motherThe four children, aged between 13 and 1, were found this Friday after wandering in search of a way out in the dense Colombian jungle.

Now the military’s efforts will focus on the search for Wilson, a sniffer dog who took part in the feat and is now lost in the thick undergrowth.

“The search is not over yet. Our principle: we leave no one behind,” the institution said on its Twitter account.

“Soldiers continue the operation to find Wilson,” he added in his tweet, accompanied by photos of the six-year-old Belgian malinois.

Wilson played a key role in the search, as he found Cristin’s bottle in the middle of the vegetation, the youngest to live to be one year old during the amazing journey through a habitat where jaguars, cougars, snakes and other predators roam.

The minors, weak but alive, were transferred to Bogotá, where they are being hospitalized.

Astrid Cáceres, director of the state agency that monitors children’s rights, said on Saturday that the minors reported meeting a dog in the jungle, without specifying whether it was Wilson.

Lesly the heroine

“It was the girl, the eldest, our heroine, the one who took care of her siblings with her wisdom and protected her,” explains the director of the land restitution unit, Giovanny Yule, one of those who led the institutional search .

Lesly, age 13 and the eldest of the siblings, “told us about the puppy,” the official told the press.

He added that the children speak “of the puppy being lost, that they didn’t know where he was and that he accompanied them for a while”.

One of Lesly’s aunts, Damarys Mucutuy, said the older two loved a survival game that might have helped save her life. “When we played, we acted like ranchitos and I think she did,” she explained to Caracol Noticias. “She knew which fruits she cannot eat because there are many poisonous fruits in the jungle. And she knew how to take care of a baby.”

The army registered the disappearance of the animal on Thursday and came up with a hypothesis: “Due to the complexity of the terrain, the humidity and the adverse weather conditions, it would have become disoriented,” the institution said in a bulletin.

The military also claimed to have found “footprints that belonged to the minors and very close to those that could have belonged to the dog.”

The children’s mother, an indigenous leader and the plane’s pilot were killed in the accident.

The two younger brothers turned 5 and 1 during their journey through the jungle.