There’s a reason dogs have earned a reputation as “man’s best friend,” a notion that’s supported by plenty of stories where an animal’s devotion was responsible for saving someone in need. Now, we have a new entry to that particular canon courtesy of the Very Good Boy who helped save his owner’s life following a scary incident in the Swiss Alps.

If I asked you to paint a mental picture of a dog coming to someone’s rescue on a snowy mountain, you’d probably envision a St. Bernard (or a member of a similarly hefty breed) bravely plowing through powdery drifts with a barrel hanging around its neck.

That cliché image can be traced back to the dogs that first arrived at a monastery situated along the Great St. Bernard Pass, a nearly 50-mile stretch in the Western Alps near the border of Switzerland and Italy, toward the middle of the 17th century.

The canines were initially trained to clear a path for the monks who needed to traverse the snowy route, but they also emerged as an invaluable resource when it came to detecting and saving travelers who ended up buried in the snow (the aforementioned barrels filled with nips of booze for warmth are apocryphal, but the dogs were able to provide heat of their own by laying on top of people in peril).

Those saviors were significantly larger than another dog that recently managed to help orchestrate a rescue toward the other end of Switzerland last Friday, as The Guardian reports a helicopter that was dispatched to track down a man who called for help were able to extract him from a perilous situation after spotting the tiny companion that had stuck by his side.

The outlet says an unnamed hiker had decided to take a stroll with what appears to be a papillon based on the pictures shared by Air Zermatt, the helicopter company that staged a search-and-rescue mission after the man sent out a call for help on a walkie talkie after falling through a snow bridge on a glacier outside the village of  Saas-Fee on the afternoon of July 4th.

The team that was dispatched to the location close to 10,500 feet above sea level initially had trouble spotting the approximately 25-foot crevice where the man was trapped, but that changed after a spotter noticed a small dog posting up on the edge of the fissure where his owner was discovered before being successfully extracted.

The man was taken to a hospital for treatment along with the dog that will presumably get all the treats he desires for the rest of his life.

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