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A pit bull saved a woman from a fire in a Long Island home Friday, barking to alert her as flames began to engulf the house.

Then the woman returned the favor.

Jackie Bonasera said she was drying her hair in an upstairs bathroom of a home in East Norwich when she heard the dog barking. She ran downstairs and saw the flames on the side of her garage, according to NBC Channel 4 in New York

She ran out of the house, but then returned to save her dog, a pit bull named Cain.

“I’m like, ‘He saved my life, I have to save his,’” Bonasera said.

“So I just put my robe over my face and I ran back in and I grabbed the dog and then I stood out here and I watched my house burn,” she said.

Bonasera believes she would have been trapped upstairs if the dog, named Cain, hadn’t alerted her to the fire. Her daughter, Alexus Stallworth, called Cain  “the town hero.”

More than 70 firefighters fought the fire, the cause of which hasn’t been determined.

The movie based on the story of a dog whose mistreatment led to changes in North Carolina’s animal cruelty laws had its world premiere in Winston-Salem over the weekend.

“Susie’s Hope” kicked off the RiverRun International Film Festival Saturday, and if you missed that showing there are two more — Tuesday at 3 p.m. at Hanesbrands Theatre, and Saturday at 4 p.m. in the Main Theatre at UNC School of the Arts.

Susie, a pit bull mix, became a poster puppy for fighting animal abuse when she was found burned, beaten and close to death in Greensboro’s Greenfield Park in 2009.

The woman who adopted her, Donna Lawrence, was once a pit bull victim.

Lawrence began feeding a dog near her home in High Point whose owners had moved away. After several days, the dog attacked her, latching on to her left leg and going for her throat before she was able to push it away and seek help. The wound left her bone exposed, and she’d receive 45 stitches.

She didn’t blame the animal: “I blame the owners who turned their dog into what it was,” she writes on the movie’s website. “Their neglect and abuse made their dog fearful and territorial.”

The attack left Lawrence, a long-time dog lover, with a fear of dogs and nightmares, even after her physical recovery.

“Then one day I met Susie, and she changed my life forever,” Lawrence writes. “So now you can see Susie and I shared something in common: she was a pit bull mix that had been had been tortured by a human and I was viciously attacked by a pit bull just a few months before we met. Our similar experiences allowed us to go from being victims to living victorious lives. I forgave the dog for my wrongful attack, and Susie forgave the human for hers.”

Susie’s previous owner had beaten the dog, and set her on fire, because she licked his baby’s face.

She was found with second- and third-degree burns on 60 percent of her body, a broken jaw, her teeth knocked out and her ears all but burned away. Her wounds were infested with maggots and she’d been surviving by eating sticks and drinking from mud puddles.

Lawrence and Susie would go on to foster awareness of animal abuse and push for increased penalties for the crime.  Susie would become a therapy dog and a Canine Good Citizen.

In 2010, the state legislature passed Susie’s Law, which increased the penalty for anyone who “maliciously” kills an animal by “intentional deprivation of necessary sustenance, and raised the offense from a misdemeanor to a felony. Susie’s abuser received a sentence of 4-6 months in jail for burning personal property and a 4-5 month suspended sentence for animal cruelty.

Susie — though a puppy portrays her in her younger years — plays herself in the movie.

Filmed locally, the movie has some actors you might recognize – Emmanuelle Vaugier, best known as Charlie’s ex-fiance Mia on the CBS comedy “Two and a Half Men,” plays Lawrence; Burgess Jenkins (“Remember the Titans”) plays Roy Lawrence; and, in our favorite bit of casting,  Jon Provost (Timmy from the TV show “Lassie”) plays state Sen. Don Vaughan, who sponsored the bill that became Susie’s Law.

(Photo: Courtesy of Susieshope.com)

“Twilight Saga” star Ashley Greene’s West Hollywood condominium was gutted in a fire Friday morning that killed one of her two dogs.

Three people sustained minor injuries, a L.A. County Fire Department spokesperson told Us Weekly, and one of Greene’s two toy fox terriers – though reports aren’t clear whether it was Marlo or Theo — was killed.

TMZ reported that Greene, her boyfriend and her brother were sleeping when a candle caught the living room sofa on fire.

Seeing the smoke, they fled. The two men ran back in an attempt to save the dogs.

Firefighters wrapped the deceased dog’s body in a sheet and gave it to one of the group.

Police in new York hope a surveillance video will help them find three men who tossed a bag containing a dog and four puppies in a secluded industrial area and then set it on fire.

Just after midnight on Monday, a van stopped on 91st Street near Ditmas Avenue in Canarsie, police said. Three men got out and tossed a large black garbage bag near a trash bin.

Four dogs were later found inside the bag, WABC reported.

“I couldn’t stand to look at it. I don’t even like to talk about it. It was a horrible thing to do to a dog,” said Sammy Omar, a beverage distributor who found the remains. “It was torture. The puppies were all burned up.”

Investigators are not sure if the dog were alive or dead when the bag was dumped and set on fire.

An ASPCA spokesperson says the dogs were taken to Bergh Memorial Animal Hospital in Manhattan for  a necropsy.

With December just around the corner, brace yourself for some doggie Christmas miracle stories.

Dogs, of course, do amazing things all year round, but there’s a tendency this time of year for those stories to get told more often, and generally in a somewhat breathless and hyped up way that gives Christmas, rather than smart dogs, all the credit.

While we’ll hold off on proclaiming it a miracle, how this little dog survived a house fire in Tennessee is pretty amazing.

Abigail apparently took shelter in a crawl space beneath the floor, and, though the house was 90 percent consumed by flames, managed to survive long enough to be pulled out by a firefighter.

“You never see a house that has fully burned to the ground — and 90 percent of the home is gone, I mean it’s up in smoke –- and something lived,” firefighter Pat Boone told News Channel 11

Boone, who pulled the dog out, said firefighters were calling her Miracle, until they learned her name was Abigail.

Her owners, who lost everything else in the fire, were thankful that Abigail was found. “Houses can be replaced, clothes can be replaced; family and animals can’t,” one family member said.

Boone said community members are stepping forward to help the family. An anonymous donor is covering all of the veterinary expenses for Abigail, who’s expected to be fine.

Sixty-five chained dogs, believed to be part of a dogfighting operation, were seized on Thanksgiving in Tennessee after firefighters discovered them when responding to a brush fire.

The dogs — mostly pit bulls and beagles — were removed from the property in Ashland City by Cheatham County Animal Control and the Animal Rescue Corps, a non-profit animal protection organization.

“We believe this is the largest dog fighting rescue in Tennessee history,” said ARC president Scotlund Haisley. He described the conditions the dogs were living in as “the worst I have ever seen at a dogfighting operation in my 22 year career in animal protection.”

The dogs were underweight, without food and fresh water and some had sores covering their bodies, officials said.

Animal control officials identified dog fighting equipment, such as a treadmill, fighting pen, and a spring pole used for strengthening dogs’ jaws.

All the animals on the property were taken to an emergency shelter outside of Nashville, where they will be assessed before being transported to rescue centers around the country.

Also taking part in the rescue were New Leash on Life, a shelter in Lebanon, Tenn.; Agape Animal Rescue out of Nashville; the Nashville Zoo and the Tennessee State Highway Patrol.

(Photos: Animal Rescue Corps)

Sheriff’s officials say a bassett hound found severely burned in a ravine in Ventura County had been doused with lighter fluid and set on fire.

The Ventura County Sheriff’s Department was asking for the public’s help Tuesday in finding whoever was responsible. The dog — who was three years old and named Buddy — died from his injuries.

A crated dog was set on fire Friday night in West Brandywine Township, Pa., , the Chester County SPCA reports.

The dog was the second to be found fatally burned in Chester County in just over three months.

Wagontown Fire Chief Todd Ziegler was driving on Manor Road about 8 p.m. Friday, when he stopped to investigate what looked like a brushfire near Route 340. He discovered the burning body of a dog in a  crate and called his department, which put out the fire.

A necropsy on the dog was planned at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine at the New Bolton Center in Kennett Square, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

On June 9, the charred remains of a Yorkshire terrier mix between 3 and 5 years old was found in the 300 block of Coates Street in Coatesville. The 15- to 20-pound dog had been burned, then placed in a trash bag.

A $5,000 reward has been offered for information leading to an arrest and conviction in that case, Chester County SPCA spokesman Rich Britton said Saturday.

Tips about both attacks can be reported anonymously by calling the SPCA at 610-692-6113, ext. 213, or by sending an e-mail to cruelty@ccspca.org.

A mother dog was photographed rescuing her litter of puppies from a house fire in Chile.

In the photos, a German shepherd mix named “Amanda” carries five of her 10-day old pups in her mouth, dropping each onto a fire truck as flames ravaged her owner’s home Thursday in Santa Rosa de Temuco, Chile.

The fire, at the home of Omar Torres, the father of boxer Tumbaito Jose Torres, was apparently the result of a car bomb explosion.

The puppies were transported to La Clínica Veterinaria Altamira where four are recuperating with their mother. 

One of the puppies died on Thursday night after suffering burns to his abdomen and mouth.

Veterinarian Felipe Lara told the Chilean newspaper Soy Temuco that Amanda defended her puppies when they tried to take them away for treatment.

(Photos: Associated Press /Jose Monsalve, Diario El Austral de La Araucaria)

The National Fire Dog Monument, a memorial to accelerant-detecting dogs, is scheduled to arrive today in Washington.

Over the weekend, the sculpture stopped in Bloomington, about halfway through  a 12-city, 2,000-mile tour that began in Denver, where it was created. The tour is sponsored by State Farm Insurance and the American Humane Association.

“From Ashes to Answers” is a sculpture of a firefighter looking down at his Labrador retriever. Its destination, and forever home, will be Fire Station No. 3 in Washington.

You can learn more about the monument, which acknowledges the work of accelerant-detecting dogs used in arson investigations, at the monument’s website.

The life-sized, 450-pound statue was conceived by Jerry Means, an arson investigator from Colorado, and sculpted by Denver-area firefighter Austin Weishel.

“The work that the dogs do really inspired me to create something where they can be recognized and so, four years ago, we started raising money,” Means told The Pantagraph. “We raised over $100,000 and are bringing recognition to these dogs who are so important in finding out who or what is responsible for fires.”

Weishel, a 22-year-old, self-taught sculptor, spent more than 1,500 hours completing the project.

“It’s something I enjoy doing and being a firefighter myself, I made sure I took the time and effort to get every detail exactly right,” he said.

Photo: Sculptor Austin Weishel of Colorado and Bruce Abbott, a member of the Bloomington Township Fire Department, next to the sculpture; by Lori Ann Cook-Neisler / The Pantagraph)