Many of us talk about our dogs as members of our family, how they’re just like our children. But when it comes right down to it, how many would be willing to risk their lives for their pets? How many would actually die for their furbabies?

Forty-three-year-old Pennsylvania resident Terry Verner was willing. Earlier this week, Verner died in a burning mobile home while trying to save his two dogs from a fiery death.

Verner and his cousin, Corey Pyle, were living together in the mobile home. He woke up somewhere around 2 a.m. to find that the home was on fire, and he woke his cousin up. Both men made it out of the mobile home, safe from the fire. Everything was completely ducky, as they say, and at that point, Verner and Pyle might have just lived happily ever after, albeit minus one mobile home.

Then Verner heard his two dogs yelping, still in the house. Although he was safe, he went back inside to save the dogs, and he never came out.

Armstrong Deputy Coroner Brian Myers said, “He was found about four to five feet just inside the door. I’m not sure if he was coming out or going in. I think he was just going in. I think the flames were just that intense at the time.”

The county hasn’t given an official cause for the fire, but Corey Pyle thinks that it came from a wood burner that Verner used to heat the mobile home.

“He was just a good, caring guy,” Pyle said in a television interview. “He loved kids, animals, everything.”

News reports from United Press International and CBS Pittsburgh don’t say whether the dogs made it out.

Pyle got to see that love in his cousin’s life, and the rest of the world can certainly see it in his death. Dogster offers our condolences to Pyle and the rest of Terry Verner’s family.

Via United Press International and CBS Pittsburgh

Top photo: Detroit Firefighters, by Shutterstock.