Stella is a lucky dog.

The boxer was trapped inside a burning building Saturday morning in Santa Monica, Calif., when firefighters found her and brought her back to life, KTLA reports.

“This little guy, he was tucked back behind a mattress pad, stuck against the wall,” Captain Jeff Furrows of the Santa Monica Fire Department said, not realizing the dog was a female. “But he was obviously trying to get away; that’s what his instincts told him to do.”

Firefighters were able to grab Stella and bring her out of the building. They tried to revive her by putting an oxygen mask over her nose for 15 minutes.

“It started to come around a little bit and color in its mouth and eyes started improving,” Batt. Chief Mark Bridges said of the dog’s recovery. A crowd watched as rescue workers resuscitated the dog.

"Everybody got excited. It's a dog, man's best friend," a boy told KTLA. A woman confessed, "I got very emotional."

Stella’s owner was not home at the time of the incident, and the dog was taken to a nearby animal hospital to recover.

But Stella isn’t the first pooch to be saved by firefighters this month. In Dallas, firefighters saved a family dog from a burning home and used fresh oxygen to resuscitate him. “The physiology of a dog and a human is basically the same," assistant fire chief Ed Hotz told NBC News. "The best method of resuscitating them is to get good oxygen flow."

He adds, "One of the most rewarding things we do is when we're able to pull somebody out of a house, or a pet out of a house, and resuscitate them, and make a difference in their life."

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