A Dog Story

Here’s the next in the “Sunday Story” series.  There’s no political point here, it’s just a story about folks who find lost dogs.

Lost Dogs

If you’ve read many of these “Our America” essays, you know dogs emerge as a reoccurring theme. We’ve currently got four rescues here at the house, and Jennifer (my wife) is deeply involved in an all-volunteer group called Lost Pet Recovery (LPR). They’re folks who spend most of their time trying to get lost dogs back to their families, and wandering dogs to safety. It sounds simple – just catch the dog. But there’s so much more that goes into it.

So the first thing you need to know about finding lost dogs, is it is NOT the same as finding lost children.  Even though we think of our dogs as our children, they will not respond the same way as our kids lost in the woods might.  When a child is lost in the woods, we gather all of our friends, we find someone to look from “the sky” with a drone, we scour the countryside calling out for them.  We assume (rightly so) that the child wants to be found.  It’s kind of a “village goes after Frankenstein thing”, think torches and crowds, but only in a good way.

Flight Mode

But after a dog has been “out” for a couple of days, they are in flight mode.  They are running, running from anything that generates fear.  And everything, and particularly everybody generates fear – often times even “Mom and Dad” and brothers and sisters.  One of the coolest parts of rescuing dogs is the moment when the dog “remembers” who “Mom or Dad”  is.  We’ve all seen the reunion videos of dogs welcoming their returning soldier home from a long tour.  And that part is really cool, and it does happen even for the “rescued” dog.  But it doesn’t usually happen when they are “out” running.

Once a dog is out, there might be a short time when calling for them will help.  But a dog also knows they might be “in trouble” for running – so even then it can’t be “Fido get back here!”  It’s got to be calm, quiet, “…hey Fido buddy, I’ve got a cheeseburger for you – smell it?”  But when you gather all your human friends and send them out into the field to find your lost canine, it’s more than likely that you are driving him or her even farther away, especially if they’ve been “out” more than a day or so.  They are scared, and all of those strange people yelling their name is going to make then even more scared.  So they’ll run, and they can outrun you.

That’s when you need my friends:  the folks at Lost Pet Recovery.

Berne 

The area around Alum Creek Drive and Livingston Avenue is not considered the “best” part of Columbus, Ohio.  It’s mostly industrial, and from time to time in the night you might hear “shots fired”.  The area makes the evening news for shootings and robberies more than for the real efforts of the Southside Civic Association.  But the owner of one of the companies in the area noticed that a Bernese Mountain Dog had taken up “residence” in the small industrial park sandwiched between Alum Creek Drive and I-70 headed downtown. 

He, through a friend of a friend, let LPR know.  And Jenn was on the job.

Jenn went down and “learned the Berne”.  She talked to the folks in the industrial park, and followed the dog tracks in the snow.  And she found out the Berne was bedding down in a storage shed on one of the properties.  In fact, Berne had a friend, Bob, the owner of one of the businesses.  He was not just feeding Berne, he was grilling beef and chicken for her.  She had a “bed”, straw blankets and such, in the back of the shed.  She came and went as she pleased, and though she wouldn’t allow contact, she definitely had “ her place” down on Alum Creek Drive.

This was in January, middle of winter here in Ohio.  But Bernese Mountain Dogs originated in Berne, Switzerland (my first mistake – I always thought they were Burmese from Burma, kind of a Himalayan thing – wrong) and the cold is what they were bred for.  And while Berne had a “place” it still was a cold, tough world out there, and everyone wanted Berne to be safe.  In fact, Bob wanted to make Berne his own.  The two even got to the point the Berne would take food from his hand.  But when he’d reach out, she’d bolt.

But she kept coming back.

Trappers

The first move was to put a camera and a “trap” in the shed.  The camera is a deer-cam, triggered by motion and transmits to Jenn’s phone.  It’s got night vision as well, so whenever anything moved in the shed, Jenn was notified.  And the trap – well it’s six feet long by two and a half feet tall by two feet wide, with a spring door that closes if Berne steps on the trip plate.  Jenn and Bob placed food leading into the trap, and of course, the “mother-load” of food at the back past the trip plate.  Any self-respecting and hungry dog would walk right in and get the food – and get trapped.

But Berne was trap-wise.  She knew to get all the food leading in, and to reach just far enough into the trap to take the scraps in the front.  But no matter what was in the back, she wouldn’t go.

This went on for a week or more, with Berne almost literally waving at the camera as she went by.  Jenn hung out down in the parking lots of the buildings off of Alum Creek Drive, and began to get a sense of the dog’s pattern.  She didn’t go far, and she didn’t cross the busy roads.  There was a small wood, a little cemetery, and the big storage lots.  She circled through her territory checking everything a few times a day.  At nighttime usually she headed for the storage shed, ignored the trap, and bedded down in the back.

Bob had to leave town for a week – so Jenn set up an alternate site to feed Berne.  And it was another week of trying different foods (from McDoubles to KFC Bowls and Chicken Strips) but Berne still waved at the camera, sniffed around the trap, and ate the teaser pieces along the edge.  She even barked at the peanut-butter covered bone lashed to the back.  She’d eat everything around, but she wasn’t going in.

Sleeping in a Truck

Meanwhile, my wife was sleeping in a truck in an empty parking lot off Alum Creek Drive, night after night.  LPR volunteers support each other. As one “trapper” gets sleep in the truck, others, spread all over the state, are watching the cameras for her.  When Berne approached, they’d text or call.  Jenn was far enough away from the trap that the sound of the phone wouldn’t disturb the dog, but would wake her up.  But instead of catching Berne, it was mostly to release the feral cats that lived in the area.  And those cats weren’t happy about the catch part – nor particularly grateful for release either.

There are several trappers in LPR, and they often collaborate on how best to catch their dog.  Maybe grilled (instead of KFC fried) food would work.  Jenn and I took our portable gas grill out to the parking lot, set up a little table, and made Sunday evening dinner.  We had our usual ribeye steak and green beans.  But we cooked another steak (not the ribeye) and some sausage for Berne.  We filled the small woods with the odor of steak and sausage, then placed her portion in the back of the trap.

We packed up and pulled off to eat our dinner in the truck, waiting for Berne to show.  It didn’t take long, we just finished our dinner when she came out of the woods and around the trap to the back.  You could sense her frustration – steak and sausage, right there in front of her.  And she voiced it, barking at the trap, sniffing around, but still refused to go in.

Panel Trap

So after a second week, Jenn, Don “the boss” of LPR, and Kim from Cincinnati got together to change the equation.  The trap wasn’t going to work.  But there is a different kind of trap, a “panel” trap.  It’s actually several sections of 6×6 pieces of fencing, lashed together to make a room.  In the front there’s a door, with a really long rope on it.  It’s a simple concept:  put the bait in the back, wait for the dog to go in, then pull the rope so the door slams shut.

But there’s no automatic part of this panel trap.  It’s up to Jenn, parked about three hundred feet away, in the dark and cold of the now-February winter snow, to pull the rope and slam the door.  And the only way she knows to pull the rope, is a grainy night-shot picture on an IPhone screen.  And there’s always a delay, of a few seconds – so while the picture might show the dog in the back, that’s very recent history, not necessarily the present.

They left the door open for a couple of days, to see if Berne would get in the habit of going in. And she did. It was President’s Day weekend, the weather forecast was looking bad – but it was time to “save” Berne. Jenn was hiding in the truck on Monday evening. She knew Berne usually came around 7 pm, so she turned the truck off at 6:30. It was a damn cold night, but she didn’t want anything to spook Berne away. Kim came up from Cincinnati to surprise Jenn, and was in a different part of the complex, watching Berne heading towards the trap.

Berne appeared and wandered into the trap.  Kim could see it, but Jenn was waiting for the camera picture.  Then Jenn got the text message from Kim:  “GO-GO-GO”.  She pulled the rope, the door slammed shut.  Berne was safe.

Polly

Jenn and Kim went to the trap, calling softly to Berne.  She huddled in the corner, scared, but Kim went in and almost immediately Berne was leaning on her.  Jenn joined them, and began to calm Berne down.   Bob was going to take care of Berne, and quickly drove up to the trap.   Don came too, and they put a “slip-lead” on Berne, and got her in Bob’s truck.  They then scanned Berne for a chip, and found that she had one.  Berne went home with Bob – pictures from that evening showed a relaxed Berne sleeping at the foot of Bob’s bed.

The chip reads out a number, which links to the “chip” company. Although the chip wasn’t registered, the company was still able to trace it back to the owner. (Hint: register your dog’s chip and keep it current. It saves a lot of time locating the owner and getting your dog home). They had an owner for Berne, and Jenn called.

Berne was lost from her home near Mansfield, almost sixty miles away, back in April.  She’d been “out” ten months, and her real name was Polly.  She was a “pure-bred” Bernese Mountain Dog; originally purchased for breeding.  But the owners had left the breeding business.  They felt that the internet had made it too dangerous for the dogs, they couldn’t “vet” the owners personally the way they wanted to.  So they had Polly and her sister, and they were living on several acres when Polly slipped away.

Bob and Berne, now Polly, were bonding, so it was hard to give her back. But it turned out that the folks near Mansfield loved her too, and Jenn now talks with them on a regular basis. Polly is back at home, happy and healthy with her sister, recovering from her adventure in the “big city”. And Jenn and LPR are on the lookout for a “rescue” for Bob.

There’s always another dog.  In the five days around when Jenn trapped Berne, LPR recovered seven other dogs across Ohio. Almost every night, there’s a LPR volunteer sleeping in a pickup truck, or staring at a computer screen, waiting on a dog to get safe. The work goes on.

Want to know more about LPR?  Click here for the Facebook Page.