The other day, Kristen, a resident of Fort Worth, Texas, was scrolling through a local moms group on her phone when a post caught her attention. A woman in the group had spotted an emaciated dog trapped in a nearby spillway.
Kristen happens to be the president
of Cowtown Friends, a nonprofit organization that raises money for Forth Worth Animal Care & Control. So as soon as she saw the post, she knew she wanted to help. She reached out to her friend Stacy, a local animal rescuer, and they immediately drove to the spillway to try to rescue the dog.
“She was literally stuck,” Kristen told The Dodo. “She had fallen into it, and there was no way for her to get out.”
As Kristen and Stacy assessed the situation, they found that both the dog’s condition and the state of the spillway were worse than they’d expected. In their decades of animal rescue work, they’d never seen a dog who was so severely emaciated. As Stacy made her way over to the dog, she had to navigate around thick mud and snakes.
“The sludge is probably a little below my knee, and I’m just trooping through because she’s scared to death,” Stacy told The Dodo.
Stacy and the dog played cat-and-mouse for a while, but eventually, she was able to catch her and transport her to the shelter. Two days later, the spillway the dog had been trapped in flooded after a heavy rain. If the dog had still been stuck down there when it flooded, she wouldn’t have made it.
“She would’ve died down there,” Kristen said. “She would’ve drowned.”
As the dog was settling into the shelter, a miracle happened. The staff scanned her microchip, saw it was registered and was actually able to get in touch with her owner.
“The ACO calls me, and she was like, ‘You’ll never guess, but her owner has been looking for her for the past two and a half months,’” Kristen said.
Kristen and Stacy learned that the dog, named Sadie, had escaped from her owner’s house while he was out of town. He’d been relentlessly searching for her every day since then, but as people kept chasing Sadie, she was pushed farther and farther from home. By the time her rescuers found her, she was 8 miles from her house.
“He would drive around every night, every day,” Stacy said.
This story serves as a great reminder of the importance of registering your pets’ microchips and keeping their information up to date. Additionally, it’s never a bad idea to take extra precautions when you’re going out of town, like attaching an AirTag to your pet’s collar.
As soon as Sadie sniffed her owner, she recognized him. After months away from home, she was finally safe and with her favorite person again. Sadie’s dad has been carefully following the vets’ instructions and getting his beloved pup back on her feet again.
“She’s gained weight, and she’s thriving again,” Kristen said.
