Earlier this year, dog rescuer Jasmine Lawson was outside of a Walmart in Birmingham, Alabama, when she saw a dog’s little head pop up at the back of the parking lot. She quickly realized that the dog was a stray, and when she learned more about his backstory,
she made it her mission to trap him and bring him home.
“I found out he had been out there for at least a year or two,” Lawson said in a video for The Dodo. “And from that day forward, that’s where the hunt started … I knew I had to rescue him.”
Lawson could tell that the dog was a bit skittish, so she knew it might be a bit challenging to trap him. But she figured that with the help of some trail cameras and an automatic trap, she could get it done fairly quickly.
“I thought I would have him in, like, three days,” Lawson said.
But a few days into Lawson’s quest to catch the dog, she realized it was going to be a little more complicated than she’d anticipated. One of her trail cameras had captured footage of the pup, whom she named Wally, going into one of her traps, getting spooked and running away from it before it could close.
“He went into that, the gate hit his little booty, and he backed right out,” Lawson said.
Frustrated by Wally outsmarting the small trap, she set up a larger, more heavy-duty trap, hoping it would do the trick. But as soon as Wally walked into the trap, he heard it click behind him and he ran away again.
“He was outsmarting me left and right,” Lawson said.
Lawson decided that the only path forward was to get him comfortable with the trap without actually using it. For 40 days, she left the trap wide open and left food inside it daily so that he could get used to being inside it without getting spooked.
“On day 70, he fully went into the trap and he was eating chicken,” Lawson said. “And something in my heart told me tonight’s the night.”
That night, Lawson activated the trap for the first time in over a month. She stayed awake until the wee hours of the morning, when finally, at 5 a.m., she saw Wally go into the trap and the door close behind him.
“I bolted out of here,” Lawson said.
Lawson rushed over to the trap as quickly as possible and brought him straight home with her. After a month of fostering him, she decided she couldn’t bear to part with him and made him a permanent member of the family.
Wally is so friendly and outgoing now that it’s hard to believe he made Lawson chase after him for 71 days. But every time she sees him roll over for a belly rub or go for a swim, she knows the whole saga was worth it.
