LONGVIEW — After more than a year, Shirley is finally home.
Longview residents Chloe Wheeler and Jon-Erik Hegstad were reunited with their beloved shepherd mix Shirley last week with the help of a Clark County nonprofit. They had last seen her in October 2019.
“I’m still kind of in a state of disbelief,” Hegstad said Friday. “We have our dog back.”
“It was definitely incredible,” Wheeler said. “I thought I would be a big blubbering mess, but I felt so much relief and closure because up until Saturday night we had no idea what happened to her. I was grieving a year later. It feels so good being able to find her.”
Most runaway pets are returned within five to 10 days, so finding Shirley after 15 months was out of the ordinary, said Keri-Lyn Jakubs, founder of I Paw’d It Forward.
“Everything just worked the way it’s supposed to work,” she said.
Shirley joined Wheeler’s family when her parents adopted the shepherd mix along with the pup’s sister Laverne at 5-months-old from a pet rescue center in Mississippi in 2010 when the Wheeler family lived in Connecticut.
In 2014, the family moved to Washington and four years later, Chloe Wheeler and Shirley moved in with Hegstad, Wheeler’s now-fiance.
The couple said Shirley is a mellow and laid-back dog at home but was always skittish around strangers. She doesn’t like to play fetch but enjoys watching Hegstad mow the lawn and do other yardwork, he said.
Hegstad said for about two months before she ran away in October 2019, he was training Shirley to be off leash. He took her to Ridgefield, where he was painting a family member’s house and allowed her to roam the property.
While he doesn’t know for sure, Hegstad said he thinks the day before she went missing Shirley wandered into coyote territory. It’s possible the coyotes then caught her scent and left a trail for her to follow the next day, he said.
After she went missing, Hegstad and Wheeler searched the area for Shirley, put up fliers, posted about her in lost pet Facebook groups and filed a report with the Humane Society for Southwest Washington.
The couple didn’t see or hear anything about their lost dog until Jakubs with I Paw’d It Forward called them on Jan. 30.
“I was definitely shocked,” Wheeler said. “I was hopeful but since it had been so long a part of me was afraid to get my hopes up. When I saw the pictures, I could have bet my next paycheck it was her, but I thought my brain could have just showed me what I wanted to see.”
“Seeing her again was hard emotionally,” Hegstad said. “It was weird mix of being ecstatic and feeling the guilt and the pain of her being outside for more than a year and the trauma she must have experienced.”
Jakubs said she went looking for Shirley after the Battle Ground animal control officer, Brent Gullickson, had reached out after calls about a “feral, wild dog” living in the greenspace near Marshall Community Park. A nearby resident said she had been feeding the dog for several months.
When Jakubs went to the area the following night, she said she spotted Shirley between midnight and 1 a.m. and recognized her. She set up some traps, which the dog tripped by pushing on them from the outside. Jakubs then made a custom trap using a large kennel and called Wheeler and Hegstad.
“Usually we don’t tell the owners until the dog is trapped because they could get overexcited and push the dog out of the area,” Jakubs said.
When the couple went to the neighborhood on Sunday, Jan. 31, they saw Shirley, got excited, jumped out of the car and called out to her, everything they’re not supposed to do, Jakubs said.
“One thing long-term missing dogs have in common is they won’t recognize you unless they’re within a five-to-10-foot range and if you’re calling to them they will bolt because they associate it with something negative,” she said.
Jakubs went out alone the next night, and Shirley again tripped the trap but wasn’t caught. The following day Wheeler and Hegstad came back to Battle Ground to help put up fliers and go door-to-door to find out who else had been feeding their dog.
Wheeler said she walked along the tree line where Shirley was hiding and talked to her in a normal tone of voice.
“She sat out in the pouring rain for almost 30 minutes talking gently talking to this wetland,” Hegstad said. “That gave her (Shirley) enough time to sneak up behind us and check us out.”
Wheeler then coaxed Shirley to them by continuing to talk to her and tossing pieces of summer sausage to her “like Hansel and Gretel.” When Shirley got close enough her owners grabbed her and put her in the car.
“It was pretty awesome to watch for sure,” Jakubs said.
Hegstad and Wheeler said their dog was comfortable with them almost immediately but took a couple days to fully relax. Hegstad said he’s noticed Shirley is now nervous when cars drive by when they are out on walks.
It’ll likely take three to four months for Shirley to fully adjust, and her owners said they are going to be careful from now on.
Wheeler said Jakubs went “above and beyond” to capture Shirley by setting traps with roasted chickens and liquid smoke to entice her, as well as keeping them updated and engaging the community.
“She’s so knowledgeable and had so much experience,” Wheeler said. “It was really special to see someone we don’t know at all caring so much about us.”
Jakubs has run I Paw’d It Forward for 10 years. The nonprofit is a search and rescue for lost and feral pets, mostly dogs, she said.
A growing number of runaway dogs she helps with are rescues adopted from out-of-state as strays, Jakubs said.
For the first 30 to 45 days after adopting a former stray, owners should try not to introduce the dog to anything new and to focus on spending time at home with them, Jakubs said. Setting a routine is also important, along with using a “martingale” collar or harness that helps prevent the dog from pulling out of it, she said.
All these things help create and strengthen the bond between the dog and owner, she said.
“That bond is going to be important because otherwise they’re not going to come back to you,” Jakubs said.
People who see a stray dog should first take a photo and then call animal control or another professional, and in most cases, shouldn’t chase after the animal, Jakubs said.
In Shirley’s case, Jakubs said her owners did everything right.
“I was pretty proud of the owners to come back from the initial urge to call out” to Shirley, she said. “It’s so hard and they did a great job. Fifteen months later and she’s home and happy.”
Hegstad and Wheeler said they’re grateful to Jakubs and the Battle Ground residents that fed Shirley when she was on the run, and they’re happy to have her home.
“I feel like I’ve redeemed myself in her eyes,” Wheeler said. “I felt we failed her. That we’ve been able to get her back and she’ll get to spend the rest of her life with us is wonderful.”
