GILROY
– When Bonnie Bailey’s small Shetland sheepdog escaped more than
a month ago, she feared it had little chance of surviving.
Lady Louise, as the 2-year-old puppy is called, had lived a
sheltered life. There is a six-foot fence around Bailey’s backyard,
and Bailey said Louise was never let outside those bounds without a
leash.
GILROY – When Bonnie Bailey’s small Shetland sheepdog escaped more than a month ago, she feared it had little chance of surviving.
Lady Louise, as the 2-year-old puppy is called, had lived a sheltered life. There is a six-foot fence around Bailey’s backyard, and Bailey said Louise was never let outside those bounds without a leash.
Bailey and Louise live in Pacific Grove, near Monterey, but the dog escaped in Gilroy on Feb. 21 (a Saturday) when Bailey brought it to Glen View Elementary School, where she is a second-grade teacher.
After 33 days of running loose on the suburban fringe and eating out of garbage bins, Louise was reunited with Bailey Tuesday morning. Taking a tip from animal shelter workers, Bailey got her dog back using a cage trap baited with Lady Louise’s favorite food – liverwurst.
“To me, it’s a miracle,” Bailey said Wednesday. “She didn’t get eaten by a coyote or a mountain lion, and she managed to stay alive – and she was crossing those big streets all the time.
“Saint Francis of Assisi was working overtime,” Bailey added, referring to the patron saint of animals.
Louise’s fur was loaded with ticks and burs, and the 18-pound, 13-inch-long dog “drank water like a camel” upon returning home, but otherwise she was quite healthy.
“She actually gained two ounces in that month, and here I thought she was starving to death,” Bailey said.
Bailey is a second-grade teacher at Gilroy’s Glen View Elementary School, and it was when she brought Louise into work on Feb. 21 that the dog escaped out one of the school doors.
“She had slipped her collar, so she had no ID, and within a half-hour we got a call saying she was weaving in and out of heavy traffic on First Street by Pizza Hut and Safeway,” Bailey said of Louise. “She was totally in foreign situations. It was just horrible having her out there and not knowing what was happening to her.”
Bailey placed an advertisement in The Dispatch for Louise and notified Gilroy police, as well as the San Martin Animal Shelter and Sheltie Rescue, a service of the Shetland Sheepdog Club of Northern California. She made up flyers and posted them in Gilroy pet stores and anywhere else she thought people might have seen her dog. She began walking the Uvas Creek Trail and asking joggers and walkers if they had seen her beloved pet. Other Glen View teachers also walked the trail, calling Louise’s name.
After nearly three weeks of persistently searching, however, Bailey had nothing. She was impressed by the heartfelt concern shown by strangers, she said, but they hadn’t seen Louise.
A five-acre vegetation fire alongside Uvas Creek on March 11 may have flushed Louise out of hiding. Four people reported seeing a dog matching the description on the flyer running from the creek bed toward a Hecker Pass vineyard the evening of the fire. Then a construction night watchman said he saw such a dog a couple of nights later near the intersection of First Street and Santa Teresa Boulevard.
After that, Bailey started sitting out in her car all night in that area, looking for Louise.
She didn’t find her pet, but one woman said she saw a similar dog shortly after midnight Friday. Another person reported seeing it at Third Street and Santa Teresa. When Bailey got there, she found paw prints she was sure were Louise’s, but no Louise.
At 4:30 a.m. Saturday, a city police officer reported seeing a dog like Louise jumping out of a garbage bin behind Mama Mia’s Italian restaurant, in the shopping center on First Street at Westwood Drive. Bailey said she herself saw Louise in that area an hour later, but the dog was too scared to approach her.
Bailey had mapped out the sightings and figured her pet was sleeping during the day in an orchard off First Street and coming out at night to scavenge for food. On the advice of Sheltie Rescue and the San Martin Animal Shelter, she obtained a cage trap and set it Monday night.
A teacher friend from Glen View, Karen Oneto, offered to check the trap every few hours. After releasing a feral cat from the cage and rebaiting, Oneto called Bailey at 6 a.m. Tuesday to say they had Louise.
Bailey was just getting ready to leave home for work, and she came right down.
“(Louise) recognized me right away and just did a dance of joy,” Bailey said.
The doting owner took her pet to Westwood Animal Hospital, a veterinarian around the corner, where about 100 ticks were removed, Bailey said.
“(Louise) was being their food dish,” she said.
Because so many burs had attached themselves to the dog, the vet decided to shave its fur.
Bailey also had the vet insert an identifying microchip under her dog’s skin, a procedure many vets now recommend. With the chip in place, she said, animal-control officials can use a special scanner to identify the animal’s owners even when it is not wearing a collar and tag.
To doubly reinforce the dog’s identity, Bailey said she also has replaced Louise’s collar with a halter, which circles the dog’s chest and legs and which it can’t wriggle out of.
Bailey said she began to lose faith after her canine friend went so long without being seen, but the sightings after the fire renewed her hope.
“I’ve got to say, the people in Gilroy were fabulous,” she said. “People were so kind, and the dog was so lucky. … It has been just such an adventure.”
