When the Chips are Down
Tri-City Tales Issue No. 38
Ashley Cole was away for the Thanksgiving holiday when she got a frantic call from her pet sitter on Black Friday: Her two dogs, Luna (pictured above) and Oso, had gone missing from her backyard in Duncanville. The pair had dug out from one corner of her fence.
Oso is a Pyrenees who has been with Ashley for 10 years. She’d gotten him as a puppy—a gift from her boyfriend (now husband). Luna is a 4-year-old yellow lab that Ashley describes as “everyone’s best friend” who loves tennis balls and riding on a paddleboard. The two dogs are pals, and were now, apparently, accomplices.
At first, Ashley wasn’t too concerned. Luna and Oso had dug out from under the fence before. She and her husband thought they had solved the problem by burying chicken wire and covering the area with gardening stones. “I really expected them to come right back,” she says. But a couple of hours later, her sitter called again. She’d been driving around Duncanville for two hours. There was no sign of them. It was getting dark, and starting to rain. Luna was afraid of storms.
For Ashley, who was two states away in Alabama, panic set in. She fired off messages on social media and Next Door, desperately asking if anyone had seen them. And she texted the emergency number for Tri-City Animal Shelter. They responded right away. No one had picked them up, but they had a question: Were her dogs chipped?
“It did bring me so much comfort knowing they were chipped,” Ashley says. If her dogs made it to any shelter, she knew she would be reunited. As the evening wore on, Ashley tried to sleep, getting up every few hours to check for news.
That night, around midnight, Duncanville police officer George Smith was on patrol in when a call came across the radio about an injured dog at Santa Fe and Wheatland Roads. He raced to the intersection to find a driver pulled over beside a yellow lab with an apparently broken leg. A Pyrenees was at her side. Both dogs were soaking wet. When Officer Smith opened the door to his car, Oso jumped in. “He seemed ready to go,” Smith said. He lifted Luna into the seat, drove to Tri-City, and got them fed and onto warm blankets for the night.
The next morning, Ashley got a text that her dogs were safe. Ashley was doubly relieved to learn they had not been out all night in the storm. Luna’s leg turned out to be just a sprain, and she’s recovering. Both dogs have lost their unsupervised backyard privileges. “They used to be inside-outside dogs,” Ashley says. “Now they are inside-inside dogs.” She’s ordered collars with GPS locators, and reinforced the fence again. “It’s like Fort Knox over there.”
Had they not been chipped, she knows she would not have been reunited so soon. Two other Pyrenees had been picked the same night, neither of them chipped, waiting for their owners to find them. “I really appreciated how helpful the staff was,” she says. “The whole time they were so caring.”
Friends of Tri-City Animal Shelter plans to fund community-based microchip reading stations throughout the Tri-City area so lost pets can be easily reunited with their owners. For more information on getting your pet chipped, please call 972-291-5335.