Volunteers use turkey dinner to trap runaway dog in Thorold
It took a rescue effort stretching from Guelph to Niagara involving nearly a dozen searchers over three weeks to track down a loose dog in Thorold recently.
In the end, it was the lure of a turkey dinner on Thanksgiving that led to Rosa the dog being reunited with her original owners.
“There’s a back story,” quipped Jenn Page of St. Catharines, who was the first to take up the chase.
In mid-September, Page was making a delivery in the Confederation Heights area when she spotted what she thought was a golden Lab but with longer hair running by full-tilt with its leash still attached.
Two weeks previous she had secured two other dogs under similar circumstances. This time, though, she was only able to get a photo.
She posted it to Lost and Found Pets Niagara’s Facebook page. It turned out a Guelph couple had sold the dog to someone living in Thorold and it had been loose for nearly a week already.
“I just couldn’t even sleep at night, knowing she was out there with the coyotes and the cars and everything,” said Page.
The new owner didn’t seem interested, but the former owners from Guelph came down to help find the dog, named Rosa.
Soon, people from Niagara Dog Rescue — a group that takes in abused or neglected animals and finds new homes for them — heard about Rosa and joined in the search.
“We just wanted to help that situation,” said Dianne Cartmell, of Niagara Falls, a board member at Niagara Dog Rescue.
While it’s a rescue group, its members love dogs and will sometimes join in searches.
“We could see they needed help … we were out there at the crack of dawn sometimes, 5:30 in the morning looking for her.”
There were spottings all over the area — near Richmond Street Elementary School, railroad tracks near Pine Street,
close to Kaumeyer Paper. At Stokes Seeds, they saw Rosa eating some leftover pizza near a picnic table.
But alone and in unfamiliar territory, the dog was skittish.
“People think, oh I can catch a dog, I’m a good dog whisperer,” said Cartmell. “When a dog’s in that mindset, it’s not going to work.”
They kept looking, and put out a few box-style traps with spring-loaded doors.
“We pulled out a map, pinpointed everywhere she had been, and in the centre of that was Canpar” Express on Collier Road South, where Rosa had been sheltering under a trailer, said Page.
“So this girl travelled in a three-kilometre radius, pretty much.”
The chase had a happy ending, with a little irony thrown in: “We ended up getting her on Thanksgiving Monday with turkey dinner in the trap.”
Page said “it was amazing how people came together the way they did” — not only the searchers, but people around the community who reported sightings and helped the searchers.
Despite her three weeks on the run, she said, Rosa looked good but had lost a little weight when her original owners from Guelph showed up to take her back home.
“It was a very heartwarming moment,” said Page.
Vince Vaughn has been starring in movies for a quarter of a century, ever since his breakout as a swaggering wannabe actor in the 1996 indie comedy “Swingers.” But in these strange and stressful times in which we find ourselves, his life is perhaps not as different from yours as you might imagine.
His days are punctuated by Zoom meetings. With his family largely confined to their home in Southern California, the 50-year-old actor frets over keeping his two kids, who are in the second and fourth grade, from falling behind where they should be academically and socially. Like most of us, he is looking for new ways to occupy his time; over the last few months, he’s been playing the occasional Friday-night game of Dungeons & Dragons online with a group of friends led by Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello.
“I used to play as a kid,” Vaughn said over Zoom from his home in late October, shortly before a presidential election that would further test everyone’s sanity. Outside his window, his children were spending the afternoon with six school friends and two teachers who have joined together in a learning pod. “I have to tell you, man, it’s a blast. It’s just so fun and nerdy.”
In his career as well, Vaughn has come somewhat down to earth. Since the mid-2000s, when a string of hits including “Old School,” “Wedding Crashers” and “Dodgeball” made him one of the most bankable stars in town, Hollywood has largely backed away from the type of R-rated, male-oriented comedies that were once his bread and butter. Following a series of box office duds including 2013’s “Delivery Man” and 2015’s “Unfinished Business,” Vaughn has recently pivoted more toward drama, starring in the second season of HBO’s “True Detective” and the gritty indie crime thrillers “Brawl in Cell Block 99” and “Dragged Across Concrete.”
Now, in the midst of a pandemic that has brought the movie business to its knees, Vaughn finds himself looking for laughs again in his highestprofile film in years: the Blumhouse horror-comedy “Freaky,” which opened last Friday at limited theatres due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In director Christopher Landon’s new twist on the tried-and-true “Freaky Friday” formula, Vaughn plays a serial killer called the Blissfield Butcher who switches bodies with an insecure high school girl named Millie (played by Kathryn Newton) after stabbing her with a supernaturally cursed dagger.
With 24 hours to figure out how to reverse the curse, Vaughn — playing Millie inside of the Butcher in a Russian nesting doll of a performance — awkwardly struggles to adjust to a suddenly oversized body, performs cheerleading moves to persuade Millie’s friends of her true identity and, in one unexpectedly touching scene, reveals a secret crush on a jock named Booker.
One of the widest studio releases since cineplexes around the country shut down in March, “Freaky” marks a test not only of moviegoers’ appetite to return to theatres but of Vaughn’s enduring appeal. Reviews for the film have been largely positive, with a number of critics highlighting Vaughn’s game performance. In September, no less a horror authority than Stephen King enthused on Twitter, “Based on the trailer of ’Freaky,’ Vince Vaughn has GOT to get nominated for an Academy Award.” (Though considering how often the Oscars recognize horror or comedy, that is exceedingly unlikely, even in a season as upsidedown as this one.)
Signing onto the film, Vaughn was well aware that such a gender-swapping role had the potential to go off the rails. For every “Mrs. Doubtfire,” after all, there is a “Jack and Jill.” “It scared me a little at first,” he says. “But I felt like, ’Well, that’s probably good.’ I’d sort of been wanting to do stuff where I feel a little like your feet can’t touch the bottom.”
While it may have been tempting to lean into slapstick, Vaughn worked to get into the emotional headspace of a vulnerable teenager, drawing inspiration in part from his own nieces. “The very first time I met Vince, we both arrived on the same page in terms of not wanting him to play a caricature of a girl,” says “Freaky” director and cowriter Christopher Landon. “I felt like the movie would only succeed if we really invested in this character and were rooting for her. I wanted him to take it seriously.”
“Freaky” producer and Blumhouse Productions CEO Jason Blum credits Vaughn, whose most significant previous foray into horror was starring in 1998’s ill-fated shot-for-shot remake of “Psycho,” with opening himself up to new challenges. “He’s a great comedian but he’s also a really good dramatic actor and I think he’s choosing interesting material,” Blum said. “Those (R-rated comedies) have all migrated to streaming, and I think it’s cool that he’s deciding to not only do
that but also trying other things.”
Where some may see a stab at a commercial comeback in a genre with a steady box office track record, Vaughn insists he has simply been moving in the direction of what interests him. Those edgy studio comedies that had once been his forte had started to grow increasingly safe and bland, he says, pointing to 2013’s underwhelming “The Internship,” which the studio watered down from a planned Rrating to a PG-13.
“When anything becomes so much by committee or you’re walking in playing defence, it’s not as rewarding a journey to go on,” says Vaughn, who popped up recently in a small role in the latest season of HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” “
What I liked about the R comedies at the time is it felt like they were like these defiant rock albums. It felt like you were part of a band. I will go back and do comedies again. But I think I do better when I’m excited or challenging myself than when I’m trying to read the tea leaves of where the market is going. I don’t really have
that skill set.”
Whether it’s his personal politics or the state of his career, Vaughn isn’t hung up on what other people might think. He’s about to start shooting his next film, the dark comedy “Queenpins,” based on a true story about a pair of women (played by Kristen Bell and Kirby Howell-Baptiste) who started a counterfeit coupon scam. He is eyeing a potential sequel to “Wedding Crashers.” As far as how “Freaky” might perform or what it might mean for his career, he says, “I have no idea how it shakes out.”
If he’s sweating that uncertainty at all, he isn’t letting on.
“Before ’Old School,’ I remember my agents calling me and saying, ’You’re not getting as many calls and you’re in jeopardy of continuing to get hired,’ “he says. “I think everyone goes through those stages and we all evolve and change. Any time you go into a different area, people are reluctant because it’s not what they’re used to selling. But when you play it safe or try to strategize based on what you think audiences want to see, I think things actually go worse.