The famous lost dogs
are found and head to the page’s joyful ‘‘Reunited’’ photo album.
Some, like Dice and Wee Dog, become long-term fixtures in the ‘‘Unresolved’’ album. It doesn’t mean they will always stay there.
The search has triggered other emotions, too. Among the support is a smattering of negativity, telling Andrew and Funnell to give up, to accept the dogs are gone.
This can go to extreme lengths. The many signs around the country have started disappearing. One billboard was tarnished with the word ‘‘DEAD’’ in yellow spray-paint; another lasted only a few minutes before it was torn down.
One vandal, in a hand-written letter to a property owner hosting a sign, described the signs as visual pollution – they said the search for the dogs was un-Kiwi and that Andrew and Funnell needed to get over it.
The pair get mean comments on their Facebook page, too. They are asked why they don’t use the resources to find missing people.
Recently, the Facebook page was hacked, and Andrew and Funnell were removed as administrators. They’ve had to start a new page. Not only has the search itself been a slog; at times, the response to it has been, too.
‘‘Initially we got dragged down by the negative stuff,’’ Andrew says.
‘‘You really just have to rely on what’s inside yourself, because most people around you will be like, oh, come on, just give it up, which is hard.’’
At its heart, this is a classic cold case. What happened to Dice and Wee Dog? There are many theories, but none which elegantly tie together all the loose scraps of information. There are two basic theories.
The first is the Freedom Camper hypothesis, favoured by Andrew and Funnell.
Andrew suspects the dogs took off in chase of a rabbit, which had been lurking around the shed. Early searches had focused south, at the back of their property; but in this scenario, the dogs fled north, in delirious pursuit of a rabbit, onto neighbouring land.
The dogs are lost, confused. They end up near the main drag, busy with tourists. The road leads to the albatross centre and a little blue penguin colony, bang-for-your-buck birdlife irresistible to visitors travelling on the cheap.
The unaccompanied dogs are picked up by freedom campers.
The theory is bolstered by sightings, some not long after the disappearance.
After their first TV appearance, a month after the dogs vanished, Andrew and Funnell were contacted by a council worker. He had been mowing the lawns at a freedom camping site when he saw two dogs tied up near a dirty, off-white campervan. Neither dog had a collar, and they were tied with rope.
It struck the man as unusual. Who travels with dogs without collars and a lead? When he saw Dice and Wee Dog on TV, he made the connection; they looked like the dogs he’d seen.
Not long after, there was a similar sighting north of Dunedin; a shop owner reported seeing two dogs in the back of an off-white van, which she swore was Dice and Wee Dog. A few days later, a similar sighting south of Oamaru.
What if the travellers, before leaving the country, gave the dogs to someone else, oblivious to the search? It sounds strange, but it does happen.
The second hypothesis is the obvious one. Dice and Wee Dog were victims of misadventure.
They disappeared in harsh land, dotted with thick bush and surrounded by steep cliffs.
Early on, it seemed the most plausible option: ‘‘We just assumed, like most people would, that they got stuck somewhere,’’ Andrew says.
But they searched, and searched, and searched. For one dog to die without a trace is plausible; two is slightly harder to fathom.
Until they are found, the dogs exist in the liminal space between life and death; and for their humans, the search will not stop until they have confirmation, one way or the other.
About seven months after the dogs vanished, Andrew had a dream. She was out in the paddocks near the farm, calling for the missing dogs. She heard Dice bark, and he emerged from the night. She bent down to give him a cuddle; despite his ageing bones, he leapt into her arms.
Where was Wee Dog? She wasn’t there. Andrew woke up. It was 3am; she did not go back to sleep.
It happened at a low point, both physically and emotionally. In a video uploaded around that time, Andrew talked frankly about her declining emotional health.
‘‘You just have these days where the pain, the pressure, and the frustration builds to a level you just can’t sustain,’’ she said, through tears.
‘‘You just want it to be over. You just want them to be home, and it’s so frustrating to go around in circles and not get anywhere.’’
A couple of months earlier, she had been hospitalised with encephalitis, inflammation of the brain. It was severe; she had a seizure in the hospital, and spent several days comatose in intensive care. She believes it was made worse by stress and fatigue.
Weeks after she left hospital, someone claimed to have found the dogs. They demanded money. At first, Andrew and Funnell were convinced it was legitimate, but it was not – it was an extortion plot.
‘‘It was horrific,’’ Andrew says. ‘‘You think, this is the moment. And things were still so painful in that moment. We were still not eating or sleeping, and pushing ourselves to the brink trying to do emails and send out flyers and reply to people and follow up on sightings. I think we just cooked ourselves.’’
In her Facebook posts, she referred to a tragedy from her past, the suicide of her teenaged brother. The pain of losing the dogs was similar, she says.
Funnell, too, was sliding. He had searched relentlessly, with gruelling physical work; he would spend weekends away, putting up signs in far-flung parts of the country.
His mission, as he described it, was to ‘‘keep alive, look for dogs’’.
One day, he broke: ‘‘He was so angry, and he kicked this bucket and smashed it,’’ Andrew says.
‘‘He was so angry, I’ve never seen him like this before or since. And I thought, gee, are we even going to survive the bloody dogs?’’
They were two people who had long ago found respite in animals. But with Dice and Wee Dog still missing, that comfort, too, was disappearing.
‘‘You just want it to be over. You just want them to be home, and it’s so frustrating to go around in circles and not get anywhere.’’ Louisa Andrew
In the middle of last year, everything changed. Andrew and Funnell came to a realisation: they accepted the dogs were gone. At the same time, Covid-19 forced them to slow their relentless pace.
‘‘Lockdown was a bit of a saviour, because we couldn’t do anything, so we had to get some rest,’’ Andrew says.
‘‘And it saved the situation, really.’’
Her dream was a turning point. At first, it had been troubling – but in retrospect, it let her accept the dogs were gone, and allow her to believe they would come back.
‘‘We accepted the dogs were gone, and I think we had been fighting against that, and it was causing so much pain,’’ she says.
‘‘Ever since then, we’ve been coming into this better and better space. We’re better equipped now for this than even before they went missing.’’
After lockdown, they returned to their search, their mental health in excellent order.
Many of the billboards are gone, so they’re focusing on leaflet drops. They’ve started a new Facebook page, and hope to reclaim the old one. It already has more than 1000 followers. The old one had about 20,000.
Instead of dwelling in the darkness, they focus on the light. Both believe the dogs are still out there, and could be found: ‘‘All it takes is one person,’’ Funnell says.
Until then, they regularly fantasise about their reunion with Dice and Wee Dog. Dice is older, fluffier, but the same gentle dog he was when he was a puppy. Wee Dog is as bouncy and playful as she was when she vanished. It’s like no time has passed.
If Dice and Wee Dog are found, the community they’d built would be dedicated to finding other dogs.
‘‘I would quit on myself, I would quit on other things in my life,’’ Andrew says, ‘‘but when it comes to animals, I would never quit in a million years.
‘‘We could go on forever, and that’s the growth for us. It’s amazing what these two dogs have brought about.’’