For the love of Dice and Weed

When their dogs vanished 18 months ago, a couple were driven to the brink. During their endless search, they found themselves again. Charlie Mitchell reports.

You might have seen the signs along the road, or found a leaflet in your mailbox: two small dogs, very much loved, possibly separated and both at large. Dice and Wee Dog vanished into the Otago hills about 18 months ago. Owners, Louisa Andrew and Alan Funnell, started looking within minutes, and have not stopped.

They’ve combed coastlines at 1am, and followed half-remembered sightings across the country; they have rounded the South Island several times over, hit dead ends, turned down work, abandoned hobbies, gone broke, torn themselves apart.

The scale of the search has few parallels in New Zealand. Not just for dogs, but for anything.

Hundreds of signs have been affixed to roadsides, from Whanga¯ rei to Invercargill. A dedicated Facebook community drew more than 20,000 followers. Andrew and Funnell have appeared on prime-time television, in newspapers, and on international radio; a banner with the dogs’ names once trailed behind a plane as it soared over Auckland.

The search has cost more than $30,000. They stopped eating and sleeping. After months of nonstop searching, Andrew fell into a brief coma after contracting encephalitis, which she attributed to stress and fatigue. A few weeks later, they were victims of an extortion plot.

It all became too much. They ran themselves ragged; they wondered if they’d survive long enough to find their dogs.

But then, everything changed. The dogs, still missing, put their humans back together.

It had been a miserable week, raining non-stop, when Dice and Wee Dog disappeared on October 17, 2019. Dice is a black poodle. He is 10 years old and about 36cm tall. Wee Dog is a black and white fox terrier-cross, four years old, about 30cm tall. Both are likely smaller than you imagine.

They were last seen together, on a small farm on the Otago peninsula, about 20 minutes north of central Dunedin.

They vanished during a 90-second window of inattention. Andrew, an equine dentist, had popped home between jobs to feed the chickens.

‘‘The dogs hadn’t had much exercise because it was that rain that just doesn’t stop for days. So, they were crazy that day, and I thought I’d shoot home quickly between jobs and feed the chooks and let the dogs run around.’’

Although the farm is close to Dunedin, it feels distant; the road trails the rocky spine of extinct volcanoes, pockmarked with bush gullies and timeworn relics of old Dunedin, Larnach Castle and retired gun emplacements and a crumbling lime kiln lodged into the hillside.

After letting the dogs out, Andrew went into a shed to get wheat for the chickens, leaving the two dogs alone.

She returned about 90 seconds later, possibly sooner. They were already gone.

‘‘I was pretty worried straight away, actually. I spent the rest of the day calling for them,’’ she says.

‘‘I rang Alan and cancelled my work because I wasn’t leaving.’’

They combed the bush gullies and the clifftops, digging out rabbit holes and tearing through gorse. A day became a week. They dropped leaflets and spoke to farmers.

A week became a month. They stopped working and searched all day, every day.

They had a tip about a dog barking near Taiaroa Head, more than 10km away. By the time Andrew and Funnell heard about it, it was night; the pair ventured out anyway, at 1am, calling for Dice and Wee Dog.

‘‘We really trawled this place,’’ Funnell, a professional gardener, says.

They assembled a search party from volunteers, who spent weekends trawling the peninsula. No luck. Even animal psychics joined the search.

‘‘We didn’t sleep, we were stressed out and spontaneously bursting into tears. We were not eating or sleeping properly,’’ Andrew says.

‘‘We did everything we could.’’

In Hanmer Springs, Sandy Winter keeps Dice and Wee Dog signs in her car. She is one of the thousands of people who have become invested in the hunt, keeping the search alive. She became aware of the situation early on. It was shared into online communities devoted to finding lost pets, tapping into a network of animal-lovers devoted to helping reunite humans with their pets.

‘‘If I could help with every lost dog, I would,’’ Winter says.

‘‘But for some reason, Dice and Weed resonated with me because of Alan and Louisa’s determination… the lengths they’ve gone to are extraordinary.’’

It has inspired a lot of people. There are people like Winter around the country, on-call to respond to sightings.

In the early days, it was up to Andrew and Funnell to respond to tips. They now have a national, decentralised network of first responders.

The search has led Winter to take time off work. She has door-knocked, contacted vets, and offered to negotiate a pickup for Dice and Wee Dog, should someone try to return them.

‘‘I believe they are still alive. I think if something had happened, we would probably know by now,’’ Winter says.

It’s strange to become known solely for intensely missing your pets. As they’ve searched for Dice and Wee Dog, Andrew and Funnell have had to contend with the complexities of human nature, and the range of attitudes people have towards animals.

Most people are supportive. Some people have lost pets and see the search as a parallel to the bottomless love they feel for their own missing animal.

The Dice and Wee Dog community is like a form of group therapy. Commenters talk about the pain of losing their pets, the unresolved grief of not knowing if they are still alive. It is a place of boundless empathy. To supporters, the extreme lengths taken to find Dice and Wee Dog are the only rational response.

‘‘I love my two dogs, and I feel like giving up is abnormal,’’ Andrew says.

‘‘To me, the normal thing would be to persevere and keep going until you find them.

‘‘We’ve found so many people just like us. Before that, I wouldn’t have realised so many people felt the same way, so it has been just amazing to see that there are actually thousands of people who do.’’

The New Zealand Lost Pet Register has 67,000 followers, and is run by a team of 17 volunteers. The page can be an emotional rollercoaster. Post after post of missing animals, with pleas from desperate owners.

‘‘People cope in different ways,’’ says Leanne Simpkin, who manages the page.

‘‘Some never give up. Others never give up on the thought of their furbaby making it home, but stop the active search. Often, this is because, mentally, it is just too tough for them to keep going.’’

For the most part, animals posted on the page

‘‘If I could help with every lost dog, I would. But for some reason, Dice and Weed resonated with me because of Alan and Louisa’s determination… the lengths they’ve gone to are extraordinary.’’ Sandy Winter