Family finds a sense of community in fruitless search for missing dog
They tried everything to find Chuck. And by everything, I mean everything. Online postings, social media, the Journal’s free “Missing” classified ads, posters, bigger posters around the neighborhood and then well beyond as the days wore on. They contacted every veterinary clinic and shelter, searched rows and rows of runs filled with sad faced pooches at Animal Humane New Mexico, searched the agency’s even sadder DOA list.
“We made our own postcard and sent out a bulk mailer to our neighborhood and surrounding neighborhoods,” Jessie Lenderman said. “We set traps at our house and in alleys where people thought they had seen him. We put our clothes and his beds outside the house with water and treats nearby. We called him and we cried.”
They walked in circles for miles and read books aloud in places they thought Chuck might have ventured, hoping their scent and their sounds might reach him. They held cookouts in parks in places sightings were reported, their car doors left wide open in the hopes he might suddenly emerge and jump right in.
When all that failed, they hired a dog detective tracker who arrived from out of state with her search dogs and her tricks for flushing out recalcitrant dogs.
When that failed, too, they consulted a pet psychic, whose soothsaying was upsetting and, Lenderman pronounced, inaccurate.
They even postponed the family’s impending move to Washington state until finally, sadly, they packed up and drove away without their beloved pup, Chuck.
“It broke our hearts,” Lenderman said from more than 1,000 miles away. “It still does.”
Chuck, a small gray wire-haired terrier mix, is still missing after wriggling out of his harness in early August when he was spooked by another dog on a walk with a pet sitter near Sierra and Loma Linda SE in the Ridgecrest area while the family was away on vacation.
For three years, he was a member of the Lenderman family — Jessie, husband Andy and son Erik (an older son is in college in Washington). They brought him home from Lap Dog Rescue of New Mexico. Although the Lendermans say they chose Chuck, those who know the affable pooch know it was Chuck who chose them.
“He hiked with us, played with us, cuddled us when we were blue and seemed happy to see us all the time,” Lenderman said. “My son learned some hard lessons — about how bad things sometimes just happen, and how you can try as hard as possible and still not get what you want, even when you think there has to still be something you can do.”
This column about Chuck is the latest “something” they can do.
“It’s our big hope. We believe he’s still out there or that somebody took him and has him, and if they just read about how much we love him …” Jessie said, her voice trailing off.
So, yes, this column is another effort to find what the Lendermans have lost, but it’s also about what they have gained.
Because in their search for Chuck, they found a community of friends and strangers who came together not just for a little dog but to offer them a big, consoling hug.
“We were in despair, and that support of strangers lifted us just a little bit,” she said. “I have a renewed faith in the power of my community. I am humbled and grateful, no matter what the outcome, and I know I will behave differently towards others after this experience.”
People, she said, made their own posters of the missing Chuck. They immediately mobilized when word spread of a possible sighting. They called and texted and stopped their cars when they saw the family out searching, not just with possible tips but also just to offer encouragement or to seek updates on Chuck. One woman hugged Lenderman on the street after an especially discouraging search.
It was as if Chuck had become the community’s dog and the Lendermans a part of a much larger family.
What Lenderman said her family also found were a lot of other people who were out searching for their own lost dogs — and dogs searching for forever homes.
“It’s like there’s a secret underground world of missing dogs and all the people who love them out looking for them,” she said. “We also realized that there are a lot of dogs out there on the streets and in the shelters that need homes.”
And the Lendermans also learned another lesson — that sometimes doing enough does not always have to be enough, that sometimes when you cut through the barriers that lie between us you can find a common bond, a common heart, a common cause that brings together strangers willing to help and to care.