Heart-warming memoir
Kate Spicer suffered the trauma of losing her beloved dog Wolfy – but once her Twitter appeal went viral after celeb support from Kay Burley, Ricky Gervais and Jeremy Clarkson, she found a new faith in humanity and the kindness of strangers.…
I lost my dog and found myself
Four years ago I adopted a scruffy four-year-old lurcher and called him Wolfy and set about falling in love with him in a way that took me by huge surprise. I thought the highs and lows of falling in love were over for me now that I was nearly 50, but then I got my first dog and discovered all those highs again, but with none of the pain and drama of a human love story. Thankfully my boyfriend loved him too – in fact having Wolfy sleeping between us on the bed somehow brought us closer.
Wolfy and I were inseparable. By day I found places for us to hang out like dog-friendly restaurants and coffee shops. At night he slept on my bed. He gave me so much love that a lot of sadness in me just disappeared.
We were rarely apart, which is probably why, when my brother was dog-sitting him one fateful Halloween, he panicked. He thought I’d abandoned him. When my dear little five-year-old niece opened the front door to trick or treaters, Wolfy shot out the door.
“Wolfy belted down busy streets at his top speed of 25mph”
Giving chase
My niece and nephew ran out into the busy road to catch him. My brother followed and understandably, seeing his kids holding a dog standing in the middle of a busy road, shouted at them to get inside – and then went after the dog. Here is the first of many lessons we learned from this awful experience. If a dog is spooked and runs, do not shout or appear to chase it as it will only run even faster.
When the kids were outside,
Wolfy was just nervy. But when my brother bellowed, “Wolfy! Come back here,” and started to go after him, then Wolfy started running. Really running! He bolted down busy north London streets at his top speed of about 25mph.
My brother lives several miles from our home in west London, so Wolfy ran a route we had never walked together. In full flight mode, a dog doesn’t stop to write endless “peemails” on lamp posts and walls so that he can sniff his way home.
There were several sightings that night from people we stopped on streets near where my brother last saw Wolfy. We’d ask, “Have you seen this dog?”, thrusting photos under their noses. The answer often came back that they had and what they’d seen had been memorable. People notice a dog running around on its own. And especially when it’s running fast. A lot of responses were of the “What the hell! I didn’t know dogs could run that fast” variety. Then, nothing. The trail went cold. He was well and truly lost – that’s if he was still alive.
So started the worst nine days of my life.
I was devastated beyond anything I could have imagined. I feel so uncomfortable comparing it to a death, but that is what it felt like. My anguish was suffocating and I cried buckets.
I had to get my dog back. But how?
A lonely search
Wolfy may have felt to me like something between a best friend, a fifth limb and a beloved child, but in the eyes of the law, he’s just my property. Like a phone or a lost mitten. Unless your dog has been stolen, the police aren’t interested. This is a very frightening feeling; we rely on the police to be there in a time of crisis. I felt very alone.
I swiftly reported the loss to doglost.co.uk. I made a lost dog poster on their website and this wonderful charity shared it with volunteers in my local area. I also made my own poster and put it on social media that first night, intending to go out and pin it all over the area he was lost the next day, and the next day, and the next day if necessary.
Helpful strangers
When I fell asleep that night,
I felt so alone. When I woke up in the morning I saw that my lost dog poster had been shared by thousands of people on social media – including Jeremy Clarkson. It had gone, as they say, “viral”. TV presenter Kay Burley and comedian Ricky Gervais shared it too.
I had put a really gorgeous picture of Wolfy on the poster and I think people both felt my pain and fell in love with him a little bit. (He is, after all, the most gorgeous dog on the planet, to me.) It wasn’t just friends that helped – complete strangers printed out the posters and went out sticking them up around north London.
And the more posters that went up, the more people wanted to get involved. Because of this, we got information from people who thought they had seen him. They might not have been able to catch him, some might have seen another stray dog, or been lying even, but this kept
Wolfy and my hope alive.
Bereft as I was, something magical happened. The police might not be interested, but normal people were. And in fact, the police were sweet >>
and, while they may not have been out hunting for him, they put posters up in the station. As the heat rose around finding Wolfy, I was able to lean on newspapers and local radio, trying to find a touching story they might be interested in. I wanted the whole city to keep an eye out for him. If he had been stolen, I wanted him to be “too hot to handle”.
Widening the hunt
One thing I learned as I hunted for Wolfy is that we naturally approach people who look like ourselves, and to widen out the search I had to leave my comfort zone. As I trudged around the streets, I was shown kindness by many people that often hover on the outskirts of society – homeless people, new arrivals to this country who spoke barely any English. I went to traveller and gypsy sites against advice, but was greeted by other lurcher-lovers who shared their own lost-dog stories.
Eight days after he had gone we went on a wild Wolfy goose chase to check out a sighting miles from where he ran away. My boyfriend was cynical. He thought it was a hoax.
He rang the dog warden for that borough who said it didn’t surprise her. “These dogs can travel miles or people pick them up and then abandon them again.”
Incredibly, the dog may have covered many, many miles in that time.
If you have the mettle, there is a school of thought that says leave it to the gods – the dog will either turn up or it won’t. This is what I’d call the “white knuckle” approach. After a week my boyfriend told me we had to stop looking. He said searching endlessly for the dog was driving us mad and making us ill. If Wolfy was out there, we had to trust he would be found. And if Wolfy was dead, well, there was nothing we could do. My family agreed with him. I said I agreed too, but it was a lie.
On day nine I told everyone that I was going to work early, but I was, in fact, walking the streets of Tufnell Park, still putting up lost dog posters, dragging a smelly sock on a stick behind me and squirting a bottle of my urine on fences and walls at dog-nose height, hoping Wolfy would smell it and sniff his way back to my brother’s house.
My boyfriend rang me, thinking I was working, and told me he had received another hoax call from someone who said they had the dog, but that he was going to check it out, just in case.
Faith in humanity
Miraculously, after nine days on the streets, Wolfy was found. A guy got to work at a garage and heard him howling behind some steel railings. The dog was battered, hungry, dehydrated and trapped. The mad thing is, the guy who found him had seen no posters and heard nothing about the Wolfy hunt.
Regardless, I would still recommend actively seeking a lost dog. As I walked around for nine days in the neighbourhoods Wolfy might have been spotted in, I was met with 95% kindness and compassion. If nothing else, it gave me hope. Hunting for my dog nearly destroyed my relationship with my family, but it totally restored my faith in humanity. w&h
“I was met with 95 per cent kindness”