Spevak: Three dogs lost in Los Banos. How could their owner be found?

In the spirit of Los Banos’ Neighborhood Watch, my neighbor Michelle and I unexpectedly became a part of a similar program which I am calling a pop-up “Neighborhood ANIMAL Watch Program.”

We didn’t intend to be a part of this impromptu program. It just happened one early evening when three dogs unknown to us showed up on our street apparently asking for help (if we understood correctly the looks on the dogs’ faces).

The dogs first appeared at the side gate of my home. My wife Sandy and I were alerted to their unexpected presence by the barking of our own two dogs.

When I went to the gate to take a look, there were three friendly dogs looking up intently at me with their tongues hanging out. One was a shih tzu with a red bandanna, another a pug and the third a small bulldog. They seemed like a family of three.

I found a dog dish, filled it with water, went outside the gate and set it down in front of them. Each of them lapped up a lot of water, which seemed to relax them a little and temporarily bonded them to me. But whose dogs were they? Neither Sandy nor I recognized them.

I decided to go next door, with the dogs trailing me, and knock on my neighbor Michelle’s door. I knew she had a dog and maybe she knew whose dogs these were. She quickly came to the door and courteously responded that no, she didn’t recognize them.

Being a compassionate person who cares for animals, Michelle immediately agreed to come with me, even though she wasn’t wearing any shoes, and with the dogs following us, knock on other neighbors’ doors to check if these dogs belonged to one of them.

Kathy, across the street, said she didn’t know who they belonged to, nor did her neighbor Robert when we knocked on his door. Michelle and I were stumped. Fortunately, one of the dogs, the shih tzu with a bandanna, let me corral him, and I saw he had a collar with a tag that said, “Charlie,” followed by a phone number.

Michelle called the number but there was no answer and no room for a voice mail. She took a picture of the three dogs and posted it on Facebook, hoping someone would know their owner.

In the meantime, the three dogs, all staying close together, started to run down the street away from us. They were headed west toward Center Avenue. That was the last we saw of them. Michelle and I hoped that they had figured out where their home was and were running back toward it.

That was the last I knew of them until the next morning when Michelle sent me a text which said, “Good news. Someone saw the dogs at Burger King. And they made it back to their owner.”

That’s all the information Michelle had. It took a while before I knew more, when Michelle texted me later with the name and telephone number of the owner, who had contacted her. The dogs’ owner, Karina, was willing to tell me “the rest of the story.”

Karina told me that she lived about a quarter-mile east of my house and was out of town visiting family in Los Angeles when her dogs apparently escaped, unknown to her, out of the gate she thought was secure.

She found out her dogs were missing when she got a call from a Los Banos number she didn’t recognize. She ignored the call, but received a second call from the same number, which she also ignored. But she did not ignore the next communique, a text from the same number which read: “We have Charlie.”

How could someone have Charlie, Karina thought. She called back the texter. It was a man named George, who told her that he and a friend had found and secured Charlie, as well as the other two dogs. George had spotted the dogs hanging around Burger King from the car wash next door, where he had been car washing.

Between George and his friend, they had in tow all three dogs, but they couldn’t transport them to Karina’s home because they wouldn’t fit in the small car they had. Karina, in LA, then tried to quickly think of someone who could help her.

Her neighbor Julie came to mind. She called Julie, who not only answered but said, as soon as she had heard Karina’s story, that she would drive to Burger King immediately and get the dogs.

When Julie arrived, George and his friend helped put the three dogs in the cabin of Julie’s truck. She thanked George profusely and offered to pay him as a reward for his troubles. George refused, saying, “I know what it’s like to lose a dog.”

Julie took the three dogs, whom she recognized as Sparky and Shorty, as well as Charlie, back to their home. She barricaded the gate so that there was no way they could escape again before their owner Karina came home the next day.

As I listened to the story of the three dogs and their safe return, I couldn’t help but feel grateful for neighbors—for my neighbor Michelle who helped me search and then posted photos on Facebook; for Julie, who was a good neighbor to Karina; and for George, a random person who became a neighbor to us all by going way out of his way to help the dogs reunite with their owner.

Neighbors, I think, are the key to a strong community. And I am lucky to have some darn good ones. So is Karina.

Finally, I’m glad to tell a story about dogs with a happy ending, after reading Steve Wilson’s account in the Enterprise about two dogs who were mauled by a pit bull on the loose. And I’m glad to have been a part of a “Neighborhood Animal Watch Program.”

John Spevak wrote this for the Los Banos Enterprise. His email is john.spevak@gmail.com.

This story was originally published July 16, 2021 at 5:00 AM.