Ladybug and the Tramp

By Liz Farrell

Distance does not exist for Jennifer Smith when it comes to saving an animal’s life.

She’ll help rescue a Yorkie in Virginia, a Boxer in Miami or a German Shepherd in Alabama.

And all before breakfast, if that’s the way it has to be.

A young, healthy Labrador/border collie mix three miles from her house on Spring Island would be a cinch compared to the heartbreak and adversity she deals with on a daily basis at Noah’s Arks Rescue, the nonprofit she founded eight years ago that will do whatever it takes to save horribly abused animals across the country.

“Whatever it takes” usually means getting veterinary experts involved and negotiating down inflated prices for life-saving drugs. It means giving every animal the best rehabilitation services available and saving every last piece of evidence so she can help get abusers prosecuted. It means following up, following up and following up.

And be warned: You are not getting one of her dogs unless she knows you’ll do right by it. And if you don’t, she’s taking the dog back.

She is tough but also warm and particularly good-humored. Her husband and grandkids call her Ladybug. And she laughs her way through most sentences, sometimes getting the giggles during the really good parts so that the words tumble out quickly and half-spoken.

She is not used to hearing no, though. Or rather, she’s used to hearing it, she’s just not used to accepting it.

So when Beaufort County Animal Services director Tallulah Trice called Smith just after mid-January to enlist her help in capturing Finn, a dog that had been loose on Spring Island after running away from his owner in Old Town Bluffton on Dec. 29, she knew what she was doing.

Smith was going to get this dog.

Finn went missing after getting spooked while his owner, Missy Staie, and a friend were having lunch. For days, Missy Staie, of Isle of Hope, Ga., came back to Bluffton to search for the dog she and her husband, Rick, had only adopted 2 1/2 months earlier from a kill-shelter in Savannah. Finn was a timid dog who had gone through behavioral rehabilitation before he was adopted.

Just over a week after his initial disappearance, Finn was spotted across the Colleton River on the exclusive Spring Island, where he had taken up residence in the woods on the south end of the island.

Some residents pitched in to try and capture the 2-year-old dog who remained out of reach. They left out food and blankets for him and shared surveillance footage of him peering into their windows or sleeping on their outdoor couches. The Staies and volunteers searched the woods. Animal control set traps.

The search for Finn, so far, had been energetic, but it also was chaotic and lacking one crucial element.

This dog’s capture — really, his survival — depended on something he didn’t have: trust in people.

Smith knew this game of cat and mouse had to be between her and Finn and no one else.

If he was going to allow himself to be captured before something catastrophic happened, it had to be on his terms.

Well, on his terms … but also on her terms.

After all, it’s Jennifer Smith.

. . .

Smith immediately sent out an email and asked her neighbors to stop feeding him.

Then she told the Staies — and outside volunteers — not to come to Spring Island anymore. At first, this upset Missy Staie.

“It was very hard for her,” said Anna Belue, Staie’s friend and neighbor who was with her when Finn ran away. “But she felt like Jennifer was the expert and that she knew what she was doing.”

When Smith had cleared the decks, she restarted the scoreboard.

Jennifer: 0

Dog: 0

The first order of business was to create a routine for Finn, to get him to come to one spot where he could reliably find warmth, water and delicious food.

She would then monitor his habits, and when the time was right, she would call the county to come dart him.

Simple.

Smith bought an igloo-style dog house, called a Dogloo, and placed it to the side of Karen and Nick Penchuk’s driveway on Goose Pond Road, where there had been many Finn sightings.

Smith and the Penchuks set up a deer camera and pointed it straight at the Dogloo.

At first, Smith fed Finn Acana, a top-of-the-line brand of dog food.

Which a very lucky raccoon happily ate.

So she took Acana off the menu and replaced it with Purina.

The raccoon enjoyed that, too.

Finn soon made the Dogloo a regular stop on his mystery tour, but he wouldn’t touch the food.

Jennifer: 0

Dog: 1

Eventually, though, Finn mustered enough bravery to stick his paw and his head into the Dogloo’s opening to pull out the food.

But the raccoons were still a real problem, so Smith devised a new plan.

She built the dog a $500 tiki hut.

. . .

Toward the end of February, Smith went to Home Depot for materials. She also went to Lowe’s.

She had an idea. She’d create an open enclosure and put the dog’s food up high, in a bucket to keep it away from those no-account dine-and-dash scavengers. Finn, when he was hungry, could easily go under the enclosure, hit the bucket with his paw and dump out the food and treats and heartworm and flea medication for himself.

At both hardware stores, she explained this plan in detail to the people waiting on her.

“Huh?” they said.

“They probably thought, ‘This is the dumbest thing I ever heard of!’ ” Smith said.

Nevertheless, she bought the materials and spent a weekend building the lean-to in her backyard by herself. She topped it with palm fronds and painted the PVC pipe legs to look like bark … sort of like bark, anyway.

Her husband, Tom, looked out the window occasionally as she worked, “She’s still out there.”

Smith moved the shelter to Finn’s spot near the Penchuks’ driveway.

She filled the bucket with food.

She left out a bowl of water.

And she placed a clean and comfy dog bed with a blanket underneath it.

When she consulted the cameras the next morning — she had since installed four of her own — she saw that he had indeed visited his new hut.

He would not touch the bucket, though.

“Put your paw on the bucket, buddy,” she said to the images on her computer screen.

She gave in. She lowered the bucket.

He would not touch it.

She lowered it again.

Nope.

Jennifer: 0

Dog: 35

Finally, Smith put some food on the dog bed, and Finn thought that was great. He’d pull the thing out from under the hut, have a snack and relax. One time he got so happy he howled at the moon.

Every morning Smith left treats and clean water for Finn. Every morning she switched out the chips in the cameras. Every morning she sat at her computer and looked at what he had been up to the night before.

It was her ritual.

Over the weeks, she became very protective of Finn. As if he were one of her case-files at Noah’s Arks.

And she would readily admit this to anyone who wanted to hear the truth.

Finn was Jennifer Smith’s dog now.

She was not going to give him back to the Staies. She did not know them. She just knew they had the dog, and then the dog ran while in their care.

When I finally catch him, she thought, I’m going to get him whatever treatment he might need, and then I’ll get him adopted.

Smith’s husband, Tom, was familiar with her tendencies. Her dedication to Noah’s Arks had more than proved how far she was willing to go for a dog.

“He knew I was hopeless,” Smith said.

One morning, as she was going over Finn’s latest nightly adventures, Tom Smith gently chuckled.

“You have a problem, Ladybug.”

Every evening Smith left food for Finn, including some cheese. Every third day she gave him clean bedding, knowing full well that he’d steal her blankets.

He also stole the elk bone she had left on the bed for him once.

At the beginning of March, Smith moved Finn’s encampment at the Penchuks’ home across the street and up a small hill in the Colleton Nature Preserve.

The cars driving down Goose Pond Road were spooking Finn and making his visits a little unpredictable. The new spot was quieter and had more places to hide the humans who eventually planned to dart him.

After more than six weeks and thousands upon thousands of photos, Smith felt like she knew this dog as if he were a pet in her home.

But she hadn’t so much as laid eyes on him in person.

“Everyone else had seen him,” she said, “but I haven’t.”

Finn knew Smith as well.

He knew her scent.

He knew her car.

He knew her tricks.

The cameras showed her this very clearly.

“I would drive off. Finn would walk in. Doo doo doo doo,” she said.

Smith was losing. The score did not look good.

Jennifer: 0

Dog: 100

But one day, about five days after she had moved the tiki hut and Dogloo, Smith saw him.

He was 20 feet away, sitting in a field.

He stood up and they looked at each other.

“I guess he wanted to be seen,” she said. “ ‘You were looking all this time for me. This is what I really look like.’ ”

He turned around, walked away, stopped and turned to look at her again.

They locked eyes.

But he did not come to her.

She got in her car and drove away. She watched him in her rear view mirror. He did not move.

She was ecstatic, though. He looked great. His fur was glossy. He had regained the weight he lost.

“That food is looking good on you,” she thought.

Over time Smith started to notice that Finn’s walk was different. He seemed more confident and comfortable. His head up. His tail relaxed.

He rolled around on the ground the way dogs do when they’re celebrating life.

This is how she knew.

It was time to try darting him.

She only needed one win against this dog. Now was the time to do the thing that she and Trice, the county’s animal control director, had been planning for a while.

It was time to drug Finn.

. . .

Trice and Smith had been consulting with the experts.

Smith alone had grilled half a dozen veterinarians.

“Are you sure these sedatives won’t kill this dog?”

“I’m sure.”

“Not even if he had a little heart thing we didn’t know about.”

“Not even then.”

Smith began Finn on a very low dose to see how he reacted.

A few days before, she and volunteers got up at 4 a.m. each morning to see if they could find him and dart him. But no such luck.

They’d need to drug him more. And set up a deer-blind.

Trice talked to a naturalist about the dangers of the woods.

They asked area hunters how to make a human disappear into the landscape so that an animal could be ambushed.

They went to the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office and borrowed night-vision goggles.

They found the perfect volunteer — a man who could set up a blind so invisible that squirrels would climb over him as though he were made of bark.

And they had the tranquilizer gun at the ready.

The two women discussed everything that could possibly go wrong.

The last thing either of them wanted to do was to accidentally harm Finn.

Any number of things could happen, they knew, but mostly they were afraid of sending a half-cocked dog out into the wilderness, where he might woozily wander into an alligator’s gullet or try to swim back to Bluffton and drown.

A few days after Daylight Saving Time they set out to execute the plan. The time change had been rough on Smith and Trice — who was helping with the search every day on her own time. They were out later and later each night, and both were exhausted.

When it was go time, the volunteer with night-vision goggles climbed into a tree, where he sat very still for five hours.

Less than 50 feet away, Finn’s drugged-up cheese was locked and loaded.

All they had to do was wait for him.

In the end, Smith decided to give Finn half the dose recommended by the doctors.

But sitting at a neighbor’s house some distance down the road, something suddenly didn’t feel right to Smith and Trice.

They panicked.

“Oh, I was not going to kill this dog,” Smith said.

The women got in Smith’s car and headed to Finn’s encampment.

They pulled up, got out and told the volunteer to abort the mission.

“Come on down,” they told him. “We’re not drugging Finn tonight.”

Then Smith went over to Finn’s bed to retrieve the sedative.

It was gone.

The women quickly pulled the camera chips and fired up Smith’s hotspot and laptop in her car.

The cameras had captured two things.

The headlights from their car pulling up.

And Finn.

Trice knew immediately that something irreversibly catastrophic had just happened.

“Jennifer and I messed up.”

Finn had eaten that drugged treat.

And he disappeared into the darkness.