My Hometown Community Helped Me Find My Dog

(Photo Courtesy of Kerry Kadel)

Kerry Kadel | Editor-in-Chief

Kerry is a woman of focus, commitment, sheer will…something you know very little about. I once saw her run for an hour straight on the treadmill…an hour…a freaking hour! And the Monday after the Super Bowl, her dog goes missing. Kerry will come for you, and you will do nothing because you can do nothing. She has a very particular set of skills. Skills she’s acquired over a very long career. If you show her where her dog is, that’ll be the end of it, but if you don’t, she will look for you, she will find you, and she will mix two monologues from John Wick and Taken to make herself seem scarier than she actually is. 

Monday, February 10th, 8:20 p.m. 

I’d just showered after coming back to my house on campus after doing arm day at the RecPlex, heating up some leftover chili my boyfriend gave me because he had extra. I’m just about to put it in the microwave when I get a text from my mom: Can you call me please? 

Uh oh. It’s urgent, I know it, like a sixth sense every kid has built into their DNA. I wonder what I did wrong as I call my mom, and upon answering her tone sounds serious, that we need to talk now. She says it’s about Darby, my fifteen-year-old Puggle. 

“Darby’s gone,” says my mom. “She wandered off somewhere…”

I hear pets wander off away from their owners when it’s their time to go. I knew her time had to have been up, and to have her pass peacefully in the comfort of her big bed. I think of my younger sister who loves Darby to death, who’ll take her death hard; my older brother now stationed in Texas who isn’t here to say goodbye, and my little brother who has to deal with being there at the house. I’m wondering if there’s anything I can do to help ease this pain that’s caused my mom to get so overwhelmed– 

“We’ve looked everywhere for her,” continues my mom. “We can’t find her,” 

Wait–what? 

So in the span of a minute, I misunderstood what my mom had been trying to tell me: Darby wasn’t gone, she was missing. Darby had been let out to do her business, and she must’ve wandered off after. Like I said, my dog is old, and what’s worse is that she is nearly blind and totally deaf. She still has so much spirit in her, like when she protests getting baths and being taken to the vet. She’s loving but senile. She’s a house dog, she’s lazy, just like her breed naturally is, she doesn’t do walks. 

So why did she wander off? She hasn’t done that since she was a puppy, but she always found her way back home after my siblings and I would walk around the neighborhood terrified, thinking she ran away for good before finding her back in our yard. She might be at the point in her life where she’s confused about where she is, but she also knows home is where we are. 

Now knowing that my senior dog was missing, I sprang into action–anyway to calm my mom’s nerves and save my little sister and older brother some heartache and worry. 

8:56 p.m. 

While still on the phone with my mom, I had created two Facebook posts, one for my friends to see and one for a group called “Anything and Everything Huber Heights.” That’s the area I’m from, the Dayton suburbs. Everyone and their mother posts there for common questions and news about what’s going on in our area–and lost and found pets. I’ve seen the occasional post of someone finding their dog or cat through the group, so if they were able to find other community members’ pets, I figured that would be the best case scenario as to who could help my family. 

So…now what? I made the post, I screenshotted it and posted it to my Instagram story and X–which I only use to retweet pictures of Snoopy, Taylor Swift news, my favorite YouTubers, and the occasional silly post. I even use Facebook to make stupid posts I think I only find funny, like posting my boyfriend’s cats with a caption that doesn’t make sense. 

The thing about my post on X was that before I’d even posted there, someone had left a comment saying that there had been a post earlier, around 4:00 p.m. or 5:00 p.m., stating that someone had seen a dog that looked like a pug near the high school in that area. 

…WHAT?! 

I panic, because I know exactly where they’re talking about, and that is a super busy road. I was already panicking thinking Darby would get hurt by the weather since it’s supposed to be growing colder, and the thought of her having to wander or sleep in the cold tore my heart apart (it does now just writing about it). But to have my childhood dog pass away by wandering into the street…I didn’t want to believe it.  I didn’t want to believe that Darby had wandered that far. You’re telling me that my 20 pound Puggle, who’s never left the neighborhood, and has only wandered across the street from my house, was spotted at the nearest high school in my area? That only broke my heart more, thinking Darby was wandering that far, confused, alone, and possibly freezing.

8:57 p.m. – a nervous, scared phone call to the Huber Heights Police Department, describing Darby and giving my contact information. 

From the phone call with the very nice dispatcher lady at the police department, she suggested posting to the Facebook group “Dayton, Ohio and Surrounding Area Lost and Found Pets.” I copy my post from the Huber Heights group and post there. Between everything else I’ve done, I am refreshing my Facebook and Instagram notifications every second. I get posts praying that she comes home, I get pictures on what to do when you’ve lost your dog, and a million reshares from strangers in the group, all very sweet, but I still don’t know if Darby has been seen by anyone else or picked up by animal control. 

9:25 p.m. 

This is the timestamp of when I screenshotted the post that helped us find where Darby was. I was scrolling through the group “Dayton, Ohio Surrounding Area Lost and Found Pets,” wondering if anyone there had made a post about finding Darby, and that’s when I saw this post of a screenshot. 

I screenshot the post and send it to my family group chat, calling my mom at the same time that I mistyped my comments because I was so excited and needed to find which animal control company picked Darby up. My mom was in tears but elated at the news, while we all shouted over one another as I tried to find the exact place that picked her up. There was a phone number, and finally I saw from my initial posts that others had taken pictures of Darby and stated that Greene County Animal Control picked her up. The screenshot has Darby found, picked up, and posted around 7:30 p.m., but I’m not sure if that’s with the edit for the update or not. 

Doesn’t matter. We found her! 

From the post that found her, detailing where they picked her up, I thought the scene looked familiar, and the roads they listed were ones that I knew. They mentioned a corn field by my neighborhood with a street right next to it that I took every day to high school, and one that I take to go back to UD. Because where Darby was found is twelve minutes from my house.

It is more plausible that Darby was found here! If she somehow weaved herself throughout Huber Heights, I’m going to need security footage from the city of Dayton for me to believe it. 

But Darby is home! 

I know at UD the word “community” has been thrown around a lot and can be made a joke with how much we pride ourselves on it–which is great, but there’s something about the people back at home that changes your perspective on it. I had someone I knew in grade school but drifted from high school post about Darby to her Instagram story, I had my housemate here share my post, and I had so many people in the Huber Heights community send prayers and help out, all underneath my first post to the Anything and Everything Huber Heights group. This was something I needed to remind myself that where you’re from isn’t a curse. Sure, technically I live 20 minutes from my house, but UD is my own little world, home away from home. Not being there for my family when I got the news about Darby crushed me. I wanted to help, I wanted something done, but I needed to ask my community for help. 

Making those posts about Darby being found was the best feeling, especially after such a depressing hour or two trying to locate her. She’s part of my family, she’s mine and my siblings best friend, our childhood. My siblings and I were surprised with Darby a few days before Christmas, after begging so long for a dog. She’s given us some crazy stories to tell with friends and families, and we now have one more to add to our collection.

Love ya, Darby, but don’t freak us out like this again!