Loulou’s unsupervised adventure was a relatively short adventure due to the quick and correct actions of her dedicated owners.
Loulou, a newly adopted dog, escaped from her owner’s office as the result of a perfect storm of events. The resident dog made an unexpected noise and movement which spooked Loulou and at the perfectly wrong time someone was entering the office and Loulou darted out the slightly opening of the door, it happens.
Loulou’s owners did all of the right things:
Day 1
- They reached out to friends and family for help and advice. A family member shared a link to a post on First Steps You should take when Your Dog is Lost
- They followed those instructions
- They contacted local Animal Control
- They contacted Lost Dogs of Wisconsin
- They created road signs and posted them around the neighborhood on the first day within hours of Loulou going missing
- They set out food and scent items at the office where Loulou went missing and made sure the food and scent items were in the range of the cameras.
- They set scent trails with liquid smoke and the resident dog all starting and looping back to the office feeding stations
- Almost immediately sightings began coming and feeding stations were setup either near existing cameras or with trail cameras.
- They called in an experienced thermal drone operator to fly over the areas where she was seen within the first 12 hours and the location where she was lost from. No heat signatures were seen.
Day 2
The following morning at 5am, Loulou was seen on camera eating at one of the office feeding stations and at the feeding stations behind the office building. A trap was set and additional motion activated cameras were added to the station where she ate the most food.
All of the cameras were monitored throughout the night. At 1am, Loulou appeared and expertly entered the trap and stepped OVER the trip plate to grab some food and then consume it just outside the trap. She repeated this same move at least four times. Each time avoiding the trip plate as we watched the live feed on our phones! After she left and did not return, we decided to replenish the food and add a strip of astroturf that would not only hide the trip plate but also act as an enlarged trip plate with the area immediately behind the trip plate where she was stepping would now be able to trigger the door.
We waited about an hour only to have a cat visit the trap and get trapped. This was both good and bad, we had to go release a local cat who was pretty not happy but at least we knew the trap trip plate adjustment was working.
Day 3
No sign of Loulou the rest of the night.
For the next 30 hours there were no sightings on cameras at the various locations and no sightings were phoned in from the area and path she had been frequenting every day.
Day 4
Just over 30 hours after Loulou was last seen at the trap, she was spotted at a Dunkin Donuts on the other side of the marsh. This is about a mile from the office however she would have had to cross the La Crosse River which is not completely frozen. Or she could have used one of the road bridges or found a way across the river in the marsh.
We immediately began working on new feeding stations, cameras and road signs in the area around Dunkin using Loulou’s patterns of movement from the last 5 days to determine where to place feeding stations and signage. As we were implementing these plans, the owner received a call from Animal Control that they had received a call from an apartment resident along the La Crosse River that a dog was stranded on a patch of ice surrounded by water. Loulou’s owner immediately drove to the location and worked with Animal Control to attempt to retrieve Loulou from the ice patch. In typical survival mode, Loulou darted off the ice patch as the owner approached and fortunately the water depth was only a few inches. She made her way to the shoreline and ran along the shoreline on the “office feeding station” side of the river but running away from the office. The owner asked the Animal Control officer to block her from going farther down the river bank towards the Mississippi. AC did that and Loulou darted up the bank and headed towards the trail that led back to the office.
11AM – Loulou is sighted on a patch of ice in the La Crosse River by a resident in the apartments by Festival Food. Resident calls Animal Control, who immediately called Loulou’s owner. Approximate location indicated by large yellow circle in the middle of the map.
11:26AM – Loulou is safely secured in the Office Trap indicated by the yellow circle at the bottom of map.
Loulou’s owner jumped back in her car and within minutes her phone began notifications of movement at the trap. Upon reaching the office parking lot, Loulou’s owner watched on the trap camera from her phone as Loulou approached the trap and contemplated entering, only to be either spooked or too scared. The next notification, approximately 2 minutes later, showed Loulou safely confined within the box trap. Loulou’s owner and coworkers carried the entire trap into a secure location and released Loulou from the trap.
Loulou was unharmed, no injuries were found. She was exhausted and will take some time to decompress from her survival mode and experience. Her owners are allowing her the time she needs to rest and recover from her ordeal.
Summary
Loulou was on the loose for just over 4 days, but it seemed like forever to Loulou and her owners. Her owners did everything RIGHT! Which is why this event has a happy ending and relatively quickly in terms of a lost dog from a new-to-the-dog location. They immediately sought assistance. They followed the directions of experienced lost dog trackers/trappers.
Through the national network of Lost Dog Trappers, the trapper from TN who originally worked on capturing Loulou and the trapper in La Crosse were able to compare notes and collaborate on Loulou as each lost dog is similar but yet different. With this information, the local trapper was confident Loulou’s range would be rather small (around 1 mile) and she was likely to return to her point of departure frequently. This is exactly what she did. She only ventured out of her area when she was spooked. We are not sure what spooked her to cross the river, it could have been she was aware of the cat being trapped or possibly she encountered some people who tried to catch her. We were fortunate that she was in a college student housing area and the students were concerned. The road signs posted throughout the neighborhood provided all of the students with information that allowed her to move within their community without pressure and pretending they didn’t see her. They called or texted the owner each sighting. This allowed us to know where she was or approximately where she was throughout each day until Thursday when she disappeared for the 30+ hours. However it was a group of observant college students who had seen the road signs and flyers in their neighborhood that spotted her in a completely new area, Dunkin Donuts and immediately knew it was Loulou and called the owner. Road signs and flyers once again prove their value in raising awareness and providing people with an easy way to alert the owners of their lost dog’s location.
