Date Missing: 5/9/20  Date Reunited: 5/24/20  Days Missing: 16

Polka Dot or Dot as she is sometimes called, a little pocket bully, began her scary adventure May 9th. She saw some turkeys and ran after them. Her humans looked for her for days. They live about 90 miles away from there and needed to go home for work. It wasn’t until May 15th that there was a sighting about 2.5 miles from where she started that they realized she hadn’t succumbed to the wilderness of the northern woods of Wisconsin. They went up to the sighting area and looked for a few days again. Dot was nowhere to be found.
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On May 17th realizing they were going to need help finding Dot they posted her missing on Facebook.  Get Toby Home responded to the post, guiding them from the distance on making posts, getting flyers and signs up and letting folks know in the area know she was missing. Folks that lived in the area saw the post and shared it so everyone around knew to keep an eye out for Dot.
One of our group members has a place about 20 miles from where she ran away and made arrangements with the owners to help with the larger street signs and flyers when she would return up there the following weekend if the owners and others looking in the area were not able to get her by then.  As luck would have it on Thursday evening May 21st a gentleman with a place up there made a separate post on Facebook of a dog that was hiding in his woodshed that was scared and ran out.  It was Dot!

On Friday we went up there with signs, flyers and trapping supplies. Permission was given from the woodshed owner to set a trap in hopes that she would circle back after it quieted down again. Once the trap was set the larger street signs were placed and flyers handed out, the owner immediately started to get calls of new sightings a few miles from the woodshed location she was seen at on May 21st.  The owners came up to also help distribute flyers and were there when the sighting calls came in; so drove to the area but had no luck trying to find Dot. She had vanished. They needed to return home for work with a very heavy heart.

Dot was traveling back and forth on a country highway covering about a 3.5 mile stretch. More traps were set at 2 additional sighting areas along with additional street signs placed. On Saturday we received another sighting call from a property owner that had seen Dot Friday night at his place and Saturday afternoon. We knew she was still in that area then and had not continued traveling north.
What was so special and so important here was the willingness of the property owners to not only grant permission to place the traps on their property but ability to check the traps a couple times throughout the day because cell coverage for the cameras wasn’t good in that area.  We would drive over early morning and evening to check the traps and re-bait them and the property owner would check them in between.

On Sunday we received a call from Dot’s owner that she was seen laying down in a ditch just a few feet off the highway. A young boy with very keen eyes saw her while he was out four wheeling with his family. They got the number off the sign down the road and called the owner. While our team was driving over to the sighting area, the family stayed by Dot and continued to just watch her to make sure she stayed in eyesight of them.

Our team, along with the caller, was eventually able to get Dot out of the creek and up the ditch using a quilt like a hammock.  Dot was now secured in the vehicle and safe! The owners were called, and to save time to get Dot the emergency vet care she needed, we immediately started driving to meet the owners half way as it was clear she needed immediate Vet care.  Dot was safely transferred to her owner’s car Sunday afternoon May 24th and was taken to the vet right away.

The next day we received word that Dot was doing OK and had slept later that evening at home. She seemed very quiet and confused but she was HOME!  After a week of being home we were given good news, Dot is back to her own playful self and is gaining the weight back that she lost while being on her adventure.