This story is about a stray dog that with the help of a handful of unknown people roamed a rural area of Columbus for months, always staying one step ahead of animal control officers, until Friday, when it stepped into a trap and began a journey toward a place far away from the Golden Triangle.
It has a happy ending and begins like this:
Last April, someone saw a full-blooded and young German shepherd in a wooded area off Lincoln Road. The person called authorities, and Steve Scott, a local animal control officer, went to retrieve the dog.
Scott does this a lot — about 50 percent of the calls animal control receives in Columbus and Lowndes County are about cats and dogs with no homes.
Looking around the area where the dog had been reported, Scott spotted it.
It ran away.
So Scott, knowing the dog had been left behind by someone and had no home, went to set a trap. His intention was to catch it, have it checked by a veterinarian, figure out its situation, take the next step. Taking the trap into the woods, he noticed something.
Spread across the forest bottom, about 20 yards off the road, were several water dishes and a mound of dog food. Someone, it seemed, had been tending to the dog.
Scott baited the trap with dog food and left. The next day, when he visited, the trap had not been touched. He was deciding what the next step should be when a man driving down Lincoln Road stopped and got out of his vehicle. When he did, the dog appeared from the woods and the man fed it a cooked steak. Then the dog vanished again.
The scene annoyed Scott, who, after four years as an animal control officer, knows a hungry dog is easier to catch.
Anyway, something like a pattern had been set.
For the rest of April and through May and June and July, Scott went back to Lincoln Road periodically trying to capture the German shepherd. Sometimes he brought along vet technicians. Sometimes he brought along people involved in animal rescue. They wanted to help get the dog off the streets.
They saw it regularly. They just never could catch it.
Scott said that sometimes when they lured the dog close with the offer of food, people driving by would stop and scold them for trying to catch it. The dog, startled, would run away. Voices were raised occasionally, Scott said. Once, when the trap had been set in the woods and baited with hamburger meat, Scott showed up and the meat was gone, the trap door had been lowered and the dog was nowhere to be found.
Why were his efforts being sabotaged?
Scott figures people who knew the dog was there and fed it regularly feared it would be euthanized if captured. Perhaps they were enamored some by the dog being a full-blooded German shepherd. It was black and tan, female, never aggressive and liked women more than men.
At any rate, Scott was undeterred. He kept at his job.
As August went by, he noticed that the dog seemed to be moving west along Lincoln Road toward Waverly Ferry Road.
On Friday, about 9:30 a.m., he saw the German shepherd along Waverly Ferry Road, and he went to get his trap. He stopped at an Alabama Street grocery store and bought some hot dogs.
When he got back, he baited the trap with some hot dogs and waited. The dog was clearly hungry. Within five minutes, Scott said, it was captured.
Scott drove it to the Columbus Lowndes Humane Society, where it sat in a metal kennel looking a little worried and a lot timid.
It is about a year old. It weighs about 50 pounds. It had on a blue collar. It has been checked for worms.
Scott said a rescue group out of Tuscaloosa is paying to have it spayed and then transported to Boston, Massachusetts, where it will be adopted.
William Browning was managing editor for The Dispatch until June 2016.
You can help your community
Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 32 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.