The Great Foster Dog Escape

I've mentioned this a couple of times before, but several years we were a foster home for northern breed dogs, primarily Samoyeds, with an occasional American Eskimo and Siberian Husky in the mix.  Samoyeds can be good dogs, but they need exercise every day.  My stepdaughter and walked our foster dogs about three miles almost every day year round unless there was a tornado watch, a thunderstorm, or a blizzard.

 One early December we started on our walk.  We had three dogs at the time, my stepdaughter’s Samoyed, a Siberian husky named Novak, and a foster Samoyed.  Since there were only two of us, we decided to leave the foster dog in the yard while we walked the other two dogs, then come back and walk him later.  Bad idea.  The foster dog wanted to come along, so he jumped our fence.  Then I totally messed up.  I managed to lose the leash on Novak as I tried to catch our runaway.  Novak was a wonderful dog in some ways, but he wasn’t loyal.  He ran off, along with the foster dog.

 Now we had two foster dogs running around loose in downtown DeKalb.  We didn’t panic.  This wasn’t the first time foster dogs had escaped.  Being an escape artist is often what made them foster dogs.

 We had dealing with escapees down to a routine.  We grabbed a couple of the little family band two way radios.  One person drove around in a car while the other one, usually me, road around on a bicycle because I could get places a car couldn’t.

 In any case, we went into our usual routine, but as I was riding I suddenly realized something that made this escape anything but routine.  Every December, DeKalb has carriage rides downtown with horses and a buggy.  We had two large, strong dogs running around within blocks of a team of horses.  I suddenly realized that we could face a runaway team of horses, people hurt, and lawsuits unless we got those dogs corralled quickly.

 I rode over to the staging area for the buggy, and sure enough the foster Samoyed was headed toward the horses.  I managed to get my bike between him and the buggy and herded him away, riding wildly across lawns, sidewalks, and alleys.  Looking back I realize I was lucky I didn’t break my neck.

 In any case, I figured out that I could ride faster than the dog could run on a straight-away.  That was probably due to a mixture of adrenaline on my part and him not being in very good shape.  He quickly figured that out too, and changed directions whenever I got up speed.

 The chase went on for what seemed like ten or fifteen minutes.  I could keep the dog headed away from the horses, and a couple of times I almost caught up to it, but in order to grab a collar or get a leash on it I needed to get off my bike.  That wouldn’t work because the dog was far faster than me on foot.  Finally I cornered him in a narrow dead-end area between two fences and got a leash on him.  He made no effort to growl or bite, and I led him back to the house.  We got a phone call a few minutes later that someone had the other dog.  The great foster dog escape was over.

Well, actually it wasn’t quite over.  I walked over to the buggy ride people to apologize for putting them in danger and got applauded by a crowd of people who had seen me chase the dog away but didn’t know that it was my bad decisions that put them in danger in the first place.  I tried to tell them that I was responsible for the dogs being loose, but they didn’t want to hear it.  I was the hero in their eyes.  I walked away feeling like a total phony.

 At least I learned some lessons from all of this.  From then on, if we were going to walk two dogs at a time the third dog stayed in the house.  And I made sure I never dropped a leash again.

If you enjoyed this, and would like to read about other adventures with foster dogs and other pets, feel free to stop by any of these other articles:

Animal Encounters-Pit Bull 

Animal Encounters-Gliders & Little Possums 

Animal Encounters-Inka & Novak 

Animal Encounters-Bats & Binturongs