Dog Rescuer Teaches Wild ‘Shadow’ to Trust

Written by Ed Kostro of Illinois

I first got a telephone call about this homeless dog more than a month ago now, and I never dreamt that his rescue would be as difficult, as time consuming, as heart wrenching, or as frustrating as it turned out to be. I also never imagined that it would involve so many people in three different communities from law enforcement officers to senior citizens to young school children. Without their help and their compassion and concern for this dog’s welfare, Shadow’s rescue would never have been possible.

April 2012 – “Ed, we could really use your help. There’s an extremely skittish stray dog that’s been hanging around a woman’s backyard recently. No one can get close to him; he doesn’t trust anyone; and we’ll probably have to trap him to save him.”

I had trapped dozens of skittish stray dogs in the last several years, so I never gave a thought to the possibility that this dog would be any different. I loaded my dog traps into my truck and I was off, thinking I’d be home in a few hours after another successful capture. I had never been so wrong.

For the entire first week of my involvement, I never even spotted him. As soon as I set up my dog traps where he was supposed to be according to the latest sighting, I’d get a phone call from someone that he was already in another part of town. So I’d hurriedly pack up my traps and rush over there. By the time that I’d get there, he’d already be gone like a shadow in the night.

I soon sadly learned that he had already been chased by various animal control departments and pursued by both police officers and agitated citizens who had called the authorities to catch him. No one had been able to corner or capture him, and tales of him scaling six-foot fences to avoid capture soon began emerging. His distrust of humans was enormous.

He Walked in the Shadows

In my second week of frustration, I finally spotted him, and he was, indeed a ‘shadow.’ He knew how to blend in with his urban environment extremely well, and if you weren’t looking for him, you’d pass right by him lying under a tree or sprawled under a deck in someone’s yard. I soon began following him all over town attempting to determine where I could set up my traps to capture him, and he quickly began to recognize both me and my truck. Now, Shadow and I were sadly playing ‘Tag’ and he was winning.

Finally, the break came that I had been waiting for. Through a lot of footwork and telephone calls, we had finally determined where two of his favorite resting places were, and I luckily got to one of them right before his arrival. And now, my carefully baited dog traps were finally ready for him.

Several of us were now hiding nearby, and we soon spotted him heading directly toward my traps. We all crossed our fingers, and we now anxiously waited. Shadow took his sweet time sniffing all around them, but not entering either one. Finally, his immense hunger forced his move, and one of the trap doors snapped shut. All of us were overjoyed, and all of us were extremely overconfident.

Before we could secure the trap and place it into my truck, Shadow panicked inside its small confined space, attempting to shred its metal bars with his teeth. When that didn’t work, he quickly began head-butting the metal door like a rampaging bull – and he was very rapidly out of the trap and gone. We stood there in total disbelief. Shadow now had the distinction of being the first canine that had ever broken out of one of my dog traps.

Now what?

We spent the next week trying to decide what to do, and searching everywhere for him once more. Soon after his trap escape, he vanished. We checked and re-checked all of his now known hiding places, and Shadow was now gone without a trace.

Some of us now sadly began to suspect that he had been run down by a vehicle or even been poisoned by some cruel individual. We were all extremely upset by his disappearance, but one of our fellow pet rescuers refused to give up on him, and she began calling police departments in neighboring communities to find out if they had any reports of a dog matching his description. Amazingly, one of them told her that the dog we were pursuing sounded just like a dog that was now wandering their streets.