Christa Garnett-Boyd and her family had mostly given up hope of finding Scout, the Boykin spaniel that went missing during a hunting trip almost five years ago near Cruger.
The Madison woman had journeyed several times, including once as far as the mountains of North Carolina, to check out the possibility that a found or rescued dog she saw online bearing a resemblance to Scout might be hers, only to be disappointed.
She kept a Facebook page going, “Helping SCOUT Get Home,” but it was mostly being used these days to post information about other people’s missing dogs.
Then came the tip last month of another possible match, an overbred, sickly female who had been found in Tipton County, Tennessee, and named “Cadence” by a Memphis animal rescue organization that took her in.
DNA testing followed, confirming that Cadence was a sibling of a dog owned by the South Carolina breeder from whom Garnett-Boyd had purchased Scout.
But the clincher came Wednesday night at a parking lot of a Lowe’s store in Southaven. That’s when Garnett-Boyd rendezvoused with the head of Tails of Hope Dog Rescue and saw Scout in person, tethered on a leash about 20 to 30 yards away.
“She kind of started sniffing the air, and then she turned and looked at me,” recalled Garnett-Boyd, an investigator with a state agency she preferred not to name. “And then she started just really pulling pretty hard on the leash and pulled toward me. I sat down on the ground, and she came up to me, started licking my face and being puppylike a little bit. It was a really sweet moment.”
The reuniting was a long time in coming.
Scout went missing on Dec. 7, 2018, while accompanying two of Garnett-Boyd’s sons and their friends on a duck-hunting excursion to Mathews Brake National Wildlife Refuge, close to the Leflore County line.
For months afterward, Garnett-Boyd spent days at a time camping out in the area, often in her SUV. She would be accompanied frequently by the son who was closest to Scout or other family members and friends to help in the search. People in the community pitched in, too.
“I can’t tell you how many people that we have never met before came out and looked for her physically, made calls, offered fliers up, sent out mailouts, bought cameras and put them out, like game cameras to look for her, donated their animal traps for us to use,” she said.
“That community there is incredible. They will forever, even if we had never found her, have a piece of my heart and my utmost respect because they just don’t make people like that everywhere.”
When Scout wound up in early August at Tails of Hope Dog Rescue, the organization’s founder, Ginger Harper, said she could tell the dog had been neglected. Her hair was matted, her eyes and ears infected, her skin callused in several spots, signs that she had been mostly living outdoors. She had an enlarged heart, and she had been bred a lot.
Boykin spaniels sell for $1,000 to $2,500, according to Garnett-Boyd. She speculated that whoever initially found Scout made money off her by breeding her repeatedly or gave her to someone who did.
Harper said Tails of Hope, which specializes in rescuing dogs with medical issues, probably spent around $3,500 on Scout’s care. But she wasn’t ready to turn the dog over to Garnett-Boyd until she was sure that Cadence and Scout were one and the same.
“Our purpose is to make sure that we are giving the dog back to its rightful owner,” Harper said.
The dog’s age, size and the relative closeness between where she was lost and where she was found suggested she might be Scout. But since she was not equipped with an identifying microchip, there was no way to be sure, Harper said. That’s why Harper suggested the DNA test.
Would she have released the dog to Garnett-Boyd without the positive match? “I guess it would have really depended on if the dog remembered her and she remembered the dog.”
Scout passed that test, too, in the Southaven parking lot.
“Scout went running to her,” Harper said. “That was good enough for me.”
It hasn’t taken long for Scout to get readjusted to her home in Madison. She’s sleeping a lot, eating well and resuming her friendship with Pepper, an 11-year-old French bulldog who lives there, too.
“That was probably the sweetest reunion of all,” said Garnett-Boyd. “They have been lying around, palling around, being old ladies together.”
As for Harper, whose organization rescues a couple of hundred dogs a year, she has the satisfaction of a job accomplished.
“Scout is exactly where she needs to be. She’s back with her family,” she said.
“Not every story of a lost dog ends up like this, so I was very happy about it.”
- Contact Tim Kalich at 662-581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
