SWANZEY — After almost a month on the run, Diego, an 8-year-old hound was reunited with his owners on Thursday.
The lanky, long-hair dog slept in his Swanzey home with the couple and their five other dogs this week for the first time since he ran off on April 15 into the Yale Toumey Forest off Route 10 in Swanzey, owner Sharron Thomas said.
“Last night was the first night that either one of us got sleep,” Sharron Thomas said of herself and her husband, Ed Thomas, on Friday morning.
Diego is a borzoi, which the American Kennel Club says is a large sighthound. Before his ordeal, the pup weighed about 120 pounds, but he lost 15 in the forest. He also injured his paws and came back with a collection of ticks, pine pitch and twigs in his fur. Diego is expected to make a full recovery, Sharron Thomas said.
Diego escaped from the couple’s parked vehicle during a trip to the groomer in April. Sharron Thomas, who is executive director of Fast Friends Greyhound Adoption in Swanzey, said something must have spooked the dog, and he ran down Route 10 and into the Yale Toumey Forest, where he spent the next month.
“He ran down Route 10 and almost got hit by cars, and then he was gone,” Sharron Thomas said.
During the month he was gone, the couple circulated posters on Facebook, and Ed Thomas and a friend scoured the forest. The pair also immediately sought help from Granite State Dog Recovery, a Hooksett-based nonprofit that helps reunite lost dogs with their families.
“There was huge amount of worry that something was going to happen to him, and really, for the first seven days, we didn’t have a sighting of him, so we weren’t sure if he was still in the area,” Sharron Thomas recalled.
They weren’t the only ones worried. Their other dogs knew something was amiss, too.
“We had one dog that wanted to pee in the house a lot, so yeah, and some of the dogs, they were moping around a little bit,” Sharron Thomas said.
A Granite State Dog Recovery effort eventually led to the reunion. The organization sets up food stations, containing a mix of kibble and a smelly meat, and cameras to see if a lost pet makes their way to the site. They also set up a trap crate to catch lost dogs.
“They put so much effort into helping us retrieve Diego that we can’t express how much we appreciate all the time and energy the group put into helping us get him back,” Ed Thomas said.
Lauren Morrissey, a volunteer from Dublin who helped coordinate the effort to find Diego with the couple, said it’s the supplies, like cameras and traps, that attract families to utilize the organization’s services.
During the month, many of these traps were set up, and on Thursday afternoon, Diego finally took the bait.
“Five minutes after we left the scene, he was in the trap,” Sharron Thomas recalled.
Morrissey explained it’s common for lost dogs to go into what Granite State Dog Recovery volunteers call “lost dog mode,” where only food, water and shelter matter.
Sharron Thomas thinks he was able to survive all that time by finding shelter, possibly under a large tree. “He’s got a lot of pine pitch on him, so we figure it was somewhere near some pine tree.”
Morrissey said most dogs who go missing typically spend 10-14 days on the lam, so at almost a month, Diego’s disappearance was longer than average.
Ed and Sharron Thomas didn’t let him out of the crate he was caught in until they were all safely in their garage with the door closed, so Diego wouldn’t get spooked again and run off again.
“We have a couple of steps that go into the house, and he went right up those steps and was waiting for us to open up the door to come into the house,” Sharron Thomas recalled.
And then came the reunion with the other dogs.
“When he came back yesterday, they all met him one by one, and you know, he had different smells about him,” Sharron said. “But within probably 15 minutes, everybody had settled down, and it was like, OK, Diego’s back.”
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