Everything sensible failed.
For sixteen months, volunteers on Kangaroo Island tried to catch a nine-pound miniature Dachshund named Valerie, and Valerie declined. They set traps. They ran surveillance cameras. They staked out bait stations overnight, salting them with her favorite treats. She was seen, photographed, and filmed. She was never once caught.
What finally worked was not a better trap. It was a torn-up t-shirt belonging to her owner, dragged across the ground to make a scent trail. Valerie followed her person’s smell into an enclosure and let the door close behind her.
That detail is the whole story, and it is worth understanding, because it explains something most people get wrong about a dog who has been missing for a long time.
What happened
Valerie went missing in November 2023, while her people, Georgia Gardner and Josh Fishlock, were camping on Kangaroo Island, off the coast of South Australia. She slipped out of her pen. Strangers tried to grab her, and she did what a frightened small dog does: she ran, into the bush, and kept going.
Her owners searched for days. Then the trip ended, and they went home without their dog. By any reasonable estimate she should not have survived a week. Kangaroo Island holds kangaroos, wallabies, possums, snakes, wedge-tailed eagles, and a robust feral cat population. She weighed less than nine pounds.
More than a year later, locals started reporting sightings of a tiny dog in a pink collar. Kangala Wildlife Rescue, the nonprofit that eventually got her, confirmed it in March 2025 on the strength of firsthand accounts and video: Valerie was alive, and she was uncatchable. She ran from any human and from any vehicle. Through storms she would simply disappear for days at a time.
Survival mode is not the same as being feral
Here is the part rescuers understand and the rest of us usually do not.
A dog who has been surviving alone for a long stretch is not running away because they have forgotten you. They are running because their nervous system has switched over. In survival mode, a lost dog stops behaving like a pet and starts behaving like a wild animal: hypervigilant, deeply suspicious of humans, and reactive to anything that moves fast or calls loudly. That includes people they love. This is precisely why the standard advice for a lost dog is to stop chasing, stop calling, and start baiting.
Valerie ran from strangers for 529 days. She did not run from her own person’s smell.
Scent goes underneath the fear response in a way that a voice does not. So the rescue leaned into it: after the traps and the cameras had failed, volunteers built a large pen with a roof, a remote-controlled door, and multiple wildlife cameras, planted where she had last been seen. They filled it with her toys and with clothing carrying her owners’ scent, restocked it daily with roast chicken, and waited.
She followed the trail in. They closed the door remotely.
The three hours after
Catching her was the beginning, not the end.
Kangala directors Jared and Lisa Karran described a dog still fully in survival mode, one who now had to learn how to be around people again. Lisa put on Georgia’s t-shirt herself, went into the enclosure, and simply sat with Valerie until she settled. She opened the crate and offered roast chicken.
Within two or three hours, Valerie was curled up in a volunteer’s lap. Jared, who had spent more than a year failing to catch this dog, said he would not have believed she could settle that fast.
They kept her for a decompression period, monitoring her behavior rather than rushing her home. Which was the right call, and also, if you have ever brought home a terrified rescue, a familiar one.
She came back heavier
On May 7, 2025, Valerie was reunited with Georgia and Josh. Georgia burst into tears; Valerie, by her account, ran up wagging, making small happy noises, wriggling.
The physical postscript is almost comic. Valerie went missing at under nine pounds. She came back at nearly thirteen. Wherever she was living and whatever she was eating out there, she was not merely surviving it. Georgia’s summary: she is stockier now, strong, and honestly healthier than they are.
Valerie is home in Albury, New South Wales, and settling in fine.
What to actually do if your dog bolts
Valerie’s rescue is a lovely story and a usable one. The tactics that worked on Kangaroo Island are the tactics that work in a suburb.
- Do not chase, and do not shout. Both push a frightened dog further away. Running toward a dog in survival mode confirms that you are a threat.
- If you see them, sit down. Crouch, turn side-on, avoid eye contact, and be boring. Scatter food and wait. Let the dog choose to approach.
- Use your own scent. Leave worn, unwashed clothing, their bed, and their toys at the place they went missing, and at your door. Scent is the signal that gets through when nothing else does.
- Feed one spot, consistently. A single reliable food station in the sighting area, restocked at the same time daily, builds a pattern you can eventually close a door on.
- Get cameras up. Trail cameras tell you where the dog actually is at 3 a.m., which is rarely where people think.
- Get the sightings network working. Every one of the confirmed Valerie sightings came from a local who had been told to look. Post, ask, and make it easy for people to report.
- Microchip, and keep the registry current. A chip is worthless if the phone number on it is from two moves ago.
Sixteen months of expert effort could not outsmart one frightened Dachshund. A dirty t-shirt did it in a day. That is not a fluke; it is a reminder of which sense a dog actually lives in.
References
- “After 529 days alone in the Australian bush, Valerie the mini dachshund is home.” NPR, 30 May 2025. npr.org
- “Tears of joy as Valerie the runaway dachshund finally reunited with owners.” CNN, 7 May 2025. cnn.com
- Kangala Wildlife Rescue, public updates on the Valerie search and recovery, March-May 2025. kangalawildliferescue.com
