Odette's Odyssey

It took Odysseus 10 years to find his way home from his epic voyage. He might not have made it home without his brave crew, but he had the wisdom and protection of Athena and a couple of other deities and demigods to help him along through the battles and monstrous encounters.

It took a lost, frightened mastiff about a month to find safe harbor, but it probably felt like 10 years to her. Blessedly, she had a full Mt. Olympus of protectors and watchers who literally watched over her through blistering heat, starvation, traffic and other dangers. She’s not home yet, but her new friends have every confidence that she’ll get her very own place in good time.

The dog went by several names, but her shelter name is Odette, so we’ll stick with that in case you want to visit her at Long Beach Animal Care Services (LBACS). LBACS has estimated her age at 4 years old.

“Instead of calling her the stray dog at Bixby Park, I just started calling her Bixby,” said Andrea Bouch, one of the two rock stars who headed the Herculean (wrong mythos, but so what?) epic rescue of the lost dog. “Then Peanut Butter — when she was secured, the trappers put a spoon of peanut butter next to her and it matched her coloring, so they called her Peanut Butter. Some of the people who live around the park were calling her Lassie because the locals thought she was trying to communicate with them [that she wanted to come home].”

Like Homer’s epic, Odette’s odyssey was long and involved, so you’ll be getting the abridged version. Bouch, who fostered when she lived in Oakland and has big dogs of her own, saw her in the beginning of August as she was walking Duncan, coincidentally a rescue mastiff, on First Street in Bluff Park.

“She was running really fast, and she was gone before you even could do anything,” Bouch said. “I went home and looked on Nextdoor, and there already had been sightings posted, like, all around.”

The sightings increased in the following days. Someone saw Odette crossing Broadway, and she crossed Ocean Boulevard multiple times. Bouch’s husband spotted Odette near Gaucho Cafe all the way on E. Shoreline Drive and then later saw her a few days later, miles away at Rosie’s Dog Beach.

“All the way down there — it was clear that she was covering a lot of ground,” Bouch said.

A few other things were clear: Odette wanted to be around people and other dogs but wasn’t ready to put her trust in humans. Her backstory was unknown — it seemed as if she’d had a litter. She may have been kept as a breeder and ran away or was dumped.

Another thing that was very clear was the shape of her ribcage sticking through her fur, showing signs of undernourishment. And there was the extremely hot weather.

“My mastiff is 3, and the heat is totally hard on him,” Bouch said. “As it started getting hotter and hotter, I really started worrying about the dog. So, I drove up to where a woman who had posted that she had seen her two mornings in a row, and I started putting water bowls out. My husband saw her again at Rosie's Dog Beach, and she was being seen like multiple times a day all around the city. So, I just started to track all the sightings and figure out any patterns of where I could leave water and food for her. She was getting skinnier and the heat was really going to be a problem for her.”

Bouch figured out from the growing number of posts on Nextdoor that dozens of people desperately wanted to help Odette but had no idea what to do with a dog that bolted every time they tried to coax her to them.

“Mastiffs are incredibly human-oriented — they lock onto their person, they’re bodyguard dogs, Bouch said. “And so, it broke my heart that she was on her own. Between the heat and that she was really fearful and losing weight, I started spending more and more time on it.”

Bouch connected with Kendra Dowan, another experienced rescuer and foster, on Nextdoor. Dowan has a master’s degree in youth, family and community sciences and spent 10 years in the field of behavior modification for kids.

“Dog behavior is not that far from our behavior,” she said. “We all have stories. I don't have any experience with trapping a stray dog, but I know enough about rescue and behavior to know that we needed her coming to the same spot over and over again.”

Bouch and Dowan formed a dream team. Knowing that a plan is the first thing to have where animals are concerned, they hatched one. Bouch had been feeding the dog near a tree in Bixby Park, and she and Dowan decided to centralize the feeding spots so that Odette would be familiar with it and be one step closer to capture.

“They’re both trying so hard not to look at each other, but they’re both totally looking at each other.” Andrea said of Kendra and Odette’s tableau vivant. Photo courtesy of Kendra Dowan

“Many humans’ best intentions, if they love dogs, is to chase after it or feed it,” Bouch “And that was actually going to work against her because she then had no one safe place to go. She felt chased all over, and she was being fed all over the city. Kendra said that if we were going to have a chance to catch her, we needed to get her hungry so that she came back to the spot where she knew food would be.”

They designated the tree behind the stage where Odette had been seen often. The dog ate the food that people left, and Dowan hand-fed her a few times.

“She ate chicken out of my hand, and she was like, I want to trust you,” Dowan said. “She's been somebody's dog. I mean, she seems like she knows humans, but she's clearly very fearful.”

The Odette Odyssey began picking up wind. Dowan contacted Shivonne Ortiz at Shelter Street Dogs, a local nonprofit that provides rescue and rehabilitation to dogs abandoned and born on the streets, for continued advice. Then, she and Bouch took the helm on social media.

“At that point, Kendra and I kind of hatched a plan to centralize the thread because there were maybe still five to 10 Nextdoor posts floating around, with people commenting on them,” Dowan said. “So, I created that central post that said, ‘If you see a sighting, this is where we're going to go.’ Then, people started commenting that there were posts on Reddit, Facebook and also the Ring camera app about her. We started to designate monitoring them.”

A couple of people volunteered to monitor the other social media posts. Others volunteered to feed Odette breakfast or dinner and left water in the designated location. People started piling in comments — most of them helpful, Dowan said — and soon, Odette had a core pantheon of helpers.

Bouch and Dowan also set up protocols for feeding and caring for Odette.

“We still needed everybody to know, don't feed her, don't chase her,” Dowan said. “We're not trying to trap her right now. We have to get her coming to one place. We had to create consistency because animal control was being called dozens of times a day about her, but they wouldn't come out unless you had her or you could prove consistency in a routine. So that became our goal: can we get her at the same place at the same time for three days in a row?”

Sightings of Odette continued, and so did efforts to entice her, which were rewarded by the dog bolting at the last minute. At one point, a woman spotted her curled up in a planter in a complex. Bouch and Kendra went to the spot and found the dog curled up in a tiny circle, as small as she could make herself.

“At that point, we knew she was getting tired,” Bouch said. “It was really hot — it was in the 90s that week. We knew she was probably dehydrated, and she was getting skinnier. We texted the woman who lives across the street, who came down, so then there were three of us. And we were like, maybe this is our chance. I had a bag of chicken that I had brought with me. So Kendra was able to feed her again. And then she bolted by us again and took off. We’d thought maybe that was our chance —that was really sad. Then, I had to go out of town.”

To avoid a tragic ending to Odette’s epic journey, divine intervention was essential. The stars finally aligned, although the trajectory wasn’t in a perfectly straight line.

Dowan and Ortiz from Shelter Street Dogs discussed a plan for trapping Odette. Meanwhile, two rescue superstars — Cynthia Lopez and “elusive-dog trapper” Mike Noon — learned about the effort via the rescue-social-media grapevine. Not surprisingly, Lopez was already in contact with Ortiz, and she knew Dowan via social media.

“I first encountered a Facebook post on [Odette], but I dismissed it, thinking it was being handled,” Lopez said. “I then received a text from a friend regarding this same dog and that her foster person, Kendra, was trying to help. It took me a minute to connect that Kendra was someone I knew on the socials. At that point, I messaged [an animal control officer], and she confirmed knowing about this dog but was unable to capture her, as the dog was covering too much ground. She was planning to inform Mike Noon, an amazing and super-experienced trapper, once [the Nextdoor community] developed a pattern.”

There aren’t even six degrees of separation between people actively involved in animal rescue — everyone knows someone who knows someone else. Lopez told the animal control officer that she’d contact Noon.

“Mike is a dear friend — he’s taught me so much about trapping and safely securing flighty dogs over the last almost 10 years,” she said.

Lopez began coming to the park every day to observe Odette and try to “learn her.” She observed the dog’s body language and how close she could safely get to her. She asked Dowan and Bouch to request that the community stop feeding her, except for the one feeding station in the park, to create a consistent routine and track her pattern.

“I quickly learned that she loved other dogs and was so drawn to children,” Lopez said. “I watched her try to follow every dog that was being walked, and she would go up to the younger kids leaving the playground. Of course, many people shooed her away, understandably so. They were unsure of this strange, unleashed, large dog. But her body language was soft, playful and friendly.”

Dowan took a screenshot of the protocols for trapping and posted it on the Odette threads on all social media. A few posters pushed back on not feeding her — who wants to see a dog go hungry?

“I said, hey, you guys, we're talking to professionals,” Dowan said. “They said, don't feed her because we need her hungry to trap her.”

The first trapping attempt went disappointingly awry. Bouch was still out of town, and Dowan and her friend Rita were bagging dog food for pets of unhoused people when a call came in from Lopez — Odette was in the park. Dowan sent Rita out to get a rotisserie chicken to feed her with, and Lopez called Noon, who came with his trap at 8:30 p.m. But Odette knew a Trojan horse when she saw one.

“We got her in the playground with all the gate doors shut,” Dowan said. “We had the trap in there, but she wasn’t falling for it. She got spooked — she went to all the doors and was just pushing them, pushing them. Finally, one opened, and she got out, and we were like, oh, shit. So, we moved the trap to the tree [where they fed Odette]. And then, Cynthia and I went walking around. [Odette] came back, sniffing the trap, doesn’t go in — gone. It was 11:15 at this point. So we're like, all right. A for effort.”

More sightings were reported. Bouch’s husband sent her shots of Odette trying to horn in on outings involving kids and the family dog. Bouch was still out of town, but she communicated the sightings to Dowan and Lopez. All attempts to corral the dog failed. Her ribcage was getting more pronounced, and her rescuers felt the clock ticking.

Finally, Athena sent her agents in the form of two dogs and their human.

Dowan’s friend Rita was looking at social media when she saw Snapchat videos of a woman walking her two huskies. Odette had followed them home, and the woman enclosed her in a gated area of her apartment building.

“Rita was like, I know that dog,” Dowan said. “What a small world — if Rita hadn't been here on Thursday night with me, she would have never recognized that dog. She lives out of town!”

Rita texted the woman and got the story from her. She put her in touch with Dowan, who was driving home from Corona.

“At 10 p.m., I'm talking to this girl — ‘You have the dog?!” Dowan said. “And she happened to be one of my friend's friends. Small world! This woman did exactly the right thing — she acknowledged her and cooed to her. [Odette] followed her dogs home, she opened her gate, the dog followed her in, and the lady was able to close her in the gated part of her apartment complex.”

Lopez said that Odette’s capture was thanks to luck and a community willing to follow directions and be patient.

 “I was called and sped over,” Lopez said. “Another neighborsat there watching the door to avoid anyone letting her out until I arrived. I used their presence and the tight space as an advantage — I slipped the lead under the courtyard door, had the good neighbor assist in tossing it loosely over her, and I stuck both hands under the gate to properly secure the lead by closing the door on it. I entered the courtyard and double-leashed her. I sat with her until Mike arrived with the humane trap. We slowly guided her into the trap to avoid her escaping again and to properly secure her for us to load into the car.”

It was after 10 p.m. and the shelter was closed, so Lopez and Noon loaded Odette in Lopez’ car. Lopez carried the trap with Odette in it to her back patio and transferred the dog to a crate.

“I probably slept three hours,” Lopez said. “I spent the majority of the night with her since she kept seeking me.”

“I landed to the news!” said Bouch, who was coming home from her work trip.

The following morning, Lopez brought Odette to Long Beach Animal Care Services (LBACS), where she met with a hero’s welcome with much fanfare — quiet fanfare, because she needed to chill. LBACS put a stray hold on her — at this writing, no one has claimed our girl.

When Dowan and Bouch announced the capture to the rest of the community, they responded with virtually audible cheers and sighs of relief. There were some comments expressing worry that LBACS would euthanize Odette, but Dowan respectfully dismissed them.

“I had adopted a reactive dog out of there before, and I know a couple of volunteers there, so I knew it wasn't [like other] shelters,” she said. “Shivonne and Cynthia also said, no, LBACS is good. If [the dog] needs any medical, they can do that. They'll spay her. And if you can foster her, please, by all means, foster her through the shelter.”

Odette’s Odyssey was, in its own way, a hero’s epic because the dog was using her own skills and logic to find her way to safety. But there’s no question that the animal community comprised the real heroes.

“You have to have a community,” Dowan said. “Dozens of people did everything from refilling water bowls and food under the tree at different times to connecting posts from Reddit, keeping an eye out, feeding back information that helped us create a pattern and eventually get lucky.”

Bouch, who has lived in Long Beach less than a year, said that the experience built community for her — animal-welfare efforts seem to have a sourdough starter effect. She and Bouch expressed gratitude to the people on the social media threads; to the woman and her dogs who guided Odette to a safe harbor; to Lopez and Noon, who spent unpaid hours watching for Odette and lugged a trap to Long Beach not once but twice; and to LBACS, with its loving staff and volunteers and its Compassion Saves programs. The shelter does not stand apart from the community.

“It’s the community that secures the dogs and takes them to the shelter,” Dowan said. “I think that's the first place people look when their dog is missing, which is also why I'm always like, take the dog to the shelter.”

Dowan encouraged people to foster dogs, donate food, or join up as a volunteer. At the very least, come visit Odette.

Odysseus was arguably the hero of his epic journey, but Odette’s Odessey was rife with heroes, and her epic story hasn’t yet concluded. As Dowan said, the shelter is just the starting place for animals, but it takes a community to help create happy endings. Odette and her crew can rest for a while, but the doggie deities are still at work to bring her home forever.

Thank you, LBC.

YOURS DROOLY

This week’s adoption lineup includes a dog whom Kendra Dowen is fostering, a longtime foster from Long Beach Animal Care Services (LBACS), and a special-needs LBACS girl. Adoption instructions for each doggie are in boldface. Odette is available, too! You can visit any of the shelter dogs, Odette included, at LBACS, Wednesday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at 7700 E. Spring St. at the entrance to El Dorado Park (no parking fee for shelter visitors).

VIXON is a 3-year-old, 70-pound lovebug looking for her people! She’s spayed and fully vetted and is dog friendly with proper introductions. She loves people, kids especially! Vixon would love a family who will include her in their adventures. She loves the outside but is a lazy inside dog! A few plush toys, a spot on the couch and her BFF are a few of her favorite things. She is house-trained, and crate-trained, walks well on a leash (although she will test leash limits!) and is eagerly awaiting people to love on her! Interested or have any questions? Reach out to @biggieboys_fosterlegacy on IG, or email Kendra.k.dowen@gmail.com.

Do you crave a lively partner who would love to go hiking but is also an affectionate lapdog? An athletic dog who will protect you from a mountain lion but is afraid of the vacuum cleaner? If you think that a dog who is a 60-pound furry shadow with the IQ of an honor roll student and the spirit of a toddler in a bounce house sounds like the perfect companion for you, you should definitely adopt MALAIKA!

Malaika is only 2 but has been in foster for about half her days. Her human says that she loves to play with other dogs but can be wary of strangers. She warms up quickly, though, with a handful of treats and some butt scratches. She’s a sucker for a good belly rub, and she’s house-trained and crate-trained, A petite version of a German shepherd with loyalty to match, Malaika is an attentive companion for an active adult household. Adopt her here, through LBACS.

Like her name, BOBBI SOX is adorable and sweet. She’s also a special-needs girl. LBACS took her in after she was hit by a car and had a seizure. The veterinary staff found that the injury had caused head trauma, and she now has a wobbly walk. Bobbi is only about 8 months old — if she’s come this far, she deserves a good rest of her life. Shelter staff and volunteers will advise adopters on Bobbi’s special needs. Can you address them or even foster her for a while? You’ll be rewarded with cuddles, kisses, lap naps and a grateful friend. Here’s Bobbi Sox’s adoption information.

TAIL-WAGGIN' AND NOSE-BOOPIN' EVENTS

Cats in Comics art show

Cool Cat Collective, Long Beach’s gallery-cum-weird-boutique-cum-kitty rescue has curated a collection of amazing cat-themed comic strips for this latest exhibit. Also, you’ll learn a little cat-comic-strip history!

The Cats in Comics art show is installed at Cool Cat Collective, 2741 E. 4th St., C, Long Beach. Free to view

Pet Loss and Illness Support Group monthly meeting

If you’re grieving the death of a pet or are feeling anticipatory grief for one who’s ill, Helen Sanders Cat Paws invites you to a safe space to share your grief. Here,CatPAWS’ cofounder Deborah Felin-Magaldi describes her connection with grief over the loss of a pet whose life she shared:

“Does anyone remember the song ‘Mr. Bojangles’? A line from it hit me even when I was young when I first heard it and already knew the loss of a childhood cat. It has stayed with me ever since:

“‘He spoke with tears Of 15 years how his dog And him traveled about. His dog up and died, He up and died. After 20 years, he still grieves.'

On the third Saturday of each month, you can talk about your loved pets, show photos, even laugh at funny memories.

This month’s Pet Loss and Illness Support Group takes place Saturday, Sept. 19, 11 a.m.–noon at the Bayshore Church, 5100 E. The Toledo, Long Beach.

Frost Fund’s Annual Fall Festival Fundraiser

Pull on your Western boots, button up your flannels, gallop across the county line, and celebrate autumn with Frost Fund at Chapman Crafted Beer! Enjoy an evening of yummy food, line dancing, local brews, raffle prizes, autumn-themed games and local vendors. Your doggy can dress up, too, and enter the costume contest, and children are more than welcome. Strollers are fine, too, but watch out for paws and wagging tails. Through social and news media, Frost Fund finds placement in local and out-of-state rescues, sanctuaries and forever homes for dogs and cats in dire need of rescue. Long Beach Animal Care Services (LBACS) pets have been beneficiaries of their volunteer efforts. Like many small nonprofits, Frost Fund is financed through donations and fundraisers like this one, so purchase tickets here. Early bird tickets are on sale until Aug. 23. If you’re currently a student, use code YOUTH at checkout for a discount, and bring your student ID at the event.

The Fall Festival Fundraiser takes place Oct. 24, 4 p.m.–8 p.m. at Chapman Crafted Beer, 123 N. Cypress St., Orange. Ticket prices vary.

Need a low-cost veterinarian, information about trapping community cats, places to volunteer, pet food, veterinary assistance, rescues and shelters to adopt from — anything pet related? Follow this link for resources. Please add your own ideas in the Comments section.