She approached Minnie with her collar and leash, lowered herself to the ground and, in a happy tone, called out, “Minnie! Minnie Moo!” “I think if she had seen me, she would have bolted out of there,” he said.īlake also happened to be nearby. He carefully and quietly got out of his car with a Snappy Snare, used to catch animals, and a bowl of food. He found the caller, who pointed out where Minnie was. He decided to set up some cameras in the area and just as he pulled onto Jermain Avenue, he received a call from a woman who said she had spotted Minnie in the cemetery. He was convinced the fireworks had scared her off and she had now run to the woods on the either side of the road near Oakland Cemetery. Minnie was not spotted again for 17 days.Įvery day, Henn walked up every trail he could find, looking for her paw prints or any sign of her. I figured the next night she would be back for sure,” he said, but the next night he heard, though the camera, fireworks go off in the area, and that was it. “She had a delicious meal and then she walked away and she ate. In a different place, Henn set up a smörgåsbord of food-bacon, hot dogs, liverwurst, rotisserie chicken-and that enticed her back out of hiding. The sound of the door closing only made her more fearful. The door closed behind her as she got out. “Then all of a sudden, as the door was closing, she darted out like a bullet. Minnie disappeared from the cameras’ views again, so he set up another feeding station in a different location, hoping the change in the environment would work. Tedd Henn has hundreds of photos and video from his trail cameras that captured Minnie during her days on the loose, including this one from May 17. If she took one more step, the door would have closed and she would have been caught,” he said. So he changed the style of trap and camouflaged it to look like a bush with an opening. When he moved on to setting up box traps with the bowls of food to coax her out, she would come by, but just never would go inside the trap.

He thought, “Oh my God, how am I going to get this dog in a trap? She’s scared of a bowl!” One night, she came back doing “a belly crawl-up to the bowl with her back legs stretched out,” before grabbing a piece of kibble and then darting away, Henn recalled. With her tail tucked between her legs, she would walk around them, then disappear. Minnie, approximately 41 pounds, had grown up in the woods in South Carolina, was rescued and ended up at the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons in Wainscott, where she was adopted out about six months ago.

I knew she was going to be extremely hard to catch, the way her behavior was,” he said. She was so skittish that if a leaf blew, she would jump 20 feet in the blink of an eye. Soon, he had hundreds of pictures of her from the cameras.

He placed the bowls Minnie had used in the woods under cameras and put out the food and a scent-”like a western BBQ,” he said-at lure her out. Henn uses a highly-trained tracking dog, a drone with a zoom-in camera, and trail cameras that send alerts to his cellphone to find lost dogs. Through the nearly eight-week ordeal, there were rarely any in-person sightings of Minnie, despite the many flyers circulated. “She certainly gave us the run-around,” Henn said of Minnie. Holley put Henn in touch with Arline Blake, who was Minnie’s dog walker and helped look for her every day. Henn is with Long Island Dog Search and Rescue, based in Sayville, and Carol Holley, a Sag Harbor woman whose dog he found after 18 days this winter called him in for this new mission. Teddy Henn, a dog detective of sorts, started searching for Minnie the very night she went missing. Bystanders tried to grab Minnie, but she ran off.įor nearly two months, the year-and-a-half old beagle/German Shepherd mix ran loose in the woods between Noyac and Sag Harbor Village, evading capture, even from an experienced trapper. She slipped out of her collar and, in the commotion, her owner fell and broke her hip in three spots. Independent/Courtesy ARF Hamptonsīack on April 15, Minnie and her owner were out for a walk at Long Beach when the skittish dog was spooked by a hang-glider. Minnie just after she was found on June 13.

Snappy snare leash