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Missoula couple fly in search dog to find missing cat |
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By JAMIE KELLY of the Missoulian missoulian.com | Posted: Wednesday, August 18, 2010 10:57 pm
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| Ricky has been missing for 10 days and Mitchell says he will spare no expense to get him back. Photo by KURT WILSON/Missoulian |
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Reward for Ricky
If you happen to find Ricky, a 7-year-old Himalayan cat, collect your $1,000 reward by calling 251-2984. Ricky disappeared in Lower Miller Creek on Aug. 9.
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Yes, George Mitchell admits it.
He has the money to fly a beagle from Arkansas to look for his cat.
And sure, that sounds extravagant. But we all put our money where our values are, right?
"This is just important stuff to me," Mitchell said Wednesday afternoon as Rio the beagle planted his sniffer in the grass of a Lower Miller Creek park.
Mitchell and his wife Toni Taylor have been missing Ricky, their 7-year-old Himalayan, for 10 days.
And for 10 days, there has been a $1,000 reward for anyone who leads the couple to their kitty (an offer that still stands, by the way).
But that kind of cash and a stack of "missing cat" posters haven't yielded a Ricky-Mitchell-Taylor reunion. And so on Wednesday afternoon, a plane landed at the Missoula International Airport carrying Lisa Bukowcyzk and Rio, the Little Rock, Ark., duo that traveled halfway across the country to track down the elusive puss.
Feline Finders to the rescue once again!
Well, maybe.
For the price of a short-notice plane ticket for a woman and her hound, plus a $500 fee, Mitchell and his wife may or may not get Ricky back. He's an outdoor kitty, and the success rate of finding those "is about 50-50," said Bukowcyzk, who has run her two-dog operation for three years now.
Success is much more likely for indoor cats - 90 percent are found.
***
Only two hours after the Feline Finders landed, Rio was picking up a scent in Kelsey Park off Linda Vista Drive. He had prepared his snout for this search, burying his nose in a baggie full of Ricky fur plucked off the cat's bed.
When Ricky wandered away, he apparently went west.
And Mitchell knows the reason for his wanderlust. Ricky used to be an apartment cat, and only later discovered the instinctive tug of wide-open spaces.
"When we got him, he didn't know there was an outdoors," he said. "So then we started to introduce him to it. And then ..."
And then Mitchell began searching for cat detectives.
He found one in Great Falls. How convenient, he thought. Only that shop had closed up a while ago and moved to the East Coast.
Still, he got on the phone with its owner, who told him her dogs don't fly. But she also recommended Feline Finders as one of the best cat-sleuthing operations in the country.
So Bukowcyzk and Rio took their first job in the Big Sky.
But it's not like they haven't been to faraway locales before. When a cat is missing, some people will do almost anything to get him or her back.
"They're their babies," said Bukowcyzk. "Your child might have four legs and fur, but it's still your child."
Mitchell didn't hesitate to make the airline reservation or write the check. Money is just money, but cats?
"They're my favorite people," said Mitchell. "Animals to me are a real big thing. You can take my house, and take my car, and take my retirement."
***
Mitchell is semi-retired, an inventor who holds several patents and now trades commodities. He and Toni moved to Missoula from Burbank, Calif., in 2003.
Five years ago, their cat died of diabetes. And so, their house devoid of the pitter-patter of little paws, they found Ricky in the classified ads. He was living in an apartment.
Now they miss him, and Mitchell said he will spare no expense - you really believe him when he says it, too - to get Ricky back.
Things were looking hopeful Wednesday. Rio found a scent. But then he got tired and thirsty.
He was to go out and sleuth some more in the evening, and will spend tomorrow as well on Ricky's trail.
Most cats are not found "nose to nose," said Bukowcyzk. It's more likely that Rio will "hit" on several places, and those will be the clues that lead to Ricky. Many cats are found days after, she said.
"It's a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle now, and it will become a 25-piece jigsaw puzzle," she said.
Sometimes, the puzzle is solved with the worst result imaginable, and the next event is a burial.
What if that's the case with Ricky? Mitchell has thought it over.
"Well," he said, "even if he's not of this Earth anymore, he's had a great five years."
Reporter Jamie Kelly can be reached at 523-5254 or at
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Serviceman found way to bring ‘my darling friend’ from Bahrain to U.S. |
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Serviceman found way to bring ‘my darling friend’ from Bahrain to U.S.
By JOE NICKELL of the Missoulian | Posted: Saturday, August 7, 2010
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| Dustin St. John pauses with Habebe on Friday at St. John’s great-grandparents’ home in East Missoula. Habebe was adopted by St. John when he was a Navy mechanic living in Bahrain, eventually finding a way to bring the dog home with him. Photo by TOM BAUER/Missoulian |
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Life in Bahrain can be a lonely existence when you’re a young American Navy mechanic. Living among the locals, Dustin St. John missed having a close friend with whom he could vent his troubles, someone who would always be there when he came home.
So St. John went out in the streets and found his best friend. Habebe didn’t talk, and only stood knee-high to St. John; but in that blonde, energetic saluki, St. John found the best listener he’d ever known.
“I just loved his personality, right off,” recalls St. John, a Missoula native who spent four years as an aviation support technician for the Navy in Japan, the Philippines, Bahrain and Iraq. “From the beginning, he always listened real well and never ran off. He was just a great dog.”
As St. John spoke on Friday morning at his great-grandparents’ home in East Missoula, Habebe (literally, “my darling friend” in Arabic) lay happily panting in the moist, lush grass.
Born in a land of sand and saltwater, Habebe has endured more in his short life than most of us experience in decades: He’s lived off garbage in a country where his kind are treated as vermin, flown around the world, visited Amsterdam and Seattle, and ultimately wound up in Montana – where he was promptly shot in the head.
“It wasn’t easy, getting him here,” said St. John. “But I had been promising him paradise for so long, I had to make it happen.”
*****
The oldest of four brothers in a close family that spans four generations, Dustin St. John joined the U.S. Navy in the summer of 2004, shortly after graduating from Hellgate High School. He spent his first couple of years in Japan, where he provided mechanical assistance to the USS Kitty Hawk.
But then one of St. John’s old high school friends, Andrew Bedard, a Marine infantryman serving in Iraq, was killed by a roadside bomb. St. John knew from that moment that he needed to go to Iraq.
“I went to my commanding officer in Japan and said, ‘You’ve got to get me over there,’ ” St. John recalls. “ ‘I want to go do what I signed up to do.’ ”
It took some time, but St. John ultimately won a transfer to Bahrain. There, he lived in a civilian apartment for a while before shipping off to Iraq for his first deployment, maintaining equipment from air conditioners and hydraulic jacks to P3 Orion jets.
It was when he returned to Bahrain that St. John decided to adopt one of the many stray dogs that ran in packs around his neighborhood.
“My friends thought I was crazy,” admits St. John. “And the locals, they hate the dogs; they’re considered like rats to them. But when you go on deployment, you don’t have many people to talk to, so he was a good ear to talk to.”
Unfortunately, St. John didn’t have much time to bond with his new friend. Two weeks after taking Habebe into his apartment, St. John was shipped off once again to Iraq for six months.
“A couple of days before I left, he was shaking, he knew something was up,” recalled St. John. “But I couldn’t just put him back out into the streets.”
So St. John put Habebe in a kennel, where he lived for the next half a year. When St. John returned, he didn’t know what to expect from the dog.
“He didn’t act like, ‘Where’ve you been?’ – he was just like, ‘All right, you’re back, let’s play!’ It was really great,” said St. John.
The man and his best friend lived together for another couple of months in Bahrain. Then, in August 2008, St. John reached the end of his four-year commitment to the Navy.
By that point, leaving Habebe behind simply wasn’t an option.
“I just couldn’t give him up, I would have had to let him go back on the street,” said St. John. “He’s too good a dog, I couldn’t do that.”
At first, the process seemed to go easily enough. The Navy offered to fly Habebe back to the U.S. for $160. St. John got the dog all the necessary vaccinations, quarantine and exams. But then, two days before he was scheduled to depart, St. John received word that Habebe’s flight would have to be delayed due to the heat.
“They said it would probably be another three or four months before he could fly,” said St. John. “I couldn’t leave him again for that long, so I started asking around.”
An airline in Bahrain offered to fly Habebe to the U.S., but wanted $4,000. St. John negotiated the price down to $2,000.
“It was a lot more expensive than I had expected,” said St. John, who only recently finished paying off the expenses of transporting Habebe to the United States, “but by then, it wasn’t a question of ‘if.’ ”
*****
So, in mid-August of 2008, Habebe flew from Bahrain to Seattle, stopping off for a night in a “doggie hotel” in Amsterdam.
“I was so jealous about that,” noted St. John, who flew separately to the United States for his final debriefing and discharge. “I’ve always wanted to see Amsterdam.”
St. John’s mother drove from Missoula to Seattle to pick up Habebe, who was reunited with St. John several days later in Missoula.
*****
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the last of Habebe’s tribulations. The following winter, St. John was living at his uncle’s place up Deep Creek. One night, Habebe didn’t come home. The following morning, St. John woke to find his dog lying on the snow-covered porch, bleeding.
Thinking the dog had been in a fight, St. John rushed him to a veterinarian, who discovered that the dog had in fact been shot square in the forehead by a .22 rifle. Miraculously, the bullet missed the dog’s brain, despite entering through his snout and fracturing a vertebrae in his neck.
“I still don’t know who did that, or why,” said St. John, who says his dog has never shown signs of aggression, even toward animals.
“He loves to chase the deer out around here, and he can actually outrun them,” said St. John. “But he never nips at them, he just runs around them – calling him fast is definitely an understatement, he can outrun those deer even when they’ve got a good head start – and then he comes back. He just likes to play with them.”
*****
Since his injury, life has settled down for Habebe. St. John found a new place to live, enrolled as a student at the University of Montana (where he studies information systems), and founded a business, Missoula Lawn Pro, with his three brothers.
Last weekend, St. John tied the knot with his other best friend, Maygen. Habebe, of course, was at the wedding, where he walked down the aisle after the grandmothers, decked in a bright bow tie.
Not that he was entirely happy about the situation.
“He was looking at me like, ‘Are you sure man, are you sure? We had a good thing going!’ ” said St. John with a laugh.
Of course, Habebe needn’t worry. After all the two have been through, there’s little chance that his best friend will abandon him anytime soon.
“He’s just a real special dog, and he has been such a good friend to Dusty,” said St. John’s great-aunt, Donna Frechette, a Minnesotan who spends her summers living with her relatives in Missoula. “That dog had been nothing but hurt his whole life until Dusty came along. You can see for yourself why Dusty loves him. We all love him.”
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Missoula pug owners gather to share puppy love |
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| Missoula Pug Club founder Jennie Pak cuddles with Chloe on Sunday afternoon. Photo by LINDA THOMPSON/Missoulian |
By BETSY COHEN of the Missoulian | Posted: Wednesday, August 4, 2010
They snort and they snore, shed every day of their life, prefer lounging to running and love their people as much as they love food, which is quite a lot.
"Pugs are the perfect dog for people who don't really want a real dog - or to exercise," said Jennie Pak, the proud owner of two pugs and ringleader of the year-old Missoula Pug Club.
Smash-faced and bug-eyed, these cat-sized lap dogs gather every Sunday at Missoula's Bark Park on Jacobs Island.
When they find each other, the critical mass of pugs transforms into a hilarious pack of friendly, heavy-breathing chaos.
On any given Sunday, you'll find upward of 50 pugs playing, snoozing and begging for a nap at the park. Regulars include Napoleon and Lola. Polly and Kizzie. Buddha, Tshi, Little Bit, Chloe and Cecil Winston.
"My daughter and I were talking one day about how our dogs really should have some friends - and this is what happened," Pak said, laughing with obvious joy. "We have 52 members now, and we have done some fun things - we were in the University of Montana Homecoming Parade last fall."
While the pugs appear to enjoy the outing with like-sized creatures, it's their owners who have the most fun.
"It's a social hour for us," Pak said. "We don't talk about anything serious. You won't find any conversations about what Mel Gibson has said or what's happening with the oil spill."
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Erik Farnham, proud owner of Cecil Winston, confessed he originally wanted a more manly beast, like a Siberian husky, but lost the battle with his wife.
"She wanted a pug, so we got the pug," Farnham said. "Now the pug sleeps in the bed with us. He's my best friend and I have become one of those people who will chase you down the sidewalk if you have a pug and say, ‘I have a pug, too.' "
Of course, Farnham's love for the breed has grown because of Cecil's unusual skills.
"Cecil's very sporty for a pug," he said. "He runs."
For anyone who needs a reprieve from the heaviness the world dishes out or an excuse to laugh, or who is intrigued by the asymmetrical wonderment of a pug's face, the pug club is the place to be.
Sundays at 1 p.m. at the Jacobs Island Bark Park is where you'll find them, or on the Mountain Pugs page on Facebook.
"There's just too much bad news in the world and pugs make you smile," said Janet Simms, owner of Kizzie and Polly. "They make you laugh and feel adored."
While on his way to the river with his two children and their innertubes, Jonathan Richter smiled at the unusual pack of canines wading in the shallow water.
A huge grin spread across his face when he learned about the weekly assembly.
Walking past, he agreed with his children's comments and announced to the world: "Pug Club is cool."
Reporter Betsy Cohen can be reached at 523-5253 or at
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