After a German Shepherd named Jackie evaded euthanasia in Los Angeles, she’s now evading animal control officers in Juneau.
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Since Jackie’s escape on Valentine’s Day, Thom Young-Bayer has been strategizing with animal control officers how best to recapture her.
Part of their plan involves a large cage with a weighted plate on the bottom that closes the entrance if anything steps on it. There’s a dish with dog food, cat food and beef dumplings on the plate and cheeseburgers zip-tied to the back of the cage. The trap wouldn’t hurt Jackie, as Young-Bayer demonstrated recently by crawling inside. The searchers check it twice a day.
For a while after they set up the trap in the Mendenhall Valley near Dredge Lake, nothing happened – except for a squirrel that made off with some coffee cake.
“And then one night, all the bait disappeared,” Young-Bayer said. “And the trap was set off, so we decided to put a trail camera out.”
Since, they’ve seen Jackie come to the trap on the camera footage, carefully reaching over the mechanism to get the food, and backing out of the cage.
She keeps returning, so Young-Bayer is hopeful. But there’s a time limit: the bears will wake up soon.
“That’s the last thing we want is to trap a bear cub,” he said. “That would be really bad.”
They won’t be able to leave bait out in the woods much longer.
Jackie came up to Juneau from Los Angeles in January with two other dogs. They were slated for euthanasia to make room as devastating wildfires pushed more animals into shelters in the region. Thom’s wife Skylar Young-Bayer wasn’t going to let that happen. She convinced Juneau Animal Rescue to take three dogs from California.
“And they’re like, ‘Sure, you know, we could probably do three or four, but someone needs to go down there and get them,’” she said. “And I’m like, ‘well, I’ll do it.’”
Skylar brought Jackie and two other dogs up from shelters she said have a euthanasia rate of 30 to 40%. She works with these shelters to alert adoptees and foster networks when a dog is added to a list of potential euthanasias. The Young-Bayers adopted two of their own dogs from these high-kill shelter areas.
Local families adopted all three dogs within a month, but Jackie slipped her collar on a walk the first day she was at her new home.
“And this is the thing: we all really underestimated Jackie,” Young-Bayer said. The cunning canine continues to evade capture.
But despite her wiliness, Jackie doesn’t seem to be dangerous, Young-Bayer said.
“She’s very scared and shy and sweet,” she said. “She’ll give you kisses. She doesn’t bite.”
And Jackie is resourceful.
Each day, animal control hears reports of a couple of sightings of Jackie, but she’s always moved on by the time they get there, minutes later. An animal control officer nearly lured her by hand with a cheeseburger, but a passing jogger accidentally scared her off.
So now, the Young-Bayers, alongside animal control officers, have been checking traps they set in the woods in the for her.
Rick Driscoll is the director of Juneau Animal Rescue, which also houses Juneau’s animal control officers. He said Jackie is shy and evasive, so people shouldn’t go out searching for her.
“She’s not going to just walk up to you and let you put a collar or a leash on her,” Driscoll said. “So it’s best if they just report it to us.”
He said if anyone sees Jackie during the day, they should call JAR.
Driscoll said he’s worried about her.
“She’s the biggest thing that’s on my mind, as the executive director of JAR,” he said.
He’s afraid she could be hit by a car, eat something poisonous, or just lose too much weight and become weak.
The couple that adopted Jackie misses her too. Eulaysia Rayne Bostrack said she felt a personal connection to the sweet dog she picked up.
“I am from LA, I know about the fires and the life of the stray dogs down there,” she said. “I’ve seen it all, so I know what she’s been through.”
The community is showing it cares too. Bostrack said the night after Jackie slipped her collar, about 40 people helped search until the early hours of the morning. Bostrack has seen her dog twice since she went missing.
“And both times, I kind of broke down because we didn’t get too much time with her,” she said.
Bostrack is hopeful that, with Juneau’s support, she can bring Jackie back home again — and keep her there, with added reinforcements.
“I’m going to try and look into getting a three strap harness,” she said.
