This is a story of Storm and Rosco, and the massive community effort which helped reunite them.
The two dogs went missing after their owners were involved in a car crash on the M1 at Eagleby on January 8.
That’s when police issued a plea to the community, asking if the wayward pups had been seen.
More than 630 community members rallied together on Facebook to help find the dogs, with many devoting hours of their time searching paddocks and backyards for any possible sightings.
Almost two weeks after the car crash, Rosco the Rhodesian Mastiff was found wandering the bush in Ormeau and was finally reunited with his owners, and less than a week later Storm the Red Heeler was found in Mount Warren Park.
Local heroes, Kylie Dwyer and Fiona Duncan created the group to help find Rosco and Storm and got the whole community involved in the search – which was a huge success.
“Fiona is a good friend of the family and the moment the accident happened she was straight online searching for the two dogs, but was finding it hard to gather all the information from the different community pages, for examples the lost and founds, so from there we decided to set up our own page,” Ms Dwyer said.
“We were hoping to use the Facebook page as a central place where people could report sightings, making it easier for us, in the end there were hundreds of people not only calling in sightings but actively searching and it became a community team.
“Never could we have imagined the amount of community support.”
Ms Dwyer said with over 600 members, most of them actively looking for the dogs, it was a huge job putting all the puzzle pieces together.
“Fiona and I took all the calls, monitored all the comments and sightings, then put the info together and then coordinated the food drops and searching, and coordinated the owners to sightings,” she said.
“We also had the help of two experts Sabrina and Annette, that have experience in tracking and retrieving lost dogs. They lent us equipment for free and spent many hours physically assisting in searching and consulting over the phone.”
Ms Dwyer said there were a lot of sleepless nights.
“One missed sighting meant missing a location change in one of the dogs,” she said.
“It was super important to keep up with the physical condition of the dogs too, to gauge methods we needed to use and the urgency. It was a delicate process.”
“We also had the M1 in between a lot of the locations so this made things a little more dangerous for both dogs and us with heavy traffic, heavy bushland and a lot of population in between.”
Ms Dwyer said the day Rosco was found the locals had been keeping a close eye on him.
“We had locals watching him from afar, blocking him from escaping,” she said.
With Rosco cornered, his owner (Syd) was able to jump out of his car and walk right up to him.
As for Storm, “the locals in the street (Brauer Court, Mount Warren Park) were helping with putting food out and calling in sightings. One family with kids similar ages to Storm’s family were able to lure him into their yard with food and water.”
“The family had him happily playing with their kids when Syd arrived.”
Ms Dwyer said Syd and his family are relieved to finally be reunited with their dogs.
