When Bailey, a recently adopted rescue dog from Texas ran away from her new owners, she made a 10-mile journey on her own back to her former animal shelter, arriving in the wee hours on Jan. 31, 2023.
The animal centre alerted El Paso residents last month, asking them to be on the lookout for Bailey. Meanwhile, Bailey was already making the journey back to the centre, with only her nose and wits to guide her. She reached the centre in the middle of the night and alerted the caretakers by ringing the doorbell.
“As we knew, dogs are incredible,” the Animal Rescue League (ARL) of El Paso posted on Facebook. “Bailey made her own way back to ARL, and rang our ring doorbell at 1:15 a.m. saying she wanted in. Staff rushed to the shelter and put Bailey in her run. She was very happy, and we were too.”
“I’ll be darn, at 1:42 in the morning she’s ringing the doorbell like, ‘I’m home,'” the founder of the league, Loretta Hyde, told USA TODAY. “The Ring camera kept going off and off and off, and you’ll see in the video that she’s running out there, sitting, waiting for somebody to come.”
When one of the shelter workers saw the pup on the Ring camera, the worker said her name over the speaker, and “she went boom, right up to the camera,” Hyde recalled.
A worker brought Bailey inside where she slept the rest of the night.
“She slept so hard the whole night,” Hyde said. “The next morning, she was like, ‘You can serve my breakfast over there. I’ll get it in a minute. I’m still resting.’ So, three days without food and water, I mean, she was making up for her rest.”
Bailey is now home again with her new family.
Staff addressed concerns saying they are “very confident that Bailey is well cared for and loved,” and they plan to stay in touch with Bailey’s family.
“It was such a happy ending for all of us,” Hyde said.
