The incredible journey of Valerie: a dachshund lost for 16 months

A miniature dachshund, aged just one year old and weighing around eight pounds, appears to have pulled off a feat neither her owners nor rescuers thought possible: surviving for 16 months on a rugged island off Australia’s southern coast.

Now, locals on Kangaroo Island are hopeful they will be able to reunite the dog, Valerie, with her owners after several recent sightings, including with the pink collar she was wearing when she went missing. Volunteers have narrowed down the search area and are now relying on video surveillance and - yes - roast chicken to entice her.

“We’re pretty surprised, that’s for sure,” said Georgia Gardner, 24, of Valerie, whom she owns with boyfriend Joshua Fishlock. “She wasn’t even just like a dog; she was an absolute princess as well. She had a car seat, and she slept in our bed,” she said, adding that Valerie would get upset over being outside for too long.

Gardner and Fishlock, 25, were camping on Kangaroo Island in November 2023 when they left Valerie in a playpen with toys and food to go fishing at the beach nearby, Gardner said. While the couple was away, Valerie ripped the pen open and hid under a parked car. As other campers tried to get the dog out, Gardner said that, believing she could be run over, Valerie got spooked and escaped the campsite, running into bushland.

Gardner’s family gifted her the dog after she graduated from university during the pandemic. She thought Valerie would soon return, as the dog often accompanied her to cafes, shops and on long drives - “anxiously attached,” as Gardner said.

But the search was like looking for a “needle in a haystack,” Gardner said, and the couple were panicking. They joined a Facebook group and secured help from Kangala Wildlife Rescue, a local nonprofit, who set out food, clothing belonging to the owners and surveillance cameras in the hope of spotting her.

“We were so upset, and we felt a lot of guilt as well,” Gardner said. The following days poured with rain and at the end of the week, the couple had to return home to Broken Hill, New South Wales, to work.

“On the ferry I remember looking at the island, just crying,” Gardner said.

Six to eight months after Valerie got lost, rescuers started receiving reports from Kangaroo Island locals of a dog wearing a pink collar wandering the island. It was an “unbelievable” development, said Kangala Wildlife Rescue director Jared Karran, given miniature dachshunds are not known for their survival skills.

“Of all dogs, that would be the last one I would say would survive out there but they do have a really good sense of smell,” said Karran, who is leading the search. “That’s probably helped her in terms of finding food.”

Karran said Valerie was likely surviving off roadkill and fresh water from local dams while managing to avoid Black Tiger snakes and Pygmy Copperheads, two venomous snakes that live on the island.

The fact that she has survived so long and still evaded humans has surprised Karran, who said: “She’s so fast and so wary now.”

Hopes for Valerie’s return increased again in the past month, with a cluster of local sightings and even a photograph that appeared to show a small black dog running across an open field.

Karran and his team have now managed to narrow down her location to the Stokes Bay area, near where she went missing, and are trying to entice her with strong-smelling food like tuna and roast chicken. Valerie was last seen on surveillance cameras on Wednesday, Karran said.

“Hopefully we can pull this off and actually get her home,” he said.

Kangaroo Island measures around 1,700 square miles - 75 times of the size of Manhattan - and has a population of 5,000. It’s renowned for its wildlife and vegetation, including the Kangaroo Island kangaroo as well as wallabies, fur seals, dolphins, koalas and sea lions.

For this reason, it has strict biosecurity rules. Pets are allowed on the island but not permitted to enter conservation areas and must be kept under control. Karran said he does not believe Valerie would have posed a threat to other local species due to her small size, and that he initially thought she would have been quickly preyed upon by eagles known to take young lambs on the island.

Gardner said the recent sightings are “very exciting” and that she is staying cautiously optimistic.

“We’re extremely grateful for all of the community on Kangaroo Island,” she said. “They’ve been so lovely to us. We were just tourists … They’re just a group of volunteers, they all have their lives and their work responsibilities, and they’re putting in endless amounts of hours and we’re just so, so thankful to all of them.”

The Washington Post