Finding Chewy: How 60 determined volunteers looked for 25 days to bring runaway dog home

“She ran away around 7.30 that evening. We wandered around till 2 in the morning. We had no idea how or where to find her,” says Chewy’s owner.

What followed was a 25-day search operation involving 63 people — lawyers, teachers, homemakers, and an NGO, besides the family.

The day after Chewy went missing, the owner contacted an animal rescue, a Delhi-based NGO called Pooch Tales, for help.

“We got a call from the dog’s owner on September 13… They heard that we helped find missing dogs,” says Adharika Kapoor, who runs the NGO along with her twin sister Anantika Kapoor (29).

When they saw Chewy’s photo, they couldn’t help but join in the search.

They started a WhatsApp group called ‘Finding Chewy’, whose members soon went from 6 to 60. A new plan was made every day.

Each volunteer, aged between 18 and 70, would hit the ground at allotted times. “Each day started with charting out a plan of action in the morning… We printed around 10,000 A3-sized posters, and employed professional poster pasting experts to put them up in strategic areas in a 5-km radius from where she went missing,” says Adharika.

At times, it felt like finding a needle in a haystack as Delhi is so big, she adds.

The morning search would be conducted by a team from 5 to 8 am, followed by the family searching from 2 to 4 pm. Then, another team would take over.

Security guards became their closest allies, chai wallahs their informants. The teams looked in every spot possible — gardens, bus stops, back lanes, even drains.

Adharika asserts that their search was not just superficial. “It was not just bending down to look under a car, it also meant spreading the word among people so they could also keep an eye out. This is how we created this human chain.”

“In the process, Chewy was not just their dog, but became one of ours as well.”

However, despite the extensive search, 24 days passed. There was no sign of Chewy.

“On days when hope ran thin, one thought kept us going: ‘We can’t stop, Chewy has to come home’,” says Adharika.

She says numerous pictures of similar-looking black dogs were sent to them, each making them skip a beat — but none of them turned out to be Chewy.

But on the 25th day, a few hours after the owner handed out flyers at a nearby temple, her phone rang. “There is a dog hiding in the store room of the temple, I have locked the door from outside,” a gardener working there told her.

The volunteers arrived and Chewy was reunited with her owner on October 9. “She was hiding inside the store room, frightened. She was not hurt but had lost a lot of weight,” says her owner, adding that Chewy is still taking time to settle back in.

“Throughout the mission, we kept telling the team that we are not going to give up, even if it takes six months to find her,” adds Adharika, delighted on Chewy’s return.

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