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NEWFIELD, NY (CortacaToday) — After nine long days of being on the loose, runaway Great Dane Vinnie was reunited with his family.
On Saturday June 8th, Bennett Travis of Syracuse was involved in a car accident near Newfield and was hospitalized. In the car with him was his dog Vinnie, who jumped out amidst the commotion and took off into the surrounding woodlands. Bennett’s mother, Nona Travis, didn’t find out about the crash until Sunday morning when she got a call from her son at a hospital in Sayre, PA asking her to go pick up Vinnie. When she arrived in Newfield, she realized Vinnie had taken off, and the community had already begun rallying to find Vinnie in a way she could not have anticipated.
“I did none of this, they did it all”, says Nona of the “dream team” she describes the search group to be. “My dream team consisted of Leann, Toby, Renee, Patrick and my girlfriend Mel from home who worked remotely. Leann, Toby, Renee, and Patrick were strangers as of two weeks ago but are truly my family now. I’m indebted to them and to the community who helped and embraced us with love and support. We will always have a special place in our hearts for my rescue team and the community of Newfield.”
The team and community worked tirelessly to try and find Vinnie, Nona spending long days and nights wandering through the woods trying to locate him. A Facebook page was created to try and keep up with Vinnie’s whereabouts, and the search group was constantly receiving calls updating them on where Vinnie had last been seen. During the search, they set up a “safe zone”, an area that was off limits for tracking Vinnie down so as not to scare him any further.
Throughout most of the search, Vinnie’s owner Bennett was still hospitalized. “He would ask me about Vinnie, and it was hard to tell him I was still looking. He had to undergo three different surgeries while worrying about what was happening with the search”, says Nona.
The day Vinnie was found, Bennett recalls he received a call that his dog had been spotted near Casella’s in Newfield. Well enough to join the search, he and the team headed out to the crash site. Once there, he saw Vinnie in the tree line, called for him, and went into the tree line to get him. Vinnie recognized him, but it had started to storm, and he was scared, skittish, and tired from all of the excitement of the last nine days.
As Bennett was in the woods trying to get to Vinnie, he decided to wait out the storm to up his chances of being able to corral his dog. His phone lost service in the process and by the time it came back on, the storm had cleared, and his phone was blowing up with calls and messages saying Vinnie had been reunited with Nona.
Vinnie was so scared from the storm and everything that had happened that it took him a while to realize he was no longer in danger. “It took him about four minutes to recognize me and come to me, but it felt like ten hours”, says Nona of finally having Vinnie back again.
Now, both Vinnie and Bennett are doing well. Vinnie was taken to a local vet and luckily was unharmed other than being quite hungry and having some minor sores on his paws. Bennett will soon start physical therapy to fully recuperate from his surgeries.
If anyone would like to make a donation to help dogs like Vinnie, Nona and Bennett point to Gatekeeper K9 Rescue, a nonprofit organization that helps search for lost dogs and aided in tracking down Vinnie. Chris Allinger of Q-Country 103.7 helped to get the word out about Vinnie, so click here and listen to the post-reunion interview he had with Nona.