Finding a missing dog is normally handled by friends and family, but a recent search for a missing spaniel involved eight separate closures of the M25 motorway and a huge volunteer operation.
Phoebe the spaniel went missing when her owner, Nicola Patterson, 33, was on a trip to Majorca with her husband and two young children.
The Welsh springer spaniel was being looked after by a friend of the family in Bean, near Dartford, when she knocked the latch on the back gate and escaped from their garden.
After hearing the news, Patterson immediately returned home with her seven-month-old baby and said she didn’t sleep for several days.
Meanwhile, Patterson’s brother began searching for Phoebe and set up a Facebook page, which gathered more than 1,000 followers in two weeks after her disappearance on 27 August, with more than a dozen people putting up missing posters.
Although there were sightings across Kent, it appeared Phoebe had crossed over the A2 on a footbridge and upon reaching some industrial units, panicked and ran away.
After a report of a spaniel on the side of the A2, National Highways temporarily closed the busy road for a check, but Phoebe was nowhere to be seen.
There were a number of sightings around the A2, near the Darenth Interchange, including a call to the DogLost charity to say: “There’s a Spaniel on the hard shoulder”- but Phoebe’s owner couldn’t be sure it was her dog from a picture taken at the scene.
Later, Patterson was notified by a National Highways staff member that he could see Phoebe on the M25 above the embankment near the Darenth Interchange.
She was told they would do another rolling roadblock and she would have 12 minutes to go into the scrub and try and get her dog out, but she was unsuccessful.
Patterson said on one evening “we had a 30-minute road closure of the M25 at seven o’clock at night, which is ridiculous, which is mad. My dad was standing on the bridge with binoculars to check and see if he could see her running out of the embankment.”
In total, Phoebe’s disappearance led to eight temporary motorway closures across an 11-day period.
Ten days after Phoebe’s disappearance, Lost Dog Recovery had set up five cameras on the M25. The cameras soon spotted her and Patterson received permission to set up a dog trap.
She said: “We were told originally we would never get permission to do any of this because of where it was, but apparently highways are under animal welfare laws, because she hadn’t eaten for 10 days at this point.”
The trap was set and Patterson’s dad bought some food to lure Phoebe, including a doner kebab and sausages – but the dog didn’t go back to it. Phoebe was seen eating all of the food around the trap but avoided the expensive food in the centre, driving Patterson, who was watching via the camera, mad.
On 7 September, National Highways suspended traffic again so a second trap could be set, and after circling it several times, Phoebe was captured just past midnight. Another road closure followed as the team cleared up its gear.
Patterson said when she got Phoebe home “she came flying in bouncing through the back door and she was so happy to see us”.
She had lost some weight but she was perfectly healthy.
Patterson added: “She was bouncing around like she’d just been out for a walk, not that she’d been missing for 11 days. That was my husband’s birthday – so it was like a birthday present that she’d come home.”
Patterson said she was thankful for all the support she received while searching for Phoebe, she said: “I can’t believe how much following she got and I don’t know what it was about our dog that captured people. “We were getting messages from people all over the world who owned the same breed – maybe her breed is why she went so famous.”
Since Phoebe’s return, Patterson said the Welsh springer spaniel appears more confident and barks more but says it a “small price to pay” for having her home.
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