DIGBY, N.S. — From trying to coax it back to shore by dangling a hotdog from an aerial drone, to breaking through ice to make a path for a canoe to reach it, a lot of determination went into saving a dog stranded on the ice on Haines Lake in Digby County on Sunday.
It was a happy ending for all involved when the dog was brought back to shore to be fed, warmed up and cared for until an owner – if the dog has one – can be located or a new home for the dog can be found.
Residents living near the lake say the dog had been on the run for a while now, with all attempts to catch it unsuccessful. No one locally had come forward saying they were missing a dog.
“This dog has been roaming around the neighbourhood for the past couple of weeks. We’ve all spotted it and we had contacted the dog catcher and I had contacted DNR because nobody could catch it,” says resident Carla Titus. “It wouldn’t come anywhere near us.”
Titus says they hadn’t seen the dog since Thursday, March 11, so they assumed the dog had found its way home. But then on Sunday, March 14, the dog was spotted again – this time on ice on the lake.
What to do?
Concerned for the dog's safety, some people turned to the Digby Talks chat group on Facebook to see what could be done.
One of the people to see a posting was Zane Lynch, the owner of Drone & Co., an aerial drone photography business in Digby. He sent up a drone to get a sense of the situation and to see if there was a path to shore for the dog. He saw one.
“I ended up tying a hot dog to the drone. I was trying to bribe her to come back to shore. I was kind of dangling it in front of her face,” he says. “I have two dogs of my own so instinct kicks in. I would go above and beyond for my two dogs.”
But the whizzing sound from the drone made the dog hesitant to follow it to safety.
Lynch, meanwhile, could see elsewhere on the lake that local residents Mike Titus (Carla’s husband) and Nathaniel Denton looked to be hatching a plan of their own.
Titus, an experienced lobster fisherman, and Denton, an experienced diver, consulted with the fire department and RCMP, who had been called to the scene. They decided to head out to the dog in a canoe. Denton put on a dry suit and Titus threw on a survival suit to keep themselves warm and dry.
They paddled out for a distance, then Denton went into the water to get them closer, breaking up ice with his arms to create a path for the canoe.
“I probably broke through a couple hundred feet of ice,” he says. Not sure if they’d need a bribe for the dog to come towards them, Lynch had brought the drone down to within reach of Denton so he could grab the hotdog, just in case.
“I broke my way through the ice until we got close to the dog,” Denton says. “I called Mike back over with the canoe. We went closer to see if we could get it on board.”
They calmly spoke to the dog to make it feel comfortable and trusting.
“I just kept breaking more and more ice trying to get closer to it. When it got to the narrow point and it wouldn’t go any farther away from us – it was too scared to go forward to shore and it was kind of timid of us – I got behind the canoe and shoved Mike and the canoe up onto the ice so he could get a hold of the dog," Denton says.
By now the dog had stopped barking at them, perhaps understanding they were here to help.
Incidentally, this isn’t the first water rescue Denton has been involved with. Years ago he and two others – Barry O’Neil and Dallas Kenley – were working on a boat on a slipway on the Digby waterfront when they spotted something in the water coming towards them.
It was a small whale, around 16 feet long, and its mouth was entangled with netting, which was also embedded about an inch into parts of its skin.
“We waded out in the water and . . . held its head up. I cut the twine all out. When it was all freed we put its head back down and it swam off – just like it had come to us for that purpose,” Denton says. “It laid there just as calm as anything as we cut it loose.”
Rescuing the dog, however, took more effort.
You can trust us
“We were watching with binoculars,” says Carla Titus. “She would slowly come and put her nose at the end of the canoe and then she would go away. They finally got close enough to her … that my husband grabbed her by the scruff of the neck and put her in the canoe.”
He kept the dog sandwiched between his legs as they made their way back to shore. Denton stayed in the water, as they didn't want to tip the canoe. Denton estimates it took about an hour from the time they left shore to when they came back with the dog.
The dog was checked over, fed and wrapped in a blanket. The area’s animal control officer, Scott Cromwell, took the dog so it could continue to be cared for and to see if it was microchipped and/or if they could track an owner. Since the rescue, there has also been no shortage of people expressing interest in adopting the dog if an owner isn't found.
Carla Titus says the fact that the dog ended up stranded on the lake turned out to be the best outcome.
“For weeks everybody saw her but nobody could get a hold of her. In all honesty it was a blessing in disguise that she actually got stranded because we were able to isolate her and she had nowhere to go but to get in the canoe,” she says.
“When my husband had first picked her up, she was shaking a lot. When she was on shore she stayed kind of close to my husband between his legs. She was scared and thought, well this guy just saved me, I’m going to stick with him,” Titus says. “It was a happy ending, for sure.”
