Wolfdog found - he's now safe at home

Shadow the wolfdog led several agencies on a tense chase over the weekend

Shadow (right) with his pack members in the back of his owner’s truck. (Photo from North Bay Animal Services)

Shadow, the two-year-old wolfdog, is safe and sound at home again, six days after he escaped from his pen at a home on Wright Road in Santa Rosa.

Several agencies, including North Bay Animal Services, Fish and Game, and the Sebastopol Police Department, worked together over the weekend trying to catch him, pursuing him back and forth across the laguna from the eastern edge of Sebastopol to the Wright Road neighborhood.

Last night as dusk fell with a steady rain, Shadow was wandering around on Highway 12, just east of Sebastopol, backlit by a phalax of police cars with flashing red and blue lights. The police closed down one lane and slowed traffic while North Bay Animal Services got Shadow off the road. But they couldn’t get close enough to catch him.

Video by Zach Saltzberg

“He ran all the way up from the bridge [at the entrance of Sebastopol] up to Merced,” Director of North Bay Animal Services Mark Scott said. “That's a long long way…We had to stop traffic so we made a barrier at Merced, and once he got to that spot, we're able to shoo him off the road into a big field. At that point, our goal was just to get him off the highway. Then we were chasing him till nine o'clock.”

Scott said they discovered who Shadow’s owner was via social media.

“We got a hold of the owner and learned that he's got a couple other dogs, so we asked him to stay connected and be ready to come if we call him at a moment's notice and bring the dogs,” Scott said.

Animal Services got a report of a sighting at the old airport between Wright Way and Northpoint Parkway around 7:30 this morning.

“And so we called the owner and had him come meet us at the end of Northpoint, and there he [the wolfdog] was on the other side of the fence about 200 yards away,” he said.

“You could hear him howling; it was very surreal,” Scott said.

“The other dogs are Huskies—that's usually what the mix is. When he saw them, he started automatically coming over.”

From there it was just a matter of getting a locked gate open, and then Shadow was reunited with his pack members and owner.

Shadow with his relieved owner, soon after his capture. (Photos from North Bay Animal Services)

There were some questions on Nextdoor and Facebook about whether Shadow was a wolf hybrid or not, but Scott said there’s no question.

“He is a wolf hybrid for sure,” he said. “We don't know how much wolf he has. You're allowed to have them in Sonoma County, and I think they have a few here and there. But they are a special breed and you should definitely know how to handle them if that's what you want to do.”

Some in the Greek chorus that is social media suggested that too much fuss was being made over what was essentially a lost dog.

Scott thought it was a situation that deserved to be taken seriously. “You’ve got an unaltered male wolfdog running around. Things can happen,” he said matter of factly.