After seven long weeks, a local man has been reunited with his lost dog.
Steven Bell has two Great Pyrenees, a large, white, animal guard dog. Wynter is two years old, and Corey is just eight months. The pair come from different litters but share the same parents.
Bell got Wynter in 2021 after befriending an animal lover named Corey. He had initially gone to Corey’s to ask him about his goats but ended up learning about the Great Pyrenees breed and leaving with one of them instead of a goat.
A year later, Bell returned to Corey’s farm and picked out the biggest Great Pyrenees puppy he had, naming him Storm. Corey then asked Bell if he could take all seven of the puppies as he didn’t have the time to properly care for them, and Bell happily took them home and cared for them until he found each a good home.
Not long after that, Bell received a message that said Corey had been killed in a cement truck accident. Devastated and heartbroken, Bell renamed Storm to be Corey.
Great Pyrenees are big dogs that typically prefer to be outside. Corey and Wynter spend most of their time in Bell’s fenced-in yard, barking every few minutes to let him know they’re still there, guarding the yard.
On Labour Day weekend, Bell was watching the Winnipeg Blue Bombers play the Saskatchewan Roughriders. He went outside at halftime to say hi to the dogs, then back in for the second half of the game. It went into overtime, and by the time the game was finished, Bell realized he hadn’t heard barking since he returned inside.
Rushing outside, he found the gate latch snapped off, the gate open, and the yard empty, the dogs had escaped and were nowhere to be found.
“When he went missing it was like I lost Corey twice,” said Bell.
The next day, Bell drove around for hours looking for his dogs. Sometime that day, he got a call saying one of them was in a nearby yard, and when he got there, Bell was reunited with Wynter, drenched from a downpour but unharmed.
Corey was nowhere to be found, though.
The Ontario SPCA and Humane Society says more than 10 million pets go missing in North America each year — 75 per cent of them, or 7,500,000 of them, never return home.
Luckily for Bell, Corey, is not part of that statistic.
Bell took to Facebook to notify the community of his missing dog. For five weeks straight, he posted update upon update and continued to ask people to share any information they might have. Three days after he found Wynter, Corey was sighted for the first time.
What Bell learned during this time was that many of his neighbours also owned Great Pyrenees — four living within two miles of his house. Because they’re guard dogs, they’re all often outside running around their yards, leading to countless false sightings and false hope for Bell.
“Everyone wanted to help,” he said. “It was emotional.”
After five weeks without Corey, the dog was sighted in a tree line two miles from home. For Bell, this was nothing but good news. He now knew the worst hadn’t happened.
Two more weeks passed, and Bell got the call he’d been waiting for. Corey was sighted in a farmer’s field nine miles from Bell’s house. He hopped in his side by side and raced to the area, spotting Corey in the middle of four fields.
Luck was on Bell’s side. As he got to the fields, the farmer was just coming off one, allowing Bell to ask for permission to drive on it to Corey.
As soon as Bell started driving toward the big white dog, he started running away. Bell managed to start herding the dog the way a heeler might herd cattle, staying on his outside and pushing him around and around, tiring him out.
“My plan and my thought process worked exactly as I thought it would,” said Bell.
It only took five minutes for Corey to recognize Bell’s voice and smell. As soon as he did, he ran to the side by side, jumped on Bell’s lap, and showered him with kisses of relief.
“I just needed the opportunity for me to be up close to him,” he said. “For him to hear my voice, to smell me. It was a great end to seven weeks of [torture].”
Bell compared being reunited with Corey to winning the lottery. As he followed him with the side by side, his fingers were tingling and numb. He didn’t believe he actually had him back for at least 48 hours.
Corey returned home matted and covered in burrs but otherwise unharmed. Since being back, he’s returned to his previous life as if he was never gone, lounging outside, barking at the sky, and cuddling his sister, Wynter.
The gate, however, is different. Bell put a lock on the top and bottom of it along with a heavy-duty latch that’s three times the thickness of the previous one. In other words, it will be nearly impossible for the pair to break out of the fence again. But in case anything happens, Bell has also invested in GPS collars for each of them.
