With dog thefts becoming increasingly common among pet owners, a Fisher Branch family is sharing their story to warn others.
Amanda Ermel and her family are dog lovers. They have numerous dogs in their family at all times, and Chevy was one of those family members just a couple of years ago.
The family’s Rough Collie was a best friend to everyone, but especially Ermel’s daughter. One evening, she let the indoor dogs out for a nighttime pee, and when she called them back in, two of the three dogs returned.
“We did the typical search and call,” said Ermel. “And in the morning, he still wasn’t home, which was so odd.”
Two-year-old Chevy has never run away from Ermel’s farmyard, and with livestock guardian dogs outside at all times, she didn’t expect him to. The evening he went missing, his best friend, Ermel’s daughter, wasn’t home, so she had to break the news over the phone. The morning after he went missing, she called Prairie Helicopter to do an aerial search, and though she was prepared to pay the fees, they donated an hour and a half of flight time.
“I just needed to know that he wasn’t stuck in a bush or got in a fight with a coyote,” she said.
After clearing a large area surrounding their home, Prairie Helicopter didn’t find Chevy, so Ermel and her family were back on the drawing board.
They took to social media to spread the word about their missing family member. Using their Collie networks, friends, family, and any channel possible, they asked the world if anyone had spotted Chevy. In addition, each family member and neighbour was driving down gravel roads with the windows down in the winter cold, looking mercilessly for the Rough Collie.
But it was to no avail.
Ermel and her family have received no answers as to what happened to Chevy, but they aren’t stopping their search. Ermel has a theory that someone in a white truck took him. To this day, their guardian dog will chase white trucks as far as she can, eager to rip the tires right off.
“She’s been a completely different dog since he was stolen,” said Ermel.
And when the family got a new Collie pup to fill some of the void that was left in their home, someone broke their fence trying to take her. The family now put up two layers of fences around their yard, along with dog runs, gates, and multiple cameras. They still follow every lead they get, some coming from as far as New York or Missouri. Because Chevy’s microchipped, he’ll show up as stolen if he’s taken to a vet.
“I can’t lose another dog to dog theft,” said Ermel. “The heartache is so, so strong.”
Ermel doesn’t know where Chevy is or why he was taken from them. She worries it was for dog fighting, money, or something else entirely.
“When you let your mind go, it’s actually quite horrific,” she said.
Ermel describes Chevy as a sibling to her children. His absence has emotionally debilitated her daughter, so the family planted a tree for Chevy this summer.
“It was ‘how do I make life a little bit easier for her that she can get through every day without sobbing or crying herself to sleep?’” said Ermel. “I explained we aren’t searching anymore but we need a place to put our grief so we can live daily until we get answers.”
Seven in 10 animal thefts reported in Canada involve dogs. In 2024, around 2,000 dog theft crimes were reported in Canada, and a staggering 30 percent of missing dogs in the country cannot be traced to their owner. Purebreds and small dogs are the most targeted, with puppies being common, too.
“He’s going to get her through graduation, her first heartbreaks,” said Ermel. “And somebody comes and just robs all of that. What they’ve done to my children, to me, to our whole family…the community even.”
Ermel said neighbours for miles didn’t let their dogs out unwatched for months after Chevy’s disappearance. Sadly, his isn’t the only in the area — Ermel’s heard of at least three others that went missing in the vicinity around the same time as Chevy.
“We can’t change it,” she said. “We have to just learn to live with this until something comes different.”
In Canada, stolen dogs are treated as theft under $5,000, which is a felony offence that carries a maximum penalty of two years in prison. Besides filing a police report and looking endlessly, nothing else can be done to find a lost pet, but knowing your dog’s microchip number will help prove it’s yours if your lost dog is found and brought to a vet.
“They could have taken everything else in my house and I wouldn’t have been this angry,” said Ermel.
