Hope springs eternal for eventual return of Bailey the lost dog

Dog catcher Ken Price says he expects Bailey will be moving about more and perhaps more likely to be spotted.

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Although sightings of Bailey, the lost dog, have dwindled to zero since March, the volunteer team has not given up hope of finding him. "There’s been a lot of ups and downs," says Bailey's owner Kelvin Fung. "He hasn’t been found dead, so therefore we still have hope. That’s kind of where things are at."

The 30-lb apricot-furred double doodle ran away from the Den Doggy Day Care on Harvester Road near the Appleby GO train station in Burlington on December 23, 2021. Despite a massive search effort involving upwards of 200 dog-loving volunteers over several months, Bailey has yet to be reunited with his family.

On Thursday night, Brampton Animal Services advertised that they had found a dishevelled apricot-coloured poodle closely matching Bailey's description. Fung says the photos matched close enough for the family to drive out to the shelter Friday to investigate. But by the time they got there, that dog's owner had stepped forward, and the shelter staff had determined that dog was not Bailey -- he did not have the same white patch on his chest, nor was he microchipped.

Although the search intensity has been diminished since March, the leader of the search effort Ken Price says there’s no reason to give up.

“I’m still hoping we can bring this boy home,” says Price, the CEO of the volunteer-run non-profit known as the Dream Team Search and Rescue that has been looking for Bailey since he went missing.

“No remains and no collar have been found, so Bailey very well could still be out there. We’re just not seeing him, likely because of his travel patterns.”

"Right now, we don’t have people stationed in the area, nor do we have a team in the area every night," Price says.

"Every once in a while, we do a search of an area, and every night there’s someone in the area just poking around. We’ll continue to respond to sightings as they happen." 

Price says that dogs can go missing for many months and still be successfully located after time in the wild. In 2019, he worked on a lost dog case involving an intact female German Shepherd mix missing from its Hamilton home.

Apparently, it was adopted by a coyote pack, which made it difficult for even the owner to lure the dog home. After six months, the dog was spotted on the other side of town, with a different collar on, and eventually captured and returned to her owner. 

Based in Burlington and Hamilton, the Dream Team recovers around 300 dogs a year. Though they usually do not take on cases in Oakville, they became involved in Bailey’s case because the dog went missing from a Burlington boarding facility.

Anyone with tips on the Bailey case is still encouraged to report them to the Dream Team at 905-399-6984.