For nine years, a midtown Mobile family swapped stories about their beloved rescue dog, half-joking that the black-and-white mutt with the perked-up ears must have once been a champion sled dog in Alaska. A brief disappearance this spring proved the tale was closer to true than anyone imagined, and along the way reunited two families who had loved the same dog years apart.
Erin Rutherford adopted the dog from the City of Mobile Animal Shelter in 2006 as a birthday gift for her young daughter. He’d been at the shelter long enough that a staff member had grown attached to him and got misty-eyed watching him leave. His microchip traced back to Alaska, and tattooed identification numbers in his ears only deepened the family’s affection for what they nicknamed “Pedro the Wonder Dog.” He settled easily into a household that would eventually include a pet pig, kittens and birds, and stuck with the family through a house fire in December that left them living in a small rental with no yard.
That lack of yard space may have played a role this spring when Pedro, now around 14 and slowed by hip dysplasia, wandered off from the front yard of his midtown home and went missing for about a day.
Not far away, a University of South Alabama employee driving to work spotted a dog struggling to cross Dauphin Island Parkway near the Loop, favoring one back leg. Thinking he might have been hit by a car, she coaxed him into her vehicle with a boiled egg from her lunch and took him straight to a veterinarian. A scan of his microchip revealed no injury at all, but it did turn up an old Clarksville, Tennessee, phone number and a different name entirely.
When calls to that number went unanswered, the woman posted photos of the dog on her own Facebook page along with pages tied to the Tennessee community listed on his chip. Within a short time, the post reached a friend of a woman now living in Wyoming, who immediately recognized her long-lost dog, and separately reached a friend of Rutherford’s in Mobile, who recognized Pedro.
The Wyoming woman had adopted the dog in 2003 from a shelter in Fairbanks, Alaska, where her husband was stationed with the Army. She later learned from a local sled dog breeder that the mixed-breed pup actually did have sled dog lineage on his father’s side, with a champion show and agility dog as his mother. After her husband deployed overseas, she moved to Mobile to be near family, settling into a rental home near Cottage Hill Road. In the summer of 2006, neighborhood kids reportedly harassed the dog with water guns and rocks while he was tied out in the yard, and he escaped soon after. She searched for him for months, calling the shelter regularly, but he had already been picked up under a different description and eventually adopted out to Rutherford’s family.
The two women have since connected online and discovered their paths may have crossed before, given family ties both share to Nashville and Wyoming. The Wyoming woman, whose landlord does not allow pets, does not plan to reclaim the dog, but is instead planning a visit to Mobile this summer for a reunion nine years in the making.
For Rutherford, learning the real story behind her dog’s origins has been its own kind of gift, confirming that the family’s playful legend about a wonder dog with a hidden past wasn’t far from the truth after all.