Janet O’Reilly has been keeping a close eye on the Wesley Ridge wildfire burning on Vancouver Island, as her house is just outside the current evacuation alert zone.
However, that has not stopped her from going for daily walks with her dogs.
But on Sunday morning, with the noise of the fire nearby, the planes and the bucketing, O’Reilly heard a new sound.
“I heard a dog crying,” she told Global News.
“I heard a dog barking in the woods.”
O’Reilly continued on with her walk and then on the way back, she heard the crying again.
She wasn’t able to go investigate but she went home, went to work, went for another dog walk with a friend in a different area and that’s when a neighbour came to her house saying she had also heard barking and crying and had stumbled across a dog tied to a tree.
“As soon as he told me that and it was by itself, then we kind of started calling everywhere,” O’Reilly said.
“We started calling every SPCA and emergency hotline numbers from the SPCA, conservation officers, RCMP and nobody could help. So it was a matter of just packing up stuff and seeing if the dog was friendly enough that it would let us get her.”
O’Reilly said that it being the long weekend and a Sunday evening, few people were available or working.
“We went up there with water and food and my friend stayed down at the service road with his dogs, just so we wouldn’t intimidate her,” O’Reilly said.
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“And we don’t know how she is with other dogs and (we) put the water down and she just started drinking and drinking and drinking. She let me come closer to her when she was drinking. She didn’t seem intimidated by me at all. She didn’t seem like she was growling, nothing.”
O’Reilly said she was trying to offer treats but the dog just wanted to drink water.
“I was looking at the chain, thinking how the heck am I going to get this chain off of her and fortunately it was just done up by a carabiner,” she added.
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O’Reilly said the dog let her take the chain off and put on a leash.
“She wasn’t awesome on a leash, but she wasn’t trying to get away from me; she was happy to be with me,” she added.
O’Reilly contacted the BC SPCA and they were able to come and pick up the dog later that night.
They think the dog is approximately two years old and is a healthy mixed-breed.
“She’s in such great shape and she friendlies up pretty fast,” Sam Sattar with the BC SPCA Alberni-Clayoquot branch said.
“We’re just kind of wondering how she ended up where she ended up.”
It is hoped that someone will recognize the dog, now known as Eve, after O’Reilly’s middle name.
Eve will see a vet soon and could be put up for adoption.
“She showed no signs of neglect,” O’Reilly said.
“I also, I walk in this area every single day, and I can almost guarantee she wasn’t there 24 hours earlier in the morning because I would have heard her crying the day before.”
How Eve ended up in a remote area tied to a tree close to a wildfire evacuation alert area remains a mystery.
“I feel that a monster did this,” O’Reilly said,
“I feel like if somebody wanted this dog to be found, it would have been tied somewhere where there’s people, or where there is going to be,
“This dog was tied where nobody, if that dog was not barking, this dog would still be there like there’s no way me or my neighbour would have come across her if she wasn’t barking.”
The BC SPCA said it offers emergency boarding services across the province so there is no need to abandon an animal.
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