WHO: Zip, a chihuahua-terrier mix, and the intrepid members of an Austin trail running club and a pet rescue nonprofit.
WHAT: A joyful reunion after the two-year-old pup was lost in Austin’s Barton Creek Greenbelt for 69 days.
WHY IT’S SO GREAT: Zip knew the routine. On June 22, as on most Saturdays, his owner, University of Texas chemistry professor Mike Rose, woke his dog up at 4 a.m. so the two could hit the trails for one of their long runs. The two-year-old mutt had become something of a mascot in the Trail Roots running club. No matter the route, no matter the length—often fifteen miles or more—Zip was always there, off-leash at Rose’s feet. “I won the dog lottery,” says Rose, who adopted the dog from a local rescue group. “His mentality was, ‘You’re running, I’m running.’ ”
But near the end of the final loop on their eighteen-mile route that day, Zip got spooked by a passing mountain biker. “I’ll never forget,” says Rose. “I see Zip’s ears point straight back and then he turns around, and he just books it on a dead sprint away from the biker.”
First, Rose doubled back on the trail calling for Zip, who had his tags on and was microchipped. Then he sent a message on the Trail Roots Slack channel. “Hey everyone, Zip just took off on me. Keep a lookout.” Immediately, his runner friends mobilized, as they would continue to do over the next two months, scattering throughout the Barton Creek Greenbelt to maximize the number of eyes looking for Zip. Finally, someone suggested that Rose reach out to the TRAPRS hotline.
Since its 2019 founding, the nonprofit Trapping, Rescue, and Pet Recovery Service has worked on more than three thousand cases of lost or stray dogs. Volunteers use wildlife game cameras that track motion and sophisticated box traps that a staff member is always monitoring (so that whatever critter wanders inside can be quickly and humanely released). Codirector Caitlin Chapman says the group’s record for the longest return-to-owner case is that of Mocha, who went home after three years and three months. Volunteers found her living in a dumpster in a rundown apartment complex in Central Austin. When they returned Mocha to her owner, she still had framed pictures of her dog hanging in her house.
Chapman told Rose to focus his efforts on awareness: Post on Facebook. Register him as missing. Get laminated signs at every Greenbelt entrance and trailhead. For the last ten weeks, Rose has hiked into every off-path pocket of the twelve-mile expanse, often stumbling into homeless encampments where folks, no matter their straits, also became invested in Zip’s fate. “They’d take one flyer and say, ‘Give me three more, I’ll hand them out too.’ ” But each false sighting, every Zip doppelgänger, was a blow to hope.
Then on August 29, the TRAPRS hotline got a call about a skinny, pale dog circling behind the Thomas J. Henry building on the edge of Highway 360. They raced to the scene and set a trap, using Rose’s sweaty running towel as a lure, with a bowl of chicken inside. Rose was in a meeting when he got Chapman’s text: “We got him. We have him.”
In a veterinary emergency room, Rose approached a shivering Zip in a state of stunned reverence. His once muscular dog had lost over 40 percent of his weight and was down to fifteen pounds. Zip’s floppy ears looked wilted, and he was covered in nicks. But as Rose, his face red and wet from the miracle of it all, drew nearer, Zip’s tail started wagging and he squealed in recognition. Once Zip was in his owner’s arms, wrapped in a fleece blanket with a print of dogs wearing Santa hats, he finally closed his eyes in dozy relief.
After a summer roaming the Greenbelt, waiting for rain, surviving on bugs or animal carcasses or trash, Zip went home to his bed. The whole family slept in the next morning. Zip came out of a bath smelling like lavender. He got the zoomies in the backyard for five glorious minutes while playing with Rose’s seven-year-old daughter, Evey. Best Saturday ever.
“Sometimes it feels like the crisis of lost animals in Austin is so major, and we’re just making a tiny little dent,” says Chapman, “and then you have a story like Zip.”
