A Southern California couple who lost their French bulldog have gone to great lengths over the past two months to find the pooch, using bloodhounds, vets, cash rewards and door-to-door canvassing.
But the dog – Mushie – hasn't arrived and the determined couple now have to put up with scam calls and barking pranks on the phone.
Still, Gabriella Sidhu and her partner, Chris Casey, refuse to give up.
“It's not just a dog as people say,” said Sidhu. “He's the closest thing we have to a child.”
No one will doubt their efforts if they want their daughter instead of a dog, he said.
The drama began when Sidhu, 24, dropped off Mushie and her nanny, employed by the pet company Rover, on September 17 at 6:15 pm in the North Hollywood area near Victory Boulevard and Beck Avenue.
Sidhu was on his way to see the movie “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” with Casey and a friend at Universal CityWalk. He said he noticed that the man was looking at at least five other dogs, but didn't think anything of it.
“It was the first time we went out for a long time,” said Sidhu. “And it turned out to be the worst night of our lives.”
After only 14 minutes, the babysitter called him. Mushie was gone, somehow harnessed out of the gate.
“Traffic was slow, time felt like it was going slow” when they returned to the sitter, Sidhu said. They searched for hours, and they found Mushie.
He and his partner took a break from work and slept in their car for two weeks to stay in the area where the dog went missing rather than return to their home in El Sereno.
Mushie, who the couple rescued from a breeder, is a black brindle Frenchie with a white chest, broken ears and no tail. He is almost 6 years old and needs daily medication and special food due to his health problems – another cause for concern.
Sidhu and Casey have spent thousands of dollars trying to find him and have offered a $5,000 reward for his return. The couple even hired a blood worker to track Mushie's scent from the dog's home to a nearby property where the trail stopped cold. The manager suspects that Mushie was taken by someone who took him home, said Sidhu.
The couple has also hired several pet talkers, or animal psychics, who say they can communicate with a pet over the phone and help owners understand it. But still no luck, said Sidhu.
“It's hard to know if it's useful,” he said.
Rover, a dog-watching company, was initially helpful, offering to pay for fliers and searching local websites for Mushie, Sidhu said. The company said that the striker will help them look after Mushie. But when they got to him a few days later, the dog keeper said he couldn't track Mushie, Sidhu said, because he was watching another group of dogs.
Sidhu, who works as a civil servant, said he felt Rover didn't do enough to find the dog and only removed the dog handler who lost Mushie from his property after KTLA-TV reached out to Rover for comment.
In a statement sent to The Times, Rover said it had taken several steps to try to find Mushie.
“To support search efforts, we have offered a large reward for information that leads to reuniting Mushie with her family, posted on online pet-finding websites that send alerts directly to local shelters and veterinarians, and reach out to members of our veterinary community. in the area,” said Rover in a statement.
Since the dog disappeared, Sidhu and Casey have reached out to every vet, pet store, library, school and shelter in the area, hoping that their dog will turn up, or that someone will see the hundreds of planes that have left them over the past two months. . They spend weekends and evenings after work looking for him, and have vowed to go door-to-door until they reach every house in the San Fernando Valley to find him, Sidhu said.
Sidhu also had to fend off scam calls from people pretending to own his dog and demanding reward money. Some callers threaten to keep the dog or run Mushie over with their car. Others make fun of him for barking on the phone, he said.
“We got bad calls and had bad communication, but we met more good, kind people than bad,” he said. “So we hope that the right person will help us with Mushie.”
Another thing that the couple is afraid of is that Mushie is staying by himself and waiting for them to come and rescue him, said Sidhu.
“One thing we can't control is our actions, our effort,” he said, “We can't let him go.”
If you see Mushie or know where she is, Sidhu asks that you call her at (760) 960-9272.
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