Woman quits job to spend 57 days searching for lost border collie, and finds her
The great Billy Madison spoke wisdom when he said: “You got a pet. You got a responsibility. If your dog is lost you don’t look for an hour then call it quits. You get your ass out there, and you find that fucking dog!” Well, that’s exactly one Washington woman did when her dog went missing in Montana.
Carole King (not that one) went so far as to quit her job as a postal worker to spend 57 days looking for her lost border collie. King, from Deer Park, Washington, recently traveled to Flathead County for a four-day vacation with her husband and their 7-year-old border collie, Katie. Instead of relaxing alongside her parents, though, Katie split, leading an anxiety-fueled adventure all by her lonesome for 57 days straight, roaming the mean streets of Flathead County in search of chin scratches and food scraps.
On July 20, King and her husband left Katie at her hotel room while going out for dinner that night. When the two came back to their room, Katie was nowhere to be found. They presumed that a loud storm had caused the dog to somehow escape the hotel room in terror, and, given that border collies are smart as fuck, it’s easy to believe.
The hotel clerk helped the couple make a flyer to share over Facebook and social media to spread news about the lost dog, which eventually snowballed over the next few weeks months and led to total strangers lending their eyes and ears to the effort, as well as texting Carole King words of encouragement for her search.
King eventually found an incredibly malnourished Katie—“severely dehydrated and in starvation mode,” per a local vet—in the city of Kalispell, Montana, after a tip-off from a phone call on September 15. “I just bear-hugged her; I wasn’t going to let her go,” King told The Spokesman-Review. “Tears were flying, we were screaming, everybody is high-fiving, hugging each other. People are stopping in their vehicles, getting out and hugging us. I think the whole neighborhood knew that we found her.”
High-fives aplenty, this story has a happy ending. Hopefully King spends less time job searching than she did dog searching.