How to Save a Dog

By David W. Brown

How to Save a Dog

Shortly thereafter, I began to notice the cats. About a dozen lingered, lazy yet alert, behind my apartment complex. Whenever someone approached, they scattered and hid beneath the building. (I found their behavior relatable.) One evening, I came upon a lean and scraggly cat on the sidewalk that looked dead. Upon closer inspection, I saw that her eyes were swollen shut. She scurried off when I reached out to comfort her.
That night, I stared at my ceiling, worrying that the cat would waste away or wander into traffic. The next morning, I left out something for her to eat. A friend suggested that I research “trap, neuter, return” groups, which sterilize and vaccinate feral cats.
Two days later, I met Nita Hemeter, the short, bespectacled co-founder of a nonprofit called Trap Dat Cat, in front of her pink house. Her face bore the weary bemusement of a veteran of some terrible war. She told me that she had started rescuing animals after reading “Animal Liberation,” by the philosopher Peter Singer, and she lent me two traps. “I’ve been trying for years to get someone to volunteer to trap at that apartment,” she told me. If I succeeded in my mission, she went on, her organization would find the cat a veterinarian.
I baited the traps with mackerel, per Nita’s instructions. Cats sniffed through the wires; one sat on top, as if mocking my efforts, and another crawled inside. But the injured cat appeared only once, uninterested in the trap. After two nights, I resorted to a backup plan: giving out food directly, in hopes of rallying her immune system. Her fellow-cats weren’t going to wait for her to find her Friskies, so this effectively meant feeding the entire colony every day and night. Within a few weeks, Squinty Cat was letting me stand beside her while she ate, and her eyes seemed healed. But now I had a different problem. The cats expected me.
The cats led me, in a roundabout way, to a dog. Three years after I adopted the colony, while checking my mailbox, I made eye contact with a woman who was stapling signs to telephone poles: Michelle Cheramie, the founding director of Zeus’ Rescues, another local nonprofit. I knew her organization well; I’d adopted two house cats from Zeus’. “I lost my dog here in Mid-City,” she said, and handed me a flyer, which I accepted out of politeness. “LOST,” it read. “PINK COLLAR, BROWN SPOTS. IF YOU SEE SCRIM, DON’T CHASE.” It featured a shaggy white dog with sad eyes and floppy ears, along with her phone number.
I was not planning to look for the dog. If anything, I planned to look away. I didn’t have the capacity to care for more animals, and I knew I’d feel beholden to any needy creature I saw. But it was difficult to ignore the van from Zeus’ Rescues, which started turning up at all hours. Whenever someone reported a sighting, Michelle posted the location on social media.
Late one night, weeks later, while depressed and doomscrolling in bed, I came across a string of recent Scrim sightings at intersections near my house. “If you are in the area, please text with location, direction headed and a picture if you can get one,” Michelle wrote. I don’t know why I went out that night. I’m not even a dog person. But it was that or reflect on every mistake I’d ever made.
Two minutes later, two blocks from home, I saw him—a seventeen-pound mutt sniffing around someone’s garden. I kept my distance and messaged Michelle. Immediately, she called me. “The rescue van is just around the corner,” she said. “Keep an eye on him.” The street was poorly lit, with gnarled tree roots that animals could hide behind; passing cars created their own roving shadows. Scrim vanished.
When the van rolled up behind me, Tammy Murray, a woman in a T-shirt and yoga pants, climbed out. She seemed to be not much older than me, perhaps in her early fifties, and she looked exhausted. I told her what had happened. “He does that,” she said. I live in Mid-City, a historically working-class residential area that is more laid-back and lived-in than the French Quarter, a couple miles away. It’s known for colorful shotgun houses, which are tightly clustered and raised against flooding. Tammy typically brought snares or a net gun to Scrim encounters, but he could duck under a house and emerge a block away.
Michelle originally rescued Scrim from a kill shelter in November, 2023, shortly before he was set to be euthanized. He was physically healthy but behaved like a dog who’d experienced abuse and neglect. During a three-month foster placement, he was docile and frightened, but not aggressive. Then, on the first night of a trial adoption in Mid-City, he escaped.
Tammy and her partner, Freba Maulauizada, both lived in Mid-City and had backgrounds in animal rescue, so a couple days after he got loose they volunteered to help. Michelle lived Uptown, twenty minutes away, so she gave them the keys to the rescue van. But Scrim wasn’t food-motivated and ignored traps. You couldn’t get close enough to use a catch pole or a net. He had “lost-dog syndrome,” which meant that he was fear-driven and survival-focussed, and he responded to calls by running.
Over the next several weeks, Michelle asked people to share footage of Scrim from home-security cameras. A record-breaking heat wave settled in, and Scrim was moving only at night. Volunteers organized a neighborhood-wide stakeout, which had the feel of a quiet, quintessentially New Orleans block party—people sitting on porches, drinking wine. I manned a street corner from 11 P.M. to 3 A.M. Even then, there were so many people patrolling the area that Google Maps showed standstill traffic. None of them found Scrim.
After that first night, I found myself driving the long way home from my cat colony. For reasons that weren’t clear to me, I went for early-morning walks and evening runs in places where he’d been spotted. I often saw Tammy in the van. I also noticed a middle-aged woman, who had short blond hair and bright-blue eyes, zipping around on an electric scooter at odd hours and in odd places. Finally, driving by one day, I rolled down my window and asked what she was doing.
“Looking for that dog,” she said in a melodic New Orleans accent. Her name was Barbara Burger, and she worked as a court reporter. Each night, she drove twenty minutes from the suburb of River Ridge to help. “It’s so sad that he’s still running the streets,” she told me. She, too, tended to a cat colony.
Sometimes, I saw a tattooed woman in her early thirties, serenely riding her bicycle. I assumed that she was either dealing drugs or searching for Scrim. Eventually, she introduced herself as Bonnie Goodson. “I’m six years sober, living in New Orleans, so I dabble in insomnia,” she told me. She’d always been too scared of bad drivers to bike in the city, but she felt safer at night.
By late July, Tammy, Michelle, Barbara, Bonnie, and I were sharing updates over a walkie-talkie app called Zello. It wasn’t exactly a social activity; the only way to cover a lot of ground was to avoid one another. But we were seeing our city in a new way. Michelle heard updates from cops and sex workers; even people who stole catalytic converters from cars started to look familiar. We also learned about each other. Michelle, who’d previously worked in I.T., started Zeus’ after seeing the plight of animals during Hurricane Katrina. Bonnie had been in the film industry for fifteen years. Freba, I learned, had migrated to the United States from Afghanistan after the Soviets invaded. When Tammy told her that I had done a tour of duty there, she lit up and said, “You’ve been to my country?” We often talked about her homeland. She once wrote that, as a gay Muslim person in a red state, she identified with the way pit bulls are stereotyped and stigmatized.
Tammy had recently lost her father and closed a furniture-building business. Long patrols gave her time to reassess her life. She gained a special understanding of Scrim’s preferred roads and routes: Palmyra, Conti, Dorgenois; the Lafitte Greenway, a running path that heads southeast toward the French Quarter; and railroad tracks that head northwest. She knew that thunder scared him enough to make him run across six lanes of Canal Street traffic.
Scrim could easily outrun our foot patrols and outmaneuver our cars, so we mostly kept track of his health from afar and tried to determine which house he slept under. Michelle hoped we could barricade all four sides and catch him. When we figured out that he ate cat food at several colonies in Mid-City, Tammy set up twenty-four new feeding stations; other animals were benefitting, too.
One night, after a sighting in Mid-City, Michelle drove up to my car and asked, “Can you drive my truck?” I got behind the wheel while she stood and navigated through the sunroof. Then a voice from the bed of the truck startled me.
“Hi, I’m Kanyon!”
Kanyon McLean was a cheerful young veterinarian who worked at a wildlife sanctuary outside the city. She regularly treated zebras and bison; she was carrying a rifle that shot tranquillizer darts. It was my first time driving a truck with a gunner in the back since Afghanistan. (In four months of weekend shifts, she only attempted to dart Scrim once; the circumstances were seldom right for his safety, or everyone else’s.)
Local media started to cover Scrim. A cute lost dog, a number to text your sightings to: it was an interactive adventure, perfect for the Times-Picayune and the evening news. At first, the breathless news stories seemed charming and harmless. “SCRIM HASN’T BEEN SPOTTED IN 2 DAYS. DOG RESCUER FEARS WORST.” “HOW WILL SCRIM THE STRAY DOG SURVIVE THE COMING COLD SNAP?” They publicized Zeus’ Rescues and the broader rescue community; many people started noticing stray animals. Thousands of texts arrived with possible sightings.
But the publicity also brought out darker impulses. Many strangers accused us of chasing a dog that wanted to be free. This idea seemed nonsensical to us; he ran recklessly through traffic and we witnessed many close calls. Animals died on the city’s roads so often that we kept heavy-duty trash bags in our cars. But Michelle received regular threats. People routinely reported that Scrim was dead, and we had to investigate every time. “I’m barbecuing and eating him,” a particularly barbaric caller said. If someone said he’d been hit by a car somewhere, we might have to search under a dozen nearby houses. We became leery of attention, and Tammy took to calling the prank callers back in retaliation. One night, Freba, noticing that Tammy wasn’t in bed, knocked on the bathroom door.
“Is everything O.K.?”

“Are you calling that number again?”

In October, after more than five months of searching, Michelle forwarded a Scrim sighting a few blocks from my house, near a quiet brickyard that Tammy suspected of being his lair. Could I go check it out? I really couldn’t—I was on deadline—but, minutes later, I was there. I found him walking carelessly along the road, the raggedy king of Bienville Street. I followed at a distance as he entered the parking lot of a limousine company.
Scrim noticed me and trotted off, but he moved with familiarity. When Tammy and Michelle arrived, we walked along a fence that surrounded the lot; aside from a gap in the rear, which we could seal, there was no place for him to crawl under or leap over. A week later, someone saw him again. Tammy, Bonnie, Michelle, and one of her employees, Syd DeVictoria-Michel, surrounded the area, and Michelle hit him with a tranquillizer dart. For eight minutes, he ran around with nowhere to go, until Michelle and Tammy managed to snatch him up.
News of Scrim’s rescue spread rapidly. I heard that, in a line at a Taylor Swift concert, someone shouted, “They found Scrim!” and the crowd erupted with cheers. I felt profoundly relieved—but also confused, even bereft. What had I been a part of? Why? I still trudged out to the cat colony nightly, and every so often a familiar furry face vanished. Although I never tried to name the cats, I felt the loss every time. “We might be the only love they ever experience,” Tammy told me one night, over drinks. “I try to remind myself of that.”
Scrim made national news. The New Orleans City Council recognized us at a ceremony for our “dedication to capturing Scrim, the terrier mutt and notorious canine runaway of Mid-City, after 177 days of search and rescue efforts.” (Walking to City Hall, Bonnie told me, “Usually when I come here, I’m protesting.”) When I’d cross some intersection we’d patrolled a hundred times, I’d snap a photo of the street signs and drop it in the group chat. We gathered at one another’s houses to tell the same war stories again and again: the time Michelle and Tammy had had him under a house and a stranger’s “help” allowed him to escape; the time a child had thrown a brick at Tammy, and she’d chased him while promising to give him “an ass beating.”
Nearly six months on the run had cost Scrim a nail, half an ear, and several teeth. (He probably chewed on garbage and stones.) At least twice, he’d been shot with pellet guns or .22-calibre rifles, which helped explain times when he’d vanished for days. He seemed anxious and depressed. We knew he had a long emotional recovery ahead. Michelle sometimes texted us maps showing coördinates from a G.P.S. collar that Scrim now wore, as if to say, “Here is Scrim’s precise location—we’ll never have to search for him again!”
Then, just before 9 A.M. on November 16th, Michelle sent several maps in rapid succession. “PLEASE COME HERE NOW,” she wrote. “He jumped out of my 2nd floor window and started running.”
We converged on Scrim’s coördinates as quickly as we could, but he was back in flight mode. While we waited for him to settle down, Bonnie, Barbara, and I stood near a busy highway. Everything felt misshapen and dreamlike. We’d always searched at night, but now it was daytime; the houses here were much nicer than in Mid-City. We expected his G.P.S. collar to last three days, but his dot disappeared within three hours.
I’m not sure I’ve ever felt as drained as I did that day. In Mid-City, Scrim knew where to find food and shelter, but now he was lost in Uptown, and probably hungry. Interstate 10 divided the city like an asphalt moat; I wasn’t even sure that I could get back to Mid-City on foot, and I could read road signs.
We resumed evening patrols, but for me they felt half-hearted, and I soon gave up. The only good news was that Michelle’s social-media posts were met with a supportive response. (“There is nothing negative that you can say to me or about him getting loose again that I haven’t already said to myself in the last 24 hours,” she’d written.) He had pushed through a window screen. Footage from a Ring camera showed him falling thirteen feet, followed by a thump and a yowl. Press coverage called him Houdini.
Days later, Tammy, Michelle, and I spotted Scrim in Audubon Park. We watched him wander near the giraffes in a nearby zoo. He walked stiffly, but his leg didn’t seem broken. Someone eventually startled him and he ran. After that, Tammy set up a feeding station nearby.
I spent the next three weekends mapping out local cat colonies and stapling “LOST” signs to telephone poles. Anytime someone made eye contact, I approached, as Michelle had once approached me. “I lost my dog,” I’d say, and hand them a flyer. We posted sightings on a public map, and, before long, large swaths of the city were dotted with pins. He walked the St. Charles Avenue Streetcar line; he settled in near some older houses in the Lower Garden District. Tammy was convinced that he was trying to find his way back to Mid-City. The interstate was impassable, however, unless he walked a perilous bike path or cut through the crowds downtown. “He’s smart,” Tammy told me. “He’ll figure something out.”
On December 12th, after nearly a month, the Scrim sightings suddenly stopped. Anxious days passed. I noticed that, without admitting it, the team had started talking about him in the past tense. We were each, in our own way, preparing for a post-Scrim world. I secretly hoped that his body would never be found. The world was better with Scrim walking through it, and I wanted his legend to endure.
Six days later, he reappeared in Mid-City.
It was strange to see Scrim become a cultural phenomenon. A dog who had been set for euthanasia—unwanted, unadoptable—ultimately appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. Michelle felt like she couldn’t turn down media inquiries; Zeus’ Rescues ran deeply in the red. But the presence of journalists disrupted our cohesion. We were tired, and at three in the morning none of us felt like answering such questions as “How did you get involved?” and “Why this dog?” None of us had good answers. I still don’t. The one that most irritated me was “Why spend so much time doing this, when you could do something like helping the homeless?” The question implied that there were more important things than animals and better ways to spend our time. We felt that Scrim was inherently worthy of help, and he needed it—if we didn’t catch him, he would almost certainly be hit by a car.
We were also doing more than searching for a dog. We engaged freely and deeply with anyone, anywhere, because that was the best way to gain intel. Tammy stocked the van with sanitation kits—things like toothbrushes and soap—for unhoused people she came across. One night, I stumbled upon a woman who’d overdosed, and I waited with her until paramedics arrived. During our search for Scrim, Zeus’ Rescues took in three hundred dogs and cats. Michelle and Tammy spent Christmas morning wading through a canal, rescuing two abandoned pit bulls. Looking for Scrim meant immersing ourselves in the place where we lived, street by street and night after night. We helped where we could.
One day in December, a local reporter happened to be present for a fourth attempt to tranquillize Scrim. Unfortunately, the resulting article featured a photo of Michelle holding the rifle, with the headline “Scrim, famous Mid-City stray dog escapes drug dart again.” We found it sweet that people identified more with the dog than with his pursuers—but now we sounded less incompetent than malicious. Michelle endured a new round of death threats. After that, I said politely but firmly that dart guns and journalists were out, and no one objected.
In mid-January, a once-in-a-century snowstorm loomed. We baited shelters with cat food and liquid smoke, a strong-smelling condiment that he seemed to like. The day before the storm, someone texted a Scrim sighting at an unusual hour—11 A.M.—and I figured it was a mistake. Sure enough, when I arrived, I discovered a young woman trying to lure a dog that a local family allowed to roam the neighborhood. “We can’t let him freeze,” the woman said. This time, I knew what to do. I gave the woman dog food and a nylon slip leash from the back of my car. I thought of this as the Scrim effect: locals were making a decision to look for animals in distress. I also learned that someone had built a shelter for the cat colony I tended.
During the snowstorm, people made “snow Scrims.” By the time they melted, in late January, Tammy was hopeful again. We’d finally found a house Scrim was routinely sleeping beneath. Ring-camera footage showed him leisurely eating cat food on nearby porches. For the first time, he seemed to be behaving like a dog. He’d linger in places and rub his belly on doormats. Tammy and Freba started setting traps in his area.
Meanwhile, on February 10th, a woman named Jennifer Ruley reached out to Trap Dat Cat, the organization that had first introduced me to animal rescue. Kittens kept turning up on her porch. Nita invited her over and showed her how traps worked.
The next morning, at seven o’clock, Nita received a text: “I think I caught Scrim!”
Nita thought Jennifer was joking—until a photo came through. A scruffy white dog had squeezed himself improbably into a cat trap. “Holy shit,” Nita said, and she immediately called Michelle. Scrim, it seemed, had rescued himself.
It was now Mardi Gras season, and Scrim was becoming a sort of patron saint for the city. Partygoers wandered the streets, drinks in hand, wearing Scrim costumes made from furry onesies. One float depicted him as an outlaw, riding a motorcycle through a window to freedom; another showed his big ears flapping triumphantly in the wind. People were spending time and money to honor a troublesome dog of no pedigree, and whatever he stood for: wildness, rebelliousness, a refusal to heel.
Recently, I visited Michelle and said hello to Scrim. He was lying calmly on her sofa, staring at me with a hint of suspicion. He’d befriended Michelle’s enormous Labrador-retriever mix, Scooby, and often followed him around the house. When I offered him pats, he tolerated them. I didn’t mind that Scrim seemed not to recognize me. We had set out to shield him from danger, and he was safe now. In videos, he bounded around the house with his tongue hanging out, wagging his tail furiously.
But I sometimes wish that Scrim could know what he means to me and my adoptive city. Practically every day, I see his likeness on Canal Street murals, devotional candles, and T-shirts with captions such as “No Gods, No Masters.” At cocktail bars, I can order dog-themed drinks such as Born to Run and Slim ’Em, Scrim. I hope he can find a sense of belonging in New Orleans. In searching for him, I certainly did.
In Scrim’s nine months on the run, he saw more of the city than many of us will see in a lifetime. Nowadays, he wears two G.P.S. trackers, and he spends most of his time in Michelle’s house, at Zeus’ Rescues, and on leashed walks around the neighborhood. Even so, every now and then, someone reports that they’ve spotted Scrim out there. I’d like to think that they always will. ♦

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