CHILTON, WI (WTAQ) – It all started with a busy weekend at work. Kelly Kane of Schaumberg, Illinois, and her boyfriend, Tony, both had to work the weekend shifts. So Tony’s uncle offered to take their dog, Greta, to the farm for a weekend.
Kane said that particular uncle rents property on a farm in Calumet County and thought it would be great to let Greta out to run in the fields, rather than trudge around in the city or sit at home for the weekend.
The old dog apparently loved running around with the ATVs and other activities on the farm. But that Sunday morning as the uncle let Greta out to do her thing, he went to do the same thing. When he walked back outside, Greta had vanished.
Kane said she had no idea where to even begin. She had never been to the area before, much less while searching for her missing family pet. But she decided the best thing to do was to start canvassing the area as well as she could on her own.
“For two days I’m down there, I stayed a Best Western, I’m driving around, it’s pouring rain and walking around. I’ve even got a loudspeaker at one point, blasting me calling her name out of the car driving down these like lovers lanes where she might have been spotted,” Kane said. “I’m from the Chicago-land area. People don’t want you running up to their houses. These people, not one person gave me a dirty look. They heard my story, showed sympathy, they told me about their dog – the word started spreading.”
But those first two days showed very little promise in finding Greta. So Kane started reaching out to different groups over the phone and joined as many missing dog groups as she could find on Facebook. She even tried to use photos of her daughter to help people sympathize with the search online.
“So people felt bad for this 11-year-old kid that was missing her dog, and that pulled at their heartstrings. It was all about connecting everybody and getting everybody involved,” Kane explained.
Kane’s daughter making lost dog signs to help in the search for Greta. (PHOTO: Courtesy of Kelly Kane)
Still nothing.
As she went to head back home, feeling somewhat defeated, Kane ran into one last person – who connected her with Get Toby Home, Inc., a dog search and rescue group out of the Green Bay area. That’s when things began to change course.
“This group starts this message group, and have this master mapper. So as we’re going and flyering, and now we’re putting up signs, and there are starting to be sightings – she’s mapping all this out,” Kane said. “We’ve got sightings – and we’ve got all this ‘This street was flyered, we need this street flyered.”
At one point, Kane said there were more than fifteen people in the online conversation – sharing where they had plastered flyers and who they had spoken to about Greta. That encouraged Kane to renew her efforts and double-down on tracking down the hunting dog.
“I take [Tony’s] minivan and get a chalk marker and I wrote #FindGreta because I’m trying to get the hashtag going, and I’ve got pictures of her on the van,” Kane told WTAQ News. “20 handmade signs plus places provided me with 15 or 20 signs, so now she’s starting to pop up on every corner. We’re going to places in town and people are like ‘Oh you’re Greta’s owner? We’re looking for her!'”
Kane started receiving messages from people she had never met that they were leaving food out in their barns, checking their deer cameras, and more – in hopes of Greta showing up somewhere.
Get Toby Home, Inc. also reinforced their efforts by providing everything from basic supplies to live traps and cameras that would send immediate feedback of any motion. But even with that help, the search was a bit of a struggle.
“It’s a $200-$300 camera attached to a post or a cornstalk or whatever we had access to, and then I’d put a piece of my clothes near the food too. The idea is that if she goes there, boom, it’ll take a picture and send it to Lori the rescue lady and she’ll say ‘Hey, we spotted her,'” Kane explained. “There’s rain, there’s corn, the cameras aren’t working. That’s not working, that’s not looking good. I have this live trap they provided me with, they showed me how to use that. We don’t have anywhere to set it because there haven’t been any more sightings.”
Kane was scouring the area on Friday and Saturday but had to get home for work on Sunday. But around 10:30 a.m. on Sunday, her phone started ringing. A lot.
“On our way out of town, we flyered from Charlesberg to Jericho with the flyers and signs – I was hitting the bars and everything. We start getting calls then Sunday morning that she’s being seen in these areas. You don’t know if they’re legit or not, but there’s enough to think it’s almost like she’s following my trail,” Kane said. “So we’re like – ‘We’ve got to get back up there, we have to camp out in the area, get your sent out there and let her come find us.'”
After getting out of work, the two found their way back up to Calumet County once again. And again, they returned with higher hopes than before.
However, there was one snag in the plan for Kelly. She had never camped in her life – and they were sleeping in a minivan, parked in a cornfield.
Kelly Kane parked the minivan in this field, where she stayed during the search for Greta. (PHOTO: Courtesy of Kelly Kane)
“We slept in the van, it was awful! I didn’t shower, I didn’t brush my teeth, and the next morning – I mean, this is gross, you probably won’t say anything about this, but where do I poop? I had to go to a gas station to poop!” Kane said. “I’m not a camper, I’m a hotel girl. And I’m standing on my boyfriend’s truck waving the dog bed in the air, I’m peeing around the perimeter. My boyfriend hung his dirty socks all around the cornfield trying to draw her in to us.”
As the search continued, Kane began to understand what people mean when they say ‘Wisconsin nice’.
“People were offering me their camp up tents, they had never met me – I could stay with them, ‘Could I do anything for you? Could I pay for the vet bills?’ – People were so generous…There was one lady in particular, Lynn, and she was amazing through the whole thing too. She was letting us park on her farms and stuff and have bases and all of that. It was great,” Kane said. “Nobody around here would do anything like this. Everybody cared. People were even going to their companies saying ‘Hey, can you send a company-wide email to all of the employees?’ – People went above and beyond.”
Meanwhile, Kane and company kept following any sightings or possible trails to find Greta. She would go to any sighting spot and spread her scent in hopes that Greta would find her way back to one of those places.
“One minute, I’d be driving through the woods crying my eyes out like a baby, and the next minute I’d be like ‘This is cool! We’ve got her, we’re going to find her!'” Kane said.
She stayed in the van again Sunday night and started the search again Monday morning.
“I’m flyering down south and I get a call that she was spotted up north, so I high tail it up there half an hour,” Kane said.
While interviewing the person who had called her, the phone rang again. It was from the local game warden.
“We had left a live trap out the cornfield, but we packed up everything else. The sheriff drives past and sees a dog in the trap, so he brings the cage to the game warden who lives a mile and half away,” Kane said.
They didn’t receive an alert from the camera, Kane admitted because she had simply forgotten to set it up that morning.
She asked the warden to check the tags, but he told her he would just keep the dog in the cage until she arrived – and didn’t want to get too close. Kane rushed back down to the warden’s house, panicked and excited at the same time. During the drive, she called the team who had been flyering with her.
“They said they were just at this guy’s house an hour ago with the flyer. That’s how he knew to call me,” Kane explained.
Once Kane arrived at the warden’s house, it was unmistakable. There was Greta.
Greta in the cage after being found. (PHOTO: Courtesy of Kelly Kane)
“I go to the cage to greet her and she’s obviously excited to see me, her tail’s wagging, she’s even a little affectionate – which she’s a not a real affectionate dog. Within a minute, she’s over it and pulling on the leash down another trail,” Kane laughed.
Greta was found about 15-20 miles away from the farm where she initially disappeared.
“She was out there for eight days and she found her way back. I took her to the vet, she doesn’t have a flea, a tick, a scratch – there’s nothing wrong with her. She lost three pounds, that’s it,” Kane said in disbelief.
But she admits, there’s no way she would have found the old hound without help from everyone involved – whether it was the work of Get Toby Home, Inc., the local deputies and warden, or just the average resident who gave them a tip or hung the posters. The entire ordeal cemented one thing in Kelly Kane’s mind that was never something as much as a thought until last week.
“I would totally move to Chilton now in a heartbeat, this community is amazing,” Kane told WTAQ News.
Kane’s family, and Greta too, will be back in Chilton this weekend for a cookout to thank the community for their help.
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