A rescue dog named Bailey is back home safe after figuring out how to ring the doorbell of the Texas shelter where she went up for adoption.
A family had adopted the friendly husky mix from the Animal Rescue League of El Paso last month. At some point soon after, Bailey got loose and ended up running away, said Loretta Hyde, founder of Animal Rescue League of El Paso.
The shelter immediately posted an urgent plea on Facebook asking anyone in the area to call them if they found her. A few people reported Bailey sightings but none were able to catch her.
What happened next still has the animal shelter stunned.
Just after 1 a.m. on Jan. 31, Bailey rang the doorbell at her former shelter, located about 10 miles from her adoptive home.
Somehow, she had found her own way to safety. And even more remarkably, she summoned some of her favorite humans in the middle of the night.
"I'll be darn, at 1:42 in the morning she's ringing the doorbell like, 'I'm home,'" Hyde told USA TODAY on Thursday. "The Ring camera kept going off and off and off ... and you'll see in the video that she's running out there, sitting, waiting for somebody to come."
When one of the shelter worker's said, "Bailey" through the camera, "she went boom, right up to the camera," Hyde said.
"'I'm here, let me in, where are you?'" Hyde imagines Bailey thinking.
It gave everyone goosebumps, she said.
Once one of the rescue's staff members arrived to the shelter, she took Bailey inside, fed her, gave her a warm blanket and put her straight to bed.
"She slept so hard the whole night," Hyde said. "The next morning she was like, 'You can serve my breakfast over there. I'll get it in a minute. I'm still resting.' So three days without food and water, I mean, she was making up for her rest."
They called her new owner, who had already been out looking for her in the middle of the night, she said.
Bailey and her owner were reunited and she's safe back home.
The story goes to show that "dogs are smarter than we give them credit for."
"She knew exactly how to get back to the shelter," Hyde said, adding that Bailey had to cross multiple busy intersections during her two days being missing.
Luckily, she said: "It was such a happy ending for all of us."
