A Southern California couple who lost their French bulldog have gone to great lengths over the last two months to find the pooch, resorting to bloodhounds, animal psychics, cash rewards and door-to-door canvasing.
But the dog — Mushie — has yet to turn up and the determined couple are now having to endure scam calls and pranksters barking into the phone line.
Still, Gabriella Sidhu and her partner, Chris Casey, refuse to give up.
“It’s not just a dog like people say,” Sidhu said. “She’s the closest thing we have to a baby.”
No one would be questioning their efforts if they were searching for their daughter instead of a dog, she said.
The drama began when Sidhu, 24, dropped Mushie off with her dogsitter, hired through the pet service company Rover, on Sept. 17 about 6:15 p.m. in the North Hollywood area near Victory Boulevard and Beck Avenue.
Sidhu was on her way to see the “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” movie with Casey and a friend at Universal CityWalk. She said she noticed the sitter was watching at least five other dogs, but thought nothing of it.
“It was the first time we had actually been out in a while,” Sidhu said. “And it turned into the worst night of our life.”
Only 14 minutes later, the dogsitter called her. Mushie was gone, having gotten out of her harness somehow and run out of the gate.
“Traffic was going slow, time felt like it was moving so slow” on their way back to the sitter, Sidhu said. They searched for hours, but could not find Mushie.
She and her partner took time off work and slept in their car for two weeks to stay in the area where the dog was lost rather than returning to their home in El Sereno.
Mushie, who the couple rescued from a breeder, is a spayed black brindle French bulldog with a white chest, perky ears and no tail. She is about 6 years old and requires daily medication and special food because of her health issues — another reason they are worried.
Sidhu and Casey have spent thousands of dollars trying to find her and have offered a $5,000 reward for her return. The couple even hired a bloodhound handler to track Mushie’s scent from the dogsitter’s home to a nearby spot where the trail stopped cold. The handler suspects Mushie has been picked up by someone who took her home, Sidhu said.
The couple also hired several pet communicators, or animal psychics, who claim they can telepathically connect with a pet and help owners understand them. But still no luck, Sidhu said.
“It’s hard to know if it’s helpful,” she said.
Rover, the dogsitting company, was initially helpful, offering to pay for fliers and search local shelter websites for Mushie, Sidhu said. The company said the sitter would help them look for Mushie too. But when they reached out to her a few days later, the dog sitter said she couldn’t search for Mushie, Sidhu said, because she was watching another set of dogs.
Sidhu, who works as a federal employee, said she feels Rover hasn’t done enough to find the dog and only removed the dogsitter who lost Mushie from its platform after KTLA-TV reached out to Rover for a comment.
In a statement to The Times, Rover said it has taken several steps to try to locate Mushie.
“To support the search efforts, we have offered a significant reward for information leading to reuniting Mushie with her family, posted in online pet-finding websites that send alerts directly to local shelters and veterinarians, and reached out to members of our sitter community in the area,” Rover said in the statement.
Since the dog disappeared, Sidhu and Casey have reached out to every veterinarian, pet store, library, school and shelter in the area, hoping their dog will show up, or someone will see the hundreds of fliers they have left over the last two months. They spend weekends and evenings after work searching for her, and vow to go door to door until they reach every house in the San Fernando Valley to find her, Sidhu said.
Sidhu has also had to fend off scam calls from people pretending to have her dog and demanding the reward money. Some callers threaten to keep the dog or say they’ve run Mushie over with their car. Others mock her by barking into the phone, she said.
“We’ve received awful calls and had awful interactions, but we’ve encountered way more good, kind people than bad,” she said. “So we’re hopeful the right person will help us and Mushie.”
One of the couple’s fears is that Mushie is on her own and waiting for them to come and rescue her, Sidhu said.
“The one thing we can control is our actions, our effort,” she said “We can’t give up on her.”
If you see Mushie or know where she is, Sidhu asks you to call her at (760) 960-9272.
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