Follow-up visit: Dogs' owner not soldier in Iraq

HELPING ORPHANED HOUNDS

The search is over for a soldier in Iraq who was believed to be the owner of two yellow Labradors in foster care.

Earlier this month, The Rumor Doctor reported that a dog rescue was looking for the soldier because it believed that a nefarious friend who was supposed to be taking care of his dogs dropped them off at animal control and refused to give his Army buddy’s name.

The Doctor ran a picture of the two yellow Labradors, Wyatt and Storm, in the hopes that someone in Iraq would recognize them, allowing yours truly to write a self-congratulatory book about reuniting a GI with his best friends that would ultimately be turned into a movie starring Milla Jovovich in a role yet to be determined.

Alas, it was not to be.

“There is no deployed soldier in the equation,” said Heather Murphy, a spokeswoman for Pinal County Ariz., where the dogs were turned over to animal control.

When The Rumor Doctor talked to Murphy earlier in the month about Wyatt and Storm, she said the county had no information about the dogs belonging to a soldier. The dog rescue countered that the county was changing its story because it didn’t like the publicity surrounding the story.

By that time, e-mails were going out from people pleading for help in finding the dogs’ owner in Iraq, and the rescue had set up a Facebook page to get the word out, so the only way you could have missed the story is if you were in a parallel dimension where cute dogs aren’t newsworthy.

Pinal County was determined to get to the bottom of the matter so that the rescue could adopt Wyatt and Storm “with a clear conscience,” Murphy said Wednesday. So, breaking with protocol, it reached out to the man and woman who had turned the dogs over to animal control.

As it turns out, the woman is applying for a job as a military contractor and could be deployed overseas, Murphy said, giving a possible indication of how this rumor got started.

The couple also had their house foreclosed on and are now living in a hotel, Murphy said.

"For those two reasons, and the fact that she was allergic to the dogs – and obviously in an allergy situation you can’t bring two large dogs in a hotel room where you’re sleeping – they made the difficult decision to surrender the dogs,” Murphy said.

Rhonda Kuehn is head of Helping Orphaned Hounds, the rescue that has purview over Wyatt and Storm.

She told The Doctor earlier this month that a county official told her group several times that the dogs belonged to a soldier.

But she was recently able to talk to the man who brought the dogs in, and on Wednesday she called the incident a “miscommunication between the person who turned the dogs in and the shelter.”

One explanation is that the person at animal control who accepted the dogs might have misunderstood that someone might be headed overseas, Kuehn said.

“I’m actually glad there was no soldier and I’m glad the truth was told because the dogs have been limbo and now they’ll be adopted together,” Kuehn said.

She thanked everyone who was involved in looking for the supposed soldier in Iraq and the upper management at animal control for getting to the truth.

Meanwhile Pinal County is doing an internal review to try to figure out how the rumor about the deployed soldier got started, Murphy said.

“It may not have even originated with the staff or the rescue organization, but obviously something got posted out there and blown up into something larger than life and we want to make sure that whatever we’re doing at our operation doesn’t give rise to this in the future,” she said.

THE RUMOR DOCTOR’S DIAGNOSIS: Case closed. If you are interested in adopting Wyatt and Storm, go to Helping Orphaned Hounds. And since there’s no book deal in The Rumor Doctor’s future – at least for now – keep checking back here for the latest rumors.

• Email
• Print
• More...