Zach Lacher was gassing up his car in the Grand Canyon when he spotted a dog carrying a Starbucks bag in her mouth, running through the gas station and back towards the canyon. As he watched her pass, he could immediately see that she was in rough shape and was clearly stealing food from Starbucks in order to survive.
“I came to find out that local authorities had been trying to get her for about three months,” Lacher said in a video for The Dodo. “She was very skittish. Like, had been there a while and was not going to let someone just grab her.”
Lacher felt a pull towards the Starbucks-stealing pup, later named Haseya, and decided to come back later in the day and stake out until he spotted her again. Little did he know what a journey that initial stakeout would turn into.
“I did not know how difficult she was going to be to catch,” Lacher said.
Lacher spent several days in a row watching Haseya as she popped up out of the canyon each day and tracking her movements. When she didn’t come out again on the fifth day, he worried she might be stuck or hurt somewhere — so he sent a drone into the canyon to look for her.
“I was probably flying it for about an hour, and I was checking the nooks and crannies, and I saw her big puffy white tail,” Lacher said. “We couldn’t have known that she was going to follow the drone all the way into where we were.”
For whatever reason, Haseya decided that she trusted the drone and wanted to see where it was going. She followed it straight to Lacher, who had food ready and waiting for her. Unfortunately, he still wasn’t able to grab her, so he set up a trap and waited.
“She was like, ‘I can’t do this anymore,’” Lacher said.
Once she was safely in the trap, Haseya was actually surprisingly calm. She’d been on her own for so long, and even though she was scared, she was also ready to be loved.
“She just laid down and kind of was at peace with it,” Lacher said.
Lacher took Haseya home, where she immediately fell in love with Lacher’s cat. She was clearly right where she belonged, and officially became a member of the family.
After stealing food and surviving on her own, Haseya settled right into her new life as if she’d been there all along, and she’s absolutely never looking back.
