“Australia’s favorite fugitive” was finally rescued — after 529 days on the lam.
Miniature dachshund Valerie — described by her owner as “an absolute princess who rides in a car seat and only wears the color pink” — first went missing back in November 2023.
An animal rescue group was “overjoyed” to announce Friday they’d finally caught her.
“After weeks of tireless efforts … Valerie has been safely rescued and is fit and well. We are absolutely thrilled and deeply relieved that Valerie is finally safe and able to begin her transition back to her loving parents,” Kangala Wildlife Rescue said on TikTok.
Kangala Wildlife Rescue, an animal rescue based in South Australia, explained the long ordeal “involved over 1,000 volunteer hours and more than 5,000 km travelled by volunteers in their private vehicles, the deployment and monitoring of numerous cameras and traps and the use of various pieces of technology.”
Valerie escaped from her pen while she was camping on Stokes Bay on Kangaroo Island with her owners Georgia Gardner and Josh Fishlock.
Two days into the trip, the couple had decided to go fishing for 30 minutes, and that’s when the pup made a run for it.
“We left her in her pen with her bed and water and a snuffle mat filled with treats and another dog toy. It had been a big day so we thought she’d be tired,” Gardner told Fox News.
Some good Samaritans spotted her, but couldn’t trap her, and the couple spent the next five days looking for their fur baby.
They posted about her disappearance in a local Facebook group and connected with Kangala Wildlife Rescue, an animal rescue based in South Australia, who helped them search for the pooch.
“It was very awful,” Gardner continued to the outlet.
“We were crying, and we weren’t sleeping, and we weren’t eating very much, and it poured rain the whole time … Finally, we had to leave the island. We both had to return to our full-time jobs. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack.”
When the devastated owners finally decided it was time to go home, they were sure to leave items of theirs and Valerie’s at the campsite, just in case she returned.
“I remember leaving one of her little toys and some of our clothes where we’d last seen her. As we were on the ferry, I remember looking back on the island and just crying,” Gardner added.
On the one-year anniversary of her disappearance, Gardner posted on Facebook again, prompting some people to reach out and say they’d seen her on the island a few times.
On Feb. 28, after another sighting, Kangala Wildlife Rescue got involved again, setting up more cameras and interviewed witnesses.
Kangala Wildlife Rescue were the ones who finally caught her, calling the process a “rollercoaster ride,” “exhausting” and a “long, tough battle,” in a recent Instagram video.
In the post, the nonprofit’s directors, Jared and Lisa Karran, explain they set up traps and made sure they were no other animals around. Once Valerie went inside, they pressed a remote which closed the trap’s door.
“Valerie handled all of that quite well considering a dog that’s been out for so long,” Jared said.
Gardner expressed her awe at how her high maintenance canine endured being away from home for so long.
“It’s absolutely unbelievable that she has survived a year and a half out there in the wild, honestly,” she told Fox News.
“She didn’t like being away from me at all … It’s just insane to think she’s been out there this long, surviving off instincts and probably eating roadkill and drinking water from dams.”
