It was November 2023 when Albury couple Georgia Gardner and Josh Fishlock were enjoying a camping holiday on Kangaroo Island in South Australia with their sausage dog, Valerie.
The pair had set up a pen at their campsite to contain Valerie, whilst they went fishing at nearby Stoke’s Bay. When they returned just 30 minutes later, their 4kg pup had managed to escape her enclosure.
Gardner said that when they returned to the campsite, she was initially in denial.
“She never left my side. She was not a very outside, rough-and-tough dog,” she told The Guardian.
“I was like ‘No, she’s so close to me that if she’s run off down the road, she’s going to come back, she’s OK’,” she said.
“As a little bit more time passed, I was like ‘No, she’s actually missing, she’s gone, we might not get her back’.”
The couple spent the next week scouring the surrounding area for their beloved sausage dog, but after many futile attempts to find Valerie, they eventually left the island to return home.
"I remember on the first day I was just covered in tears. We barely ate anything," Gardner told The Adelaide Advertiser.
"My whole world just crumbled. When we left the island without her, I cried for days."
There were initial sightings of Valerie in the weeks and months following her initial escape, before reports of her whereabouts fell quiet.
Now, in a huge twist in Valerie’s story, 16 months after her escape, there have been new reported sightings and images snapped of the sausage dog.
“To think that she even went one night outside in the rain, oh my gosh. To think that she’s gone a year and a half is incredible,” Gardner said.
The Kangala Wildlife Rescue confirmed her miraculous survival through video evidence.
The not-for-profit organisation has set up “surveillance” and is using “various trapping and luring methods” to help bring Valerie home.
On their Facebook page, the organisation wrote: “Based on first-hand accounts and video evidence we now know that Valerie is alive. She runs at the first sign of humans or vehicles and despite the best efforts of dedicated Island locals, Valerie has been impossible to catch.”
Experts are amazed by Valerie’s survival, speculating that she may have eaten roadkill, drank dam water, or possibly received help from locals.
Just this week, more photographic evidence that Valerie is alive surfaced.
Valerie’s owners said that it would “mean everything” to be reunited with their “princess”.
“It would just mean that our little family is finally complete,” Gardner said.
“We would just be so thankful to all of the Kangaroo Island people, because we were tourists on their island and everyone there was so lovely to us.”
Kangala Wildlife Rescue shared Valerie’s unbelievable story to Facebook on Saturday, urging the public to report any sightings of Valerie.
