Losing a pet is hard. The lack of closure from a runaway can hurt even more. To know the last time someone saw your pet, it was being pulled into a stranger’s vehicle? That would be devastating.

Until this past Thursday, this was the tragic reality for a Saginaw resident, when her husky mix, Wolf, was finally returned to her. That’s right, don’t worry, this story has a happy ending.

Wolf’s journey homeward was made possible by the good heart of a local veteran and activist. He asked that we not use his name, so we’ll call him “Davey.” This local hero encountered the dog on M-13 on a drizzly Thursday afternoon. He saw the dog run across the road before padding over to gnaw on some roadkill. Davey stopped and called to the dog.

“He immediately came up and shook my hand.” The dog was in bad shape, and Davey couldn’t just leave him on the side of a busy road. Unable to connect to Wi-Fi and complete a search for local animal control, he turned to the second hero of this story: Mutual Aid.

You see, Davey had been inadvertently preparing for this moment for months through his activism with Bay City Resistance. More than just a couple of loud-mouthed protestors on a street corner, or frequent attendees of City Commission Meetings, the people involved in BCR are building community.

In a world where third-spaces are constantly being lost, and online polarization is pushed for profit, connecting with our neighbors is easier said than done. Nonpartisan communities like BCR attempt to bridge these divides. Whether they are concerned about civil rights, war, or privatized bridges, people with a wide variety of pet projects and peeves are coming together like never before.

When Davey’s Internet service failed, it may have prevented him from getting a Gemini summary of local animal control, but his people did not fail. With enough service to place a call to members of their mutual aid group, Davey’s phone was soon flooded with phone numbers of local shelters, control professionals, and friends-of-friends who fostered pets.

“After calling Saginaw animal control, a couple Zilwaukee cops came out. We got [Wolf] in the car and I took him home for the night.” Wolf knew how to shake, and was wearing a crude collar, so he clearly wasn’t wild. In the morning Davey took the dog to the Bay City animal shelter, who offered to take the dog in for a week while attempts were made to find an owner.

Within 48 hours of finding Wolf on M-13, a woman reached out to Davey via Facebook Messenger. She’d seen his post and recognized her blue and brown-eyed bestest boy. Some old photos of the dog, and a 2024 Facebook post in AskSaginaw reporting the dog stolen left Davey confident the right person had found his post.

The next morning Wolf was reunited with his owner. Upon taking him home, she discovered that he had developed food-aggressive behavior and was not getting on well with the family cat. Davey has now agreed to foster Wolf while they put in the work to reacclimate him.

When things feel hopeless, and you feel like you’re all alone in a world fighting against you, community helps. Two years of hurt can now begin to heal due to the actions of one person stopping to treat the world with kindness.

Make that phone call, go to that event, find people in your community who share your passions. You never know who you might be able to help, or who might be able to help you.