Meet the WTA bus driver who helped a stray dog searching for her four puppies
A dog and her puppies were reunited after a Whatcom Transportation Authority bus driver noticed her frantic, repeated searches at the bus station in downtown Bellingham.
Now 6 weeks old, the roly-poly puppies — named Tiabeanie, Luci, Elfo and Kissy after characters in the animated series “Disenchantment” — are being cared for in a volunteer foster home. They will be old enough for adoption in a few weeks, according to Laura Clark, executive director of the Whatcom Humane Society.
Their future is bright, the Humane Society said, thanks to WTA bus driver Shari Stamey and other good Samaritans who stepped in to help, starting around 12:15 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 22, on East Magnolia Street. That was when Stamey, who was there for her shift as a standby driver, noticed a distressed dog.
“I saw a dog running up the concourse from the smoking area with a person chasing it, leash in hand. She was pretty close to the dog so I think she had just lost control of it. The dog kept going up to all the buses and looking in them and under them but quickly moved on. We noticed she looked like she was nursing puppies and wondered where they were,” Stamey recounted in a post on the WTA Facebook page.
The dog had been given to the woman an hour ago, according to the post, and the dog didn’t seem to know her. The woman subsequently gave up and left, Stamey said to The Bellingham Herald.
Other WTA employees called the Whatcom Humane Society about a stray dog being at the bus station but Humane Society workers couldn’t get close enough to her to catch her. So Stamey, during breaks in her work that day, kept an eye out for her, trying at one point to lure the dog to her by feeding her cheese.
“She would eat the cheese but she would not get close to me,” Stamey said in the Facebook post. “The dog would return to the Bellingham Station about every 20 minutes or so. It seems like she had a really specific loop she was making.”
Another WTA employee, George Henderson, said he thought the dog was looking for her puppies and that was why she didn’t go far and would keep coming back.
“She would bark or growl at anybody who tried to get near her, but she just seemed scared, not aggressive. She would jump into buses with open doors and jump right back out,” Stamey said in the post.
This went on for roughly 7-1/2 hours.
Around 7 p.m., Stamey got permission to pull her standby bus into a gate that wasn’t being used. When she saw the dog come back about 30 minutes later, she ran to her bus, pulled up a YouTube video of 17-day-old puppies barking and whining, and waited for the dog to come and investigate the sound. When she did, Stamey shut the doors to the bus.
“I had her,” Stamey said, adding that the dog ran back and forth in the bus, barking and howling, while they waited for the Whatcom Humane Society to show up. “We kind of hung out in there for a while.”
Meanwhile, two women and a little boy showed up with plain hamburger patties from McDonald’s that they bought for the dog after noticing her earlier in the day. Stamey fed them to the dog.
“She was really skinny, pretty neglected, pretty stinky,” Stamey said.
Eventually, the tired dog leaned against Stamey, allowed her to pet her and put her into a dog kennel. The Whatcom Humane Society found two of her puppies at Base Camp, an emergency homeless shelter on Cornwall Avenue, where the animal control department received the first of many calls about the dog running at large. The other two puppies were found nearby, according to Clark.
The dog, named Athena, and the puppies she was nursing were reunited. They came to the Whatcom Humane Society as strays and spent a couple of weeks in a quiet part of the shelter, away from other dogs. She was “extremely protective of the puppies, not allowing any staff near them or near her,” Clark said to The Herald.
The puppies were recently separated from Athena and sent to the volunteer foster home, whose people plan to adopt Tiabeanie.
“They really are the cutest and they are so sweet and fun,” said Santina Lampman, who is caring for them. “I am sure you can see why we failed and are keeping one.”
Athena remains at the shelter.
“She is fractious and staff are working with her to earn her trust, teach her the world is not a scary place and help socialize her,” Clark said of Athena, adding that Tails-A-Wagging has volunteered its services to help with her socialization and daily training.
Clark added: “We are hopeful that with time, patience and lots of positive reinforcement she will start to feel more safe. She has already made big improvements, even taking a nap while a staff member sat with her in her kennel.”
She will continue to be a work in progress, Clark said, and the goal is that she can one day be placed in foster care for more training and socialization or be transferred to an animal welfare group that can provide that for her.
“She is a good mama that deserves all the love we can give her and a second chance at a great life,” Clark said.
Looking back on that day, Stamey said she kept trying to get to the dog because the animal was clearly struggling and looking for her babies.
“I’m a big fan of animals in general,” said Stamey, who has a dog and two cats of her own as well as a trail of paw-print tattoos on her left arm. “I knew if she wasn’t reunited with her puppies, there was a good chance they wouldn’t survive.”
Adoption
More information about adopting an animal from the Whatcom Humane Society shelter is at whatcomhumane.org.
