Every Fourth of July since its founding, All Animal Search and Rescue of Santa Clarita receives reports of missing pets who seemingly run away from their homes due to the loud booms, pops and whistles of fireworks.
According to Lorena Zeballos, founder of the nonprofit organization that helps pet owners find lost animals, terrified dogs and cats unable to cope with the stress of loud sounds often go “crazy.” Some animals bolt from leashes, break through fences and disappear.
“We’re friends with a lot of these (social media) admin groups down in the San Fernando Valley, here in Santa Clarita, up in Palmdale and in Lancaster,” Zeballos said during a recent telephone interview. “They let us know, ‘Hey, there’s this dog running around. Can you help this owner?’ We have different members of our organization who will drive around with traps, leashes and food in our cars.”
According to the organization’s website, All Animal Search and Rescue was founded in 2016 with the goal of finding lost pets. However, for over 15 years, Zeballos has engaged in hundreds of successful trappings, reuniting lost pets with their owners and helping to get stray animals out of dangerous environments to safety.
The website adds that lost pets, especially those unfamiliar with their neighborhoods, are often oblivious to the perils around them, be it moving vehicles, predators like coyotes, or the lack of food and water necessary to stay alive.
Zeballos said that All Animal Search and Rescue was born out of an incident in which a lost dog crossed her path one night on Valencia Boulevard.
“This dog had run up into the hills,” she said. “The next morning, I’m like, ‘I’m going to get this dog.’ I felt bad, and I went and hiked the hills, and I found the dog, and then found the owner. It was just an awesome, amazing feeling. And the support I got — I’m like, ‘You know what? I’m going to do this as a hobby.’”
The more Zeballos did the work, the more people encouraged her to do more, and to invest in traps and other equipment to help capture lost animals. Over the years, people have volunteered to help Zeballos in her mission. That all led to her creating a nonprofit organization in 2023.
The Fourth of July quickly became the busy time of the year, Zeballos said. Collectively, her group will set out on the night of the Fourth and will find, on average, about five to 10 dogs within the Santa Clarita Valley. Those numbers are larger in other areas, like the San Fernando Valley.
All Animal Search and Rescue will sometimes locate dogs they weren’t even trying to find. Zeballos was sad to say that, on occasion, pets won’t have chips to scan or tags to lead them to their owners. She said she and her group will foster the animals and post about them online, in hopes that owners will come forward, so they don’t have to send the animals to shelters.
Zeballos brought up the importance of pet owners chipping and/or tagging their animals.
“There are a lot of dogs that have no chips and no collars, and people will put them in their backyard,” she said. “The dog may jump a 7-foot fence because of the adrenaline, they take off, and then we can’t get them back home. And if we can’t find their home after a few days, we legally have to take them to a shelter. If people would just chip their dogs, that would be helpful.”
Even indoor animals should be chipped and/or tagged, she said, because anything can happen.
Zeballos shared one Fourth of July story from 2018 in which a cane corso/Labrador mix, home by itself, was spooked by fireworks, broke through a back glass door of the home and went out into the Saugus streets. Luckily, Zeballos was able to find and capture the dog, who was badly cut up from the shards of glass. However, if the dog was unidentifiable, her challenge of getting in touch with the pet owner would become that much more difficult.
Finding a lost animal is challenging enough.
Canyon Country resident Dean Childs shared a story from a few years back about the time his 35-pound mixed terrier named Roxy escaped.
“My wife and I went on a one-week cruise, and my dog was over at my son’s house,” Childs said during a telephone interview. “He (his son) started up a dirt bike, and thinking Roxy would be OK, she took off like a rabbit.”
Roxy fled into the nearby hills. She was still missing when Childs and his wife returned from their trip. Childs panicked and immediately took to the hills over the course of a good two weeks in search of his pet, he said. His daughter posted pictures of Roxy on social media. Luckily, someone saw the dog in the hills, responded to social media posts, and the conversation got back to Zeballos, who sprang into action.
Zeballos set up a baited trap with a camera in the area where Roxy was spotted, and she monitored the trap from her nearby parked vehicle.
“She warned me,” Childs said. “She said, ‘Don’t go look for your dog. She’s in survival mode. You’ll scare her.’”
Roxy eventually found the trap and made several hesitant attempts to take the bait before she finally went all in. Once inside the trap, the door closed, and Zeballos and company had safely captured the dog.
Childs spoke about when Zeballos opened that trap in his home and his beloved pet came into his arms. As he told the story, he was drawn to near tears, trying to express how he felt at the time.
After a moment, he said, “I’m trying to get my composure back together. You’ll have to excuse me. She (Roxy) was skin and bones. She had coyote teeth marks all over her. She wouldn’t have made it a few more days.”
Childs said that he and his wife had almost lost hope that Roxy was still alive. She’d been gone for over three weeks.
The couple was so grateful to Zeballos. Childs said that, after all these years, he remains in touch with Zeballos. He provides favors for her, too, like welding her broken traps.
Mel Burkett, also a Canyon Country resident, shared a story about when one of her dogs, Nova, got away from her.
About a year ago, she and her husband adopted Nova from the Castaic Animal Care Center. The dog escaped almost the moment they got home.
“I drove home with her on my lap with a leash on her,” Burkett said. “We got home, I sat her on the grass, I had a hold of the leash, and I was just letting her kind of smell the grass in the front yard. But I didn’t have a super tight grip on the lash. And she (Nova) reared up and took off as fast as she could, straight down the hill with leash and everything.”
Nova, a 2-year-old Husky breed, was, according to Burkett, an extremely withdrawn dog and not very social. Burkett and her husband could see the dog was terrified from the moment they met her at the shelter to the time they got her home.
The couple could not catch up with Nova once she bolted. She was gone in a flash. They went to social media and posted a description of the dog and an explanation of what happened. They didn’t even have a picture of the dog to post alongside it.
Nevertheless, someone online reached out, asking Burkett and her husband if they’d gotten in touch with Zeballos. They hadn’t done so, but they did after that.
“At first, I thought, ‘What can this person do?’” Burkett said. “Like, I didn’t really understand what more they could do to help get this dog back.”
Zeballos told the Burketts to stay off the trails, that doing so would only push their dog further into the hills.
The rain began to hit. As days went by, Burkett said she feared she’d never get Nova back.
People online responded to social media posts about Nova, explaining how they’d spotted a dog that fit Nova’s description. Zeballos went to where the people said they saw the dog, and she set her trap.
Five rainy days later, Zeballos reached out to Burkett with the news about Nova.
“She gave me a call,” Burkett said, “and said, ‘I have your dog.’ I thought, ‘How’s that possible?’”
It’s the same every time — Zeballos said that seeing the reunion between pet owners and their lost animals is so emotional to her. She’s captured many of these reunions on video for her social media pages.
She tried to relate the sentiments.
“It’s emotional for all of us,” she said. “Seeing the dogs excited and jumping on them (the pet owners) and just — I can’t explain it. The moment is amazing. It’s an amazing feeling, seeing the owners crying and so happy. So many (people) think they’re never going to see their dogs again. And that’s why we do this.”
Zeballos doesn’t only use traps to capture lost animals. She uses other tactics and will even offer suggestions to pet owners. For example, placing scented items like an animal’s bed or an owner’s dirty socks or sweaty clothes at the doorstep of their home will sometimes lead animals back.
If it’s safe and it won’t attract nearby predators like coyotes, she might also tell pet owners to put out food — sardines for lost cats, hot dogs, hot bacon and such for lost dogs.
Additionally, Zeballos recently recruited a drone flyer who can fly a drone with a camera over more rural areas to search for pets.
“But there’s a way to fly a drone for a lost dog,” she said. “If you do it improperly, the dog will take off further into the hills. A person has to know how to fly the drone for a lost animal.”
And so, as the Fourth of July holiday draws nearer, All Animal Search and Rescue has made plans to have about five people, including Zeballos, out in the community looking to rescue animals who have gotten away from their owners. She and her group will hit the streets when they start to hear fireworks or as the sky begins to darken.
While she loves the holiday and thinks fireworks are beautiful, Zeballos knows the trouble that the loud booming, popping and whistling noises can cause.
“We hate to be Debbie Downers,” she said, “but there are so many dogs that are just fearful.”
For more information about All Animal Search and Rescue, go to AllAnimalSearchAndRescue.org. To report escaped animals, call 310-620-8163.
