Over the holidays I heard two missing-dog stories I want to share to begin the new year. Both illustrate rescuer Melanie Manning’s motto: “It takes a village to save an animal.” They also illustrate that sometimes it also takes good vibes, good prayers and good luck.
Jan Clements’ pit bull Socrates, also known as Socks, turned up missing from her house in Musicians Village in early December.
The first story is about Jan Clements’ pit bull Socrates, also known as Socks, who turned up missing from her house in Musicians Village in early December.
Clements, who plays New Orleans-style piano with several local musicians, was at a studio in Covington on Dec. 4, recording with Gaynielle Neville and Beth Patterson. When she got home, her door was open and Socks was gone.
“I was devastated,” she said, when I talked to her on the phone recently. “I rescued him when he was a puppy, and I love him like he is my child.”
She spent days driving around her neighborhood looking for him, talking to people, and putting up fliers. Her friend Heather Grant, who calls Socks “Foolio,” put up dozens of fliers, too. But for days the only responses were from a prank caller saying he’d seen Socks on a nearby street. A couple of times she could hear laughter in the background. Still, she would go out looking for him.
One afternoon, when she came home after working some of the sweat-equity hours required to help pay for her Habitat home, she stood outside talking to her neighbor Al “Carnival Time” Johnson.
“He was really attached to Socks. They were good buddies,” she said. “While he was missing, Al called me every day to check on him.”
A woman walking her dog stopped to talk to them that afternoon, and Johnson went and got his flier to show her.
That was when Clements got her first bit of news, and it was bad.
“The lady said a couple of weeks earlier she’d seen a man driving around the neighborhood picking up pit bulls and putting them in his truck,” she said. “She thought he was going to sell them to buy drugs.”
Clements was heartbroken. Socks had a microchip, but who would ever discover it? As soon as she went inside, her phone started to ring, and she figured it was the prank caller again.
When she answered, a man told her he was Sticks the Clown, and he knew where her dog was.
“I thought, ‘This cannot be real,’” she said.
He told how he had just seen her flier that afternoon and how he had been at a little convenience store a week earlier with his sister when a guy pulled up selling pit bulls out of the back of his truck for 20 dollars each.
“Sticks — I think he’s a drummer — said he really wanted to buy my dog because he could see how sweet he was, but he didn’t have 20 bucks,” Clements said. “I could relate to that because I’m a New Orleans musician.”
He loosened the tight chain around Socks’ neck, and another man bought him. Then Sticks’ sister started to cry and asked him to go get the buyer’s name and phone number in case they ever found the real owner. He gave Clements a phone number and told her the man’s name was “Nuge” and he lived in Algiers.
“I wanted to give him some reward money, but he told me I could just buy him a beer sometime,” she said.
As soon as they got off the phone, she called Mike Nugent and found out he had Socks and had been trying to find his owner. He said Socks had been a perfect house guest and had gotten along great with his own pit bull. He told her he was a bartender at Vic’s Kangaroo Lounge in the Warehouse District and he would bring Socks there at 7 p.m.
Clements arrived with Socks’ leash and some treats at 6:15, ordered an Abita Lager, and sat outside waiting. When Socks and Nugent arrived, they went inside. She started to cry, and Socks kissed her repeatedly and ran around greeting people, and then everybody celebrated their reunion.
“It was just a crazy, happy time,” she said.
Clements is thankful for her friend Heather, who kept putting up fliers when she was starting to lose hope. She is thankful for Sticks and his sister, who got Nugent’s phone number, and she is thankful for Nugent, who probably saved Socks from a tragic fate. She is thankful for Sula, a singer with the group Zion Trinity, who took her hand and said a prayer for Socks the day before she was reunited with him. She is thankful for Johnson’s heartfelt concern and for all her Facebook friends who sent their thoughts and prayers her way.
“There was just so much love and energy helping to bring Socks home,” she said. “I’m so blessed to have my dog back. It was the best Christmas present I ever received.”
Daisy was adopted 10 years ago from a litter of puppies left in a cardboard box near UNO.
The second story begins with fireworks in Metairie on Christmas Eve and a shepherd-mix named Daisy.
Stephanie Brisset left her home in Airline Park with her husband, Richie, and their three children (two sons, 7 and 5, and a daughter, 1) around 5:30 p.m. to attend Mass and then go to an aunt’s house. Their two dogs, Daisy and Kobe, were in the house, but able to get to their fenced-in yard through a doggy door.
When they got home around midnight, Daisy was nowhere to be found.
“She is petrified of fireworks, and we figure she kind of freaked out while we were gone,” Brisset said. “It looked like she got out through a little bitty hole in the fence.”
The Brissets adopted Daisy 10 years ago, after seeing her on the Petfinder website. She was from a litter of puppies left in a cardboard box near UNO, and they picked her out and brought her home.
“She’s part of our family,” Brisset said. “I had such a sick feeling not knowing where she was.”
So Christmas was rather dismal for her.
“It was sad, but we had to have Christmas for our kids,” she said.
They talked to some neighbors who had seen Daisy race by around 9 p.m. on Christmas Eve, just after someone started setting off fireworks.
“They said she was running so fast she looked like a fox,” Brisset said.
Daisy was leery of anyone she didn’t know, so the Brissets knew no stranger would be able to catch her. They went looking for her every day and tried to put up fliers.
“But it was cold and rainy, and they would just dissolve,” she said. “I was just so afraid if she was still out on New Year’s Eve, we’d never see her again.”
On Dec. 30, Melanie Manning, the behind-the-scenes animal rescuer with the “It takes a village” mantra, was out running errands. She had just exited from Clearview Parkway onto the Earhart Expressway going toward Harahan when she saw a yellow dog coming toward her. She was talking to a friend, a volunteer at the Jefferson Animal Shelter, when she spotted the dog and described it: gold with a black muzzle, about 40 pounds.
She pulled off the road to try to get her, but Daisy just kept running.
“I said, ‘Oh, my God, she’s heading into traffic,’” Manning said.
Suddenly, there was a Louisiana State Trooper behind her, and he called out, “Is that your dog?” She shook her head no and said she was just trying to catch it.
“I thought he was going to say, ‘Lady, are you crazy?’ But instead he said, ‘I’m going to help you,’” Manning said.
Then the terrified Daisy jumped over the guard rail and into the traffic going the opposite way.
“How she didn’t get hit is just beyond me,” Manning said, when she was telling me of their adventure.
At that point the young trooper took off around the end of the guard rail and headed back toward New Orleans in what Manning figured was an illegal maneuver if you’re not a State Police officer.
“But I followed him,” she said. “I thought, ‘What is he going to do, give me a ticket?’”
Drivers slowed down when they spotted the police car, and the trooper motioned for Manning to go in front of him to get the dog between them. But when she tried to, Daisy slipped through an opening in the chain link fence that leads down to a canal. Manning followed her under the fence, but Daisy was far ahead of her, running toward the wooden fence that separates the Coca-Cola bottling plant from some apartments on Citrus Boulevard. The trooper was waiting for her, and she went back and told him there was no way they were going to catch her.
“I said, ‘At least we got her away from Earhart.’”
She thanked him for helping her and then drove over to Citrus to look some more, but she never saw the yellow dog again.
As soon as she got home, her friend called back to say she had found a photo of a missing dog on the ARNO Facebook page that looked like the one she’d been chasing. She forwarded her the picture of Daisy and gave her Brisset’s phone number.
Manning called Brisset and left a message, explaining where she had last seen Daisy. Brisset was at the doctor’s with her 1-year-old, and as soon as she got the message, she called her husband and told him to stop whatever he was doing, take the boys and go look for Daisy on the Earhart Expressway.
Brisset also talked to Charlotte Bass Lilly, director of ARNO, who has been rescuing dogs for decades. She said they should look for her in the area around the canal, that Daisy would feel safe there, away from cars and people.
“Richie was walking up and down the grassy area, calling her name,” Brisset said.
And then, there she was.
“When she saw Richie, she jumped in the canal and started swimming to him. He said it was awesome,” Brisset said.
Soon Daisy was back where she belonged, had a warm bath, and took a long, long nap. And the Brissets spent a quiet New Year’s Eve at home with their children, some friends and their beloved dog.
“She was gone for six days, and we honestly wondered if we’d ever see her again,” Brisset said. “Melanie said if it wasn’t for that State Trooper she would probably have been hit on the expressway. I am so thankful to him. I just wish I knew his name.”
A lot of things went right for the Brissets to have a tail-wagging ending to their story: Manning was on the expressway at just the right moment, the young trooper slowed down traffic and stopped to help her, her friend saw the photo of Daisy on Facebook, and Bass Lilly told them where to look for her.
“All the stars must have been aligned that morning,” Manning said.
Yes, the stars were aligned, and a village of caring people reached out to help.
Sheila Stroup’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday in Living. Contact her at or 985.898.4831.
