Rescue Greyhound Travels Across Palm Beach County While Missing, Enjoys 7-Week Adventure

DELRAY BEACH, FL — After seven weeks on the run, a rescue pooch from Spain that went missing in Palm Beach County was eventually found — but not before she traversed countless miles, visited at least four cities, crashed a Christmas parade and enjoyed some leisurely time on the beach.

Playa, a 2-year-old greyhound, was flown to the United States and found herself in the Delray Beach home of her foster family, Alastair Calderwood and his wife, just a few days before Thanksgiving thanks to the work of the organization Greyhounds in Motion.

Since greyhound racing ended in Florida in recent years, many nonprofit groups and rescuers have worked hard to find homes for the retired racing dogs.

There’s also a movement to help Spanish greyhounds, Calderwood said. “In Spain, they’re used as hunting dogs, and they breed them very prolifically. Then, they’re just abandoned at the end of the hunting season, and some are even killed, unfortunately.”

Playa was born on the streets in Spain, living on her own for two years, before being rescued and sent to South Florida by the organization Galgos del Sol.

Everything went well during her first couple of days at Calderwood’s home. Though she was a little nervous when people got too close to her, she was friendly, he said. And she enjoyed being around his two dogs, both former racing greyhounds that he adopted.

All it took was a split second for Playa to dart from the house.

“She was in the bedroom, and we actually have a baby gate on the door to keep her there, but it didn’t stop her,” he said. “My wife opened the front door, and she just bolted at top speed out the door.”

They followed her out, trying not to move too quickly or appear as though they were chasing her, because that would just scare her more. But by the time they made it to the end of their street, Playa was already taking off toward Atlantic Avenue.

After immediately letting Greyhounds in Motion know what happened, they got to work looking for her.

At the time of Playa’s escape, she was wearing a GPS collar that worked for only the first two days she was on her own before the batteries died.

“That was two days of us looking to see where was and trying to catch her. She was always scared and just ran as soon we got close to her,” Calderwood said. “She had never known life in a home before.”

They’d arrive wherever the GPS showed she was and she would sneak past them or get into spaces they couldn’t reach — disappearing into a dense hedge or through a tiny gap in a fence.

At one point, the GPS directed rescuers to a canal. They thought they could easily corner her with a fence on one side and the canal on the other. Two small groups of rescuers approached her from the other two sides.

“There was no way she could get around us,” he said. “Then, when she saw she was cornered, she dived into the canal and swam across to the other bank.”

When the GPS stopped working, they distributed 2,000 flyers about Playa throughout the area and shared the story of her escape and photos on social media sites, such as Nextdoor and Facebook.

Rescuers received hundreds of calls about Playa sightings. Some people spotted her at the Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens in Delray Beach. Others saw her join the Boynton Beach holiday parade; and at one point, she made her way to downtown Delray. Another day, they received nearly 30 calls that she was on the beach in Boca Raton.

“We had a net and treats, but by the time we got there, she was gone,” Calderwood said. “A police lieutenant drove us in his beach buggy to the first place she’d been seen next to a forest of sea grapes. We looked around, but she had vanished. The next day, she turned up 13 miles away.”

Rescuers suspect that she was walking along the canals to get from place to place, he added. “She wasn’t often seen on roads. Though, one person did see her crossing Linton Boulevard, waiting for the lights to change before she crossed. She knew how to get around safely.”

Eventually, they started getting calls that Playa had been seen in the High Point community in Delray Beach, not far from Calderwood’s home. Nighttime security footage and doorbell cameras showed her scoping out porches and yards.

“She was sniffing around and walking around as if she was looking for something,” he said.

They decided to use the community’s tennis courts as a trap, putting food in them as bait. Residents installed trail cameras in the courts that showed she was regularly going there for her meals.

After attaching a rope to the gate, rescuers and other volunteers took turns watching the tennis courts, waiting to pull the string to close the gate and trap her inside.

“One time somebody saw her up close. She sniffed the rope going from the gate to the car, looked at both ends of it and walked away,” Calderwood said. “She’s too smart, and that’s why it took so long to catch her.”

Eventually, an engineer living in the neighborhood created a remote control to close the gate. They could operate it using their phones. Whenever the security cameras in the courts went off, they could just send a text message and close the gate from wherever they were, trapping her inside.

“After about five days of watching and waiting, that’s what happened,” he said. “She went in to eat some food and we saw her, so we operated the gate. She didn’t notice that the gate was closing.”

That was Jan. 10 — about seven weeks since she first escaped from Calderwood’s home.

“That was a very emotional moment after all this hunting for her,” he said.

He had started to lose hope that she would ever be found.

“At several points, especially when I first realized she was crossing really busy roads and crossing them multiple times a day, I thought at some point she was going to be hit,” he said. “I was hoping and praying it wouldn’t happen, but I sort of resigned myself to the fact that we might never see her again.”

By the end of her journey, Playa seemed “relieved” that she was caught, Calderwood said. “When they put her on a leash, she was actually, surprisingly calm and didn’t try to escape.”

After being captured, she was sent to another foster — a friend of Calderwood’s — who has a large plot of land in Port St. Lucie with plenty of space for her to run safely. The rescue organization has already found her a “forever home,” he added.

He was surprised by the community support for finding Playa over the past two months.

“I was amazed by how generous people were and how supportive they were. It was really heartwarming. People were so kind,” he said.

And Playa practically became a household name in the area while she was on the run.

“People were excited to see her. A kid on a school bus phoned me and said he could see her running around a children’s playground. I could hear him boasting to his friends that he was the first one in their school to see the dog,” Calderwood said. “They’d obviously been looking for her. She became quite the local celebrity because she was seen in so many different places.”