Finding Cooper Before The Cold Comes

by Patricia A. Miller

It’s been more than two months since the Wurst’s beloved Australian shepherd Cooper vanished after a visit to Haven Beach on Long Beach Island.

And Mary Ann Wurst is pulling out all the stops to bring her 16-year-old deaf dog home before the weather turns cold. She’s tried animal communicators who say they can receive messages from animals. But they work primarily with animals who are right in the same room. None of them have had much experience with dogs who are missing.

“We haven’t found a body,” she said. ”None of them have said he’s passed.”

The last message Wurst received said that Cooper is somewhere on the island. He is tired, frightened, hungry and disoriented.

“I do believe he is eating and he has been fed by some that have seen him,” the communicator said in a message to Wurst today. “but can’t get close enough to get him. He’s scavenging the rest—he is close by to people. ”

Cooper has been hiding in some type of a walk-up made of boards near the beach, a shelter from the rain and wind, the communicator told Wurst.

“Although it is close to people, it‘s rather hidden,“ the communicator wrote. “Somewhere close to where he is being fed.“

Wurst doesn’t care if anyone ridicules using an animal communicator, or flying an advertising plan with a banner with Cooper’s information. She just wants her 16-year-old pup back.

“It’s pretty much consuming me,” she said. ” You have to try and be functional. But it’s really hard.”

The family has a home on Mississippi Avenue in Haven Beach, but lives primarily in Hunterdon County.

Wurst, her husband and grandchildren took their four dogs to the beach on Sept. 26. Cooper went with them. The grandchildren became a little antsy and she asked her husband to go back to the house and get a game. She theorizes that Cooper may have tried to follow him and became disoriented and missed the house.

Wurst is asking LBI residents to keep an eye out for Cooper and check sheds and garages he may have wandered into. Cooper is mostly black, with some white markings on his face and feet. He has a bell on his collar and was wearing an orange and black harness.

”...all suggestions are welcome- Cooper deserves to spend his remaining time on this earth with his family,” Wurst wrote on the Facebook page “Cooper Come Home” recently.

Cooper is a therapy dog at St. Peter’s University Hospital in New Brunswick where Wurst works. He is very approachable and used to being around people, Wurst said.

“He will go up to strangers,” she said.

Dogs similar to Cooper’s description have been spotted on the island and even in the Ocean Acres section of Manahawkin, but so far none of the sightings have panned out.

Even as a puppy, Cooper did not like the rain, Wurst wrote on the Facebook page.

“If you are out in LBI he may be hiding under a bush,“ she wrote. “ If you are out walking your dog let them check around shrubbery and porches - they will tell you if another dog is there.”

Anyone who thinks they have seen Cooper please call Wurst immediately at 201-777-0189. The family lives on Mississippi Avenue in Haven Beach, about five miles south from the Causeway.

“I have to find him, whether he’s dead or alive,” she said.