Back with family

GREEN BAY – When Kelly Van Scoyk and her husband decided to take a trip to Madison one weekend in October 2023, they didn’t expect to get a call saying that their dog, Dixie, had escaped their home, but it is thanks to “Get Toby Home” (GTH), a nonprofit lost dog search and rescue group, that Dixie is safe and back with her family.

“Last year, our dog Dixie ran out the front door when we had a new dog sitter for the weekend,” Van Scoyk, a volunteer at Get Toby Home, stated. “We were in Madison and helpless. A friend contacted GTH on our behalf. This organization immediately started their process with the goal of getting Dixie safely back home.

“By the time we got home two hours later, GTH had already completed the flier that they were going to distribute. There was [also] a volunteer on our street asking neighbors if they had seen our dog.”

It was thanks to the quick work of the volunteers at Get Toby Home that Dixie returned to her family early the next morning.

“We were incredibly grateful that Dixie arrived home safely. We were so impressed by the commitment of this organization that I contacted them immediately to become a volunteer,” added Van Scoyk.

Get Toby Home was organized in 2018, after a family from Suamico lost their dog, Toby, on Dec. 1, 2017.

“A lot of people came out and tried to search for Toby: tried to get him back home,” Sheri Liebergen, current president of Get Toby Home, stated. “This brought the community together. A bunch of people came out to search for Toby [and] distribute fliers. Unfortunately, Toby was never found, but while everyone was searching, they realized there was a need for this in our area.”
It was after this that Toby’s owner founded Get Toby Home.

The organization helps hundreds of families a year reunite with their lost dogs, with their locations in Green Bay, Appleton, Shawano and Manitowoc.

However, the organization has helped families all over the state, and they are even working with some families in Michigan to help find their lost loved ones.

“GTH uses Tomahawk Live Traps [and] Arlo and SPYPOINT cellular cameras,” Lierbergen said. “We bait the traps with rotisserie chicken, braunschweiger, McDonald’s and Burger King cheeseburgers and anything smelly that the volunteers happen to have at home. We [then] spray liquid smoke around the trap to draw the dog to the trap. On average, we put out about 20 signs per lost dog and flier all houses in the area the dog went missing from.”

Get Toby Home is always looking for volunteers to help with their process of finding lost dogs.

Volunteers can make and distribute fliers, make signs, help with mapping out sightings of missing dogs through Google Maps and more; applications are available on their website.

Get Toby Home will be hosting its second annual fundraiser on Saturday, Oct. 19, 11 a.m. – 2 p.m. located at Buzz Social, 2310 Lineville Rd., Suamico.

For more information, visit www.facebook.com/GetTobyHome or www.gettobyhome.org.