A Great Pyrenees dog spent at least four days stuck in a trap, before chewing her way out and trekking home

Sookie came home on Christmas Eve.

The Great Pyrenees dog had already been missing for four days. Her owners, Shannon Hamilton and John Kunard, live a few miles southwest of Shellbrook – in coyote country. They assumed the worst.

But, on Christmas Eve, John saw something. He called out to Shannon:

“Sookie’s home,” he said. “She’s out on the deck and she’s hurt.”

“My first thought was she got in a fight with a coyote and she got torn up,” Shannon told the Daily Herald. “But when I went out the wire was around her leg. She walked up to me and it was like, thunk thunk thunk, her leg was frozen solid.”

Sookie had stepped in a trap. It was a wire loop – a snare. The trap was probably baited, Shannon said, since she’d noticed her dogs coming back with cow bones in recent days.

The surgery went well, but there’s still a chance the infection could spread further up her leg.

Now, as Sookie recovers in hospital, costs are piling up. There’s the surgery, at more than $3,000, then the prosthesis, imported from the United States, and accommodations. Altogether, Shannon estimates, she’ll have to pay more than $7,000.

So she’s set up a gofundme page, to raise money over the Internet. So far, she’s raised more than $1,300, mostly from friends and family.

Shannon called conservation officers. Kevin Harrison, an officer with the Prince Albert Field Office, said the investigation is ongoing. He wouldn’t provide details on Sookie’s case, but outlined the rules that trappers are supposed to follow, such as how close it was set to the residence and how often it was checked.

It seems like Sookie’s trapper was flouting most of them…

For more on this story, please see the Dec. 30 print or e-edition of the Daily Herald.

This is a corrected story. The original version of this story misidentified John’s last name as Hamilton. The Daily Herald regrets the error.