A lost dog returns to his family. An organization adopts and cares for senior dogs. A puppy survives in the cold after a car wreck. Here are just a few heartwarming stories about local people coming together to help pets in need.
Written by Leslie Criss | Illustrated by Abbey Edmonson
Community Helps Find Lost Pup
Like many students who venture far to attend Ole Miss, Isabelle Janney of Luray, Virginia, toured the campus and fell in love with it. After three years in Oxford, the English major graduated May 11, 2024.
Parents, siblings, grandparents, other relatives and friends arrived in Oxford to celebrate and attend Janney’s graduation. Traveling along with her parents was Roo, the family’s 3-year-old Australian shepherd.
When the family went to dinner the night before graduation, Roo stayed behind in Janney’s apartment. But when the family returned, Roo had been unintentionally let out of the apartment and was missing.
Heartbroken, Janney and her family covered the city of Oxford by car, calling Roo’s name over and over. Posters emblazoned with the blue-eyed pup’s photograph were placed on poles and social media outlets aplenty.
With their furry, four-legged family member missing, Janney’s commencement day joy was tempered by a profound sense of sadness.
In the days after becoming a graduate of Ole Miss, Janney and her family were astounded by the outpouring of compassion from the citizens of Oxford.
“People came out of the woodwork to help us search,” Janney said. “My phone rang off the hook with strangers overjoyed to report Roo sightings.”
Those same strangers in Janney’s adopted community came together to offer drones, humane traps and tracking dogs to assist in the search for Roo.
For eight days, Roo remained lost. Most family members returned to Virginia, but Janney’s parents, Monica and Marc Janney, stayed in Oxford to search. Help from the people of Oxford remained constant.
Family members in Virginia returned to Oxford in Marc Janney’s truck, a favorite space for Roo. On the evening of May 17, Janney’s dad took his truck to a field where several Oxford residents had reported seeing Roo. He left the truck doors open and game cameras on the truck.
“We left, hoping Roo might return to the vehicle he knew best,” Janney said. “At 5:30 a.m., Saturday, May 18, Roo hopped into the truck and waited to be taken home, in good shape, but very dirty.
“No words will ever be able to express the gratitude my family and I have for this community and its people for their concern for a dog they didn’t even know.”
Couple Opens Hearts & Home to Senior Dogs
When Susan and Neal Cox met, they realized they had common interests. They also discovered they shared an intense passion for animals.
The couple, now married 10 years, has put their passion into action.
“In 2014, we started fostering dogs,” Susan Cox said. “I always had a heart for senior dogs, especially since becoming aware of how senior dogs get left behind — for multiple reasons: Their care gets expensive, people don’t want them anymore or they want younger dogs.”
Her love for seniors comes at least in part from her parents who were in the eldercare business 35 years.
Euley, a blind and deaf Yorkie from Oxford, was the first senior dog to call Ol’ Hank’s Place home.
“We were beside ourselves,” she said. “We were so new at caring for a senior dog, but we fell in love with this dog who was 15 when he came to us. He lived for two years, and he thrived. We gave him so much love and learned so much.”
After Euley, the couple wanted another senior dog to foster. And then there were six.
“Finally, we realized maybe we should do something — maybe this is a thing, this making a home for senior dogs,” Cox said.
And Ol’ Hank’s Place in Holly Springs was officially in business. The nonprofit is supported by fundraising. It’s named for a beloved mini labradoodle long loved by the Coxes. Hank was adopted from the Memphis Animal Shelter by Susan when he was just 6 months old. He lived to be 16. It was while Susan and Neal cared for Hank in his senior years that they first began to develop the idea to start a sanctuary for senior dogs.
“Neal and I run on complete faith,” she said. “We’re not rich, we both have full-time jobs, and sometimes we say, ‘Oh, wow, how are we going to fund things this month?’ We say prayers all the time, and honestly, the money just comes. It’s always just enough.”
The largest expense is veterinary care for the senior pups. The Coxes spare nothing with health care.
Some of the dogs come to them from shelters, where sick seniors have been relinquished by owners. A few of their fosters lived only a month or two, but in their final days, they had fine food and lots of love, rather than dying alone in a shelter.
Aria was only 5 and diagnosed with bladder cancer when she came to live at Ol’ Hank’s Place. Though early scans showed a mass, another veterinarian surprisingly found no sign of the cancer.
Job is a 14-year-old German shepherd who came to Ol’ Hank’s three years ago rather than being euthanized for being old.
“He’s missing hair, looks like he did three tours in Vietnam, but he’s still living, still going,” Cox said.
The Coxes have also facilitated senior humans in fostering their senior dogs for as long as they are able, and they have taken their dogs to visit nursing home residents.
Well over 100 dogs have been helped by Ol’ Hank’s Place, and these days, 21 seniors call it home. The Coxes continue to make plans for the future of their passion.
“There are times we look at one another and don’t know if we can keep on doing this any longer,” she said. “We have cried some tears. It’s hard to be in the trenches and do the work. But the good outweighs the bad. Our life is this rescue.”
Learn more about Ol’ Hank’s Place and donate to the organization online at olhanksplace.org.
With Prayers Aplenty, Poodle Pup Survives Wreck, Ice & Snow
On a cold morning in January, with a winter storm slated to begin late in the afternoon, Randy Leister, his 17-year-old daughter Emily and her 5-month-old standard poodle pup Kiffin left Oxford at 6 a.m. heading to Kentucky to pick up a new horse. They thought they could beat the predicted precipitation back home.
They made it to Kentucky, picked up the horse and headed for home. At 1:30 p.m., the sleet came early. Just after 2 p.m., Emily’s mom Tiffany was driving home from Batesville when she found out there had been in an accident.
“They hit black ice on a bridge and the truck rolled over, landing upside down,” Tiffany said. “Miraculously, the horse trailer remained upright.”
A nurse practitioner, Tiffany could hear shock in the voices of her husband and daughter, but neither was seriously injured. When she arrived at the scene of the accident, minutes from the family’s home, she could not see her daughter. But she heard her.
“After we were helped out of the truck, I just started screaming for my dog,” Emily said. “Some Ole Miss student who stopped to help gave me a pair of muck boots to put on. They were size 12.”
No one knew if the dog had made it to the woods or was crushed under the truck.
“Angels were all over the place,” she said. “Calm, cool Casey Daniels held the horse, who would have died if the trailer had flipped; Rex Holloway and Emily Smith came and took the horse to our farm.”
The search for Kiffin continued until 10 p.m. No one in the family got much sleep. They prayed a lot. At 6:30 a.m., the family, each with a standard poodle wearing wash cloths, Ziploc bags and duct tape on their paws for protection, continued the search.
“We thought the dogs might be able to help find Kiffin,” Emily said. “My brother said he had just prayed for help finding my dog, and when he finished his prayer, Kiffin — the only dog we have that howls — howled twice.
“(He) couldn’t really see her at first; she looked like an ugly, frozen, wet rat and just blended in with the woods.”
A trip to Animal Clinic of Oxford brought good news — after 19 hours in the wet and freezing cold, Kiffin was amazingly well, just hungry and dehydrated.
“It was the worst 19 hours of our lives,” Tiffany said. “But it is all such a testament to God’s grace.”
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