How to Save a Dog
July 10, 2025 at 07:30PMFor nearly a year, a motley crew scoured New Orleans for a shaggy white mutt named Scrim. To his own surprise, David W. Brown, a cat person, became one of the most dedicated seekers. The saga opened Brown’s adopted city up to him:
A record-breaking heat wave settled in, and Scrim was moving only at night. Volunteers organized a neighborhood-wide stakeout, which had the feel of a quiet, quintessentially New Orleans block party—people sitting on porches, drinking wine. I manned a street corner from 11 P.M. to 3 A.M. Even then, there were so many people patrolling the area that Google Maps showed standstill traffic. None of them found Scrim.
After that first night, I found myself driving the long way home from my cat colony. For reasons that weren’t clear to me, I went for early-morning walks and evening runs in places where he’d been spotted. I often saw Tammy in the van. I also noticed a middle-aged woman, who had short blond hair and bright-blue eyes, zipping around on an electric scooter at odd hours and in odd places. Finally, driving by one day, I rolled down my window and asked what she was doing.
“Looking for that dog,” she said in a melodic New Orleans accent. Her name was Barbara Burger, and she worked as a court reporter. Each night, she drove twenty minutes from the suburb of River Ridge to help. “It’s so sad that he’s still running the streets,” she told me. She, too, tended to a cat colony.
Sometimes, I saw a tattooed woman in her early thirties, serenely riding her bicycle. I assumed that she was either dealing drugs or searching for Scrim. Eventually, she introduced herself as Bonnie Goodson. “I’m six years sober, living in New Orleans, so I dabble in insomnia,” she told me. She’d always been too scared of bad drivers to bike in the city, but she felt safer at night.
By late July, Tammy, Michelle, Barbara, Bonnie, and I were sharing updates over a walkie-talkie app called Zello. It wasn’t exactly a social activity; the only way to cover a lot of ground was to avoid one another. But we were seeing our city in a new way. Michelle heard updates from cops and sex workers; even people who stole catalytic converters from cars started to look familiar. We also learned about each other. Michelle, who’d previously worked in I.T., started Zeus’ after seeing the plight of animals during Hurricane Katrina. Bonnie had been in the film industry for fifteen years. Freba, I learned, had migrated to the United States from Afghanistan after the Soviets invaded. When Tammy told her that I had done a tour of duty there, she lit up and said, “You’ve been to my country?” We often talked about her homeland. She once wrote that, as a gay Muslim person in a red state, she identified with the way pit bulls are stereotyped and stigmatized.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/07/10/how-to-save-a-dog/
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