1 greyhound reported missing in Rock Hill found, other deceased

The saga of two greyhounds who vanished while being transported through South Carolina by a rescue agency reached a bittersweet conclusion over the weekend.

A former racing dog named Tater Tot was discovered, unharmed, in a post office parking lot and reunited with the people seeking to adopt him. His female companion, Jewel, wasn’t so lucky. She was struck by a car on the interstate and killed.

The two dogs were the focus of a statewide search on Friday after the dogs were reported missing from a hauler taking the animals from a racing circuit in Florida to meet up with an animal adoption organization in Durham.

But when he driver made a pit stop in Rock Hill, he noticed two of the dogs were missing from his specialized greyhound trailer. How the dogs got loose, and where, was a mystery. It was thought the two fell off the hauler on the highway and may have been seriously injured.

Word quickly spread among animal lovers throughout South Carolina about the missing pups.

“There are greyhound rescue and adoption organizations all over the country, and there’s an Amber Alert system for missing greyhounds,” said Mary Prather, a volunteer with Greyhound Adoptions of Florida who was helping to deliver the dogs to a rescue organization out of Virginia. “When a dog goes missing, there are email alerts that go out, texts, calls. It’s pretty amazing.

“We had people looking for these dogs everywhere between Charlotte and Charleston,” she said.

Tater Tot and Jewel were being transported from Florida, along with several other greyhounds. At the Florida-Georgia line, their hauler was inspected by the Department of Agriculture, and apparently the latch to the pin where the two dogs were kept muzzled wasn’t securely closed.

When the hauler next stopped in a rest area off Interstate 26 in Dorchester County just prior to reaching Interstate 95, the duo made their escape.

“They did not fall off the trailer while it was on the interstate, because the male dog did not have a single scratch on him when he was found,” Prather said.

The two dogs were transitioning from their former life as racing dogs, a life of kennels and tracks rather than homes and people. They had just completed six weeks in a home training program where the hounds were paired with inmates at a Florida prison to learn how to be around humans.

“They need to get acclimated,” Prather said. “When a greyhound gets into a home for the first time and sees windows and a TV, it’s a real culture shock to them.”

While the missing dog alert wasn’t able to help Jewel, a mailwoman who saw the message discovered Tater Tot outside her post office in St. George late Friday and was able to reunite him with the rescue organization. He was turned over to the Virginia group to rejoin the other hounds on Monday, after Prather gave him a new moniker.

“I called him ‘Lucky,’” she said. “And hope his new family keeps that name.”

This story was originally published March 30, 2015 at 5:15 PM with the headline "1 greyhound reported missing in Rock Hill found, other deceased."