Adventurous Ace heading 1,000 miles home to Texas
IRMO, S.C. — A dog found on the side of a road is going home to his 80-year-old owner Saturday.
And a group of Facebook friends is helping make that happen after one of them found Ace wandering around near this town of about 12,000 on the outskirts of Columbia, S.C.
Brannon Rutherford, a dog groomer who lives here, has been taking care of Ace for a couple of days after one of her friends found the 3-year-old male, who is mostly white with a cute brown spot around his right eye. She took the dog to a veterinarian to check for a microchip and discovered that his owner lives more than 1,000 miles away on a farm outside of Granger, Texas.
Leroy Filla and his family had been looking for Ace for more than a week.
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"He's an older gentleman struggling with Parkinson's, so he gave us his son's phone number, and we contacted him," Rutherford said. "He was like, 'How in the world is he in South Carolina?' "
The last sighting of Ace had been on an interstate near a truck rest area.
"Ace must have gotten away from the trucker, and here we are," Rutherford said. She has nicknamed him Travelin' Ace.
Ace followed Filla everywhere, especially when he walked out to feed his cattle, said Filla's son, who didn't want to be identified. He called the dog Filla's best friend.
After the son got the call from Rutherford, the son asked Filla, who lives alone, whether he wanted Ace returned.
"I don't want you to go through the trouble," the son said Filla told him. "But I sure do miss him."
So Rutherford started looking for a way to make that happen.
"The older generation doesn’t want people to go through a ton of trouble for them, and they’re not going to come out and say it," said Kelly Warr of Columbia, S.C., who saw Rutherford's Facebook post asking if anyone were willing to take Ace on another adventure. "But this would mean the world to this man if he got his dog back, and he didn't have to ask.
"We're bringing him back," she said. "Ace is coming home."
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Warr and a co-worker will begin a trek Saturday morning that will take them and Ace through six states before getting to Granger. She emphasized that the trip is a team effort.
"I’m just the person that’s driving him," she said. "There was somebody that found him on the side of the road. There was the vet that got him all the shots and made sure that he was current. Then there's Brannon who was like, 'We have to get him home,' someone who’s been housing this dog, who has been finding places that can foster this dog until we could make this happen.
"A lot of people ... believed in getting this man his companion back," Warr said.
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