A 120-pound white livestock guardian dog has been missing in the wide-open country north of Casper since Friday night, and the Gillette couple who raised him from a puppy have spent the weekend driving back and forth across Wyoming, with their stomachs in knots, looking for him.
Tango was last seen around 7:30 p.m. Friday near the BB Ranch area north of Casper, headed north. Since then, there hasn't been a single confirmed sighting.
His former owner, Kendra Green, doesn't know whether he's still in Natrona County, has wandered toward Kaycee or has simply picked a direction and kept walking.
That's what scares her most.
“Our biggest concern is that he's going to keep walking until he kills himself,” Green said Monday. “He's not going to have food. He has nowhere to go. He doesn't know that area.”
Tango has no collar and no tracker. He's in unfamiliar country during the August heat, and Green worries that even if somebody does spot the enormous white dog, he won't let a stranger get close enough to catch him.
She and her husband, Anthony, have been looking themselves.
Anthony made the two-hour drive from Gillette on Saturday and spent the day searching. On Sunday, they came back together, driving the roads and scanning the countryside until they ran out of places they could access.
Green said Wyoming Game and Fish personnel helped look Saturday, as did local law-enforcement authorities.
Someone even took an airplane up to look for Tango from above.
Nothing.
“Me and my husband have been a basket case pretty much all weekend,” Green said. "It broke our hearts rehoming him but now knowing he's out there with nobody is just gut wrenching. We just want our boy back. He has guarded goats his whole life, he's amazing at his job and such a good boy."
Trying To Do Right
The particularly painful part for Green is that Tango had barely left her family when he disappeared.
Green got Tango and his biological brother when they were 8 weeks old. Tango turned 2 in June and spent most of his life working around the family's goats.
He's half Great Pyrenees, one-quarter Maremma and one-quarter Anatolian shepherd — three livestock guardian breeds built to live around and protect animals.
As the brothers grew older, they began fighting.
It wasn't an occasional sibling squabble, Green said. The fights became serious enough to result in repeated veterinary visits, and eventually she and her husband decided keeping the two together wasn't fair to either dog.
They began looking for another ranch where Tango could work.
“We didn't want to get rid of him,” Green said. “We were really just trying to do — keep it fair for the both of them to stop getting hurt.”
On Thursday night, Tango went to his new home in the Casper area.
By Friday night, he was gone.
Tango was headed north at about 7:30 p.m., she said, and the new owners eventually stopped searching.
The country itself has complicated things. There are large expanses of private property, limited roads and plenty of places for a dog to disappear.
Green has contacted animal shelters in Casper, Gillette, Cheyenne and Laramie in case Tango turns up somewhere unexpected.
Meanwhile, people have been sharing her missing-dog posts on social media.
Still, by Monday morning, Green hadn't heard of any sightings.
Built To Wander
For a dog like Tango, several days is enough time to cover a lot of Wyoming.
Kathy Liles, a western rescue contact for the Great Pyrenees Club of America, said roaming is deeply ingrained in livestock guardian dogs, particularly when they don't have established boundaries.
“They just feel they have to guard the entire world if they can get to it,” Liles said.
Great Pyrenees can be serious wanderers, she said, and Tango's situation is especially difficult because he escaped almost immediately after arriving somewhere unfamiliar.
Normally, a wandering guardian dog may eventually return to its territory.
“If they don't know where their home is, they're not going to come home,” Liles said.
Because Tango disappeared so soon after being rehomed, Liles said, “he has no reason to ever return to there because he doesn't know it.”
She said it's possible Tango could attempt to move in the direction of the place he knew before, though there's no way to know whether that's what he's doing.
“I think he would try harder to go towards where he was before, or just be lost,” she said.
Liles couldn't put a maximum distance on how far Tango could travel, but said Great Pyrenees can cover “a long, long ways.”
'A Big Baby'
Despite his size, Green doesn't describe Tango as intimidating.
“He’s super gentle,” she said. “He’s a big baby.”
At roughly 120 pounds, however, he's difficult to miss up close. He's a large, tall, mostly white dog who knows his name and will respond to Tango.
Whether he'll actually come to somebody he doesn't know is another question.
“He might look at them, but he might just be like, ‘You're not my mom,’ and try to keep finding us somewhere,” Green said.
Liles said Great Pyrenees generally are “really docile and sweet,” raising another possibility: Someone could encounter Tango and take him in without realizing two people in Gillette are desperately looking for him.
But as the days pass, Liles said the more immediate concerns are traffic and water.
“To me, traffic is the biggest thing,” she said, particularly if Tango reaches an interstate, highway or other busy road.
With hot weather, dehydration also becomes increasingly concerning. Food is less urgent, Liles said, because a healthy dog can go considerably longer without eating than without access to water in the heat.
Still, Monday isn't necessarily too late.
Liles recalled one dog on her own property that disappeared for 11 days before turning up. Tango could be tired, sore and lost, she said, but the most important thing now is to keep spreading his picture and getting more eyes looking for him.
Bring Him Home
For Green, the search carries a particular kind of guilt.
She and her husband weren't trying to unload a dog they no longer wanted. They were trying to protect Tango and his brother from hurting one another.
Now she's replaying that decision while driving hours through Natrona County looking for him.
“We're kind of kicking ourselves for trying to rehome him,” she said.
The couple lives about two hours away and doesn't know many people in the Casper area, making every Facebook share, rancher, driver and person keeping an eye on the horizon potentially important.
Even a sighting would help.
Green isn't necessarily asking a stranger to somehow wrestle a 120-pound livestock guardian dog into a vehicle. She just needs someone to see him, recognize him and tell her where he went so she can get there and try to call him herself.
“It would mean the world to us,” Green said.
Anyone who sees Tango or has information about where he may be is asked to contact Kendra Green at 307-680-6834.
Kolby Fedore can be reached at kolby@cowboystatedaily.com.
