All’s quiet on the Scrim front. For more than 48 hours there have been no reported sightings of New Orleans’ favorite stray dog. That worries Michelle Cheramie, the woman who has spent months attempting to capture Scrim in order to place him in the safety of a loving home.
“These are the hardest times,” said Cheramie, the proprietor of Zeus’ Rescues pet adoption agency. Without sightings, Cheramie said she fears the worst for the runaway pet. “Maybe he got clipped by a car and is hiding under a house, injured,” she said. Or worse.
Scrim, an ashen-white terrier mutt, was last spotted at the corner of South Claiborne Avenue and Felicity Street on Thursday morning. As she’s done many times before, Cheramie posted lost-dog flyers in the area, but so far, no one has texted with new sighting.
Chaos theory
A member of Cheramie’s “capture team” dutifully adds all Scrim spottings to a Google map in an attempt to track the dog’s wanderings with dated, color-coded pins. But, at a glance, the digital map is so crowded with pins — imagine a spilled bag of Skittles — that it serves mostly as a tribute to the diabolical dog’s inscrutability.
It may take an expert in chaos theory to spot Scrim travel patterns in the jumble, if patterns even exist.
Cheramie suspects that Scrim is now somewhere in the Hoffman Triangle, a neighborhood bordered by South Broad Street, Martin Luther King Boulevard, South Claiborne Avenue, and Toledano Street. The area, which includes warehouses and auto maintenance businesses, in addition to residences, offers “tons of places for him to hide,” Cheramie said.
Celebrity fugative
The holidays may have diminished reported Scrim sightings — people are busy. Also, Cheramie said, the residents of Scrim’s new territory may not yet be aware that they should be on the lookout for a celebrity fugitive in their midst.
She said her strategy for catching the fleet-footed creature is simply to drive around with her tranquilizer dart rifle at her side, hoping to spot him. “Just give me one sighting, that’s all I need,” she said.
Scratching the Scrim backstory
For those readers new to the saga of the Crescent City celebrity dog, here’s the backstory in brief.
Scrim was a shy stray, found in a Houma trailer park on Halloween 2023. Cheramie retrieved the dog from the Terrebonne Parish Animal Shelter and placed him with an adoptive family, but Scrim immediately escaped.
The dog subsequently became a local sensation, as he evaded capture for almost six months, dodging cages, nets, tranquilizer darts and a posse of well-meaning dog lovers.
Finally, one week before Halloween, Scrim was trapped in a fenced parking lot, where Cheramie darted him. The dog was delivered to a pet hospital to recover from his ordeals. An X-ray revealed that sometime in his past, Scrim had been shot twice, either by a firearm or air rifle. The projectiles remain in his flesh.
After his return to domesticity, Scrim appeared before the New Orleans City Council, where he was hailed as a new icon of resilience.
Scrim seemed safe at last, but, as things turned out, the chase was far from over. Three weeks later, on Nov. 15, the undaunted dog performed his most daring escape, diving 13 feet from a second-story window of Cheramie’s Uptown home and continuing his urban travels.
