Last week Banjo the Bernese mountain dog arrived at his new home in Charleston, South Carolina, after traveling 350 miles across Alabama and Georgia. His previous owners had given the five-year-old up, and the National Bernese Mountain Dog Rescue Network had stepped in to find him a forever family. But within two hours of landing, he scaled a seven foot fence in the backyard and disappeared.
“This is one of the things we see quite often within hours of rescued dogs getting adopted,” says Terri McDermott, who founded the nonprofit in 2023 and has since taken in 792 Bernese mountain dogs, mostly from puppy mills, and placed them into foster and permanent homes. That’s why the rescue furnishes each dog with a kit to start their new life: a collar, a leash, a harness, a seatbelt tether, a slip lead—and an advanced GPS tracking device.
The family called their caseworker after Banjo disappeared, the caseworker called McDermott, and she logged into the system to track him. “I opened my computer, and we watched this dog run an hour and forty-five minutes up and down Rifle Range Road with cars everywhere,” she says. “I felt sick and was thinking to myself, ‘I’m going to watch this dog die here.’”
Banjo managed to evade the cars, but darkness was falling, and as the children in his new family cruised around on their bikes, trying to keep sights on him, he disappeared into the marsh. Remotely, McDermott turned on a light on the tracking device, and one of the kids spotted the glow in the distance. She then called an animal control service, which got the Mount Pleasant Volunteer Fire Department involved.
At that point Banjo was so far out in the marsh that his tracking device lost signal. “I couldn’t pick up on anything, and we all feared the worst. I thought he’d drowned,” McDermott says. As a last-ditch effort, the fire department launched a heat drone. Sure enough, after scanning the grassy expanse, a team member saw a white light and flew the drone closer until the shape of a dog, sunk to his hips in pluff mud—the notoriously quicksand-like muck that forms the base layer of Lowcountry salt marshes—came into view.
That’s when the official rescue began, as first reported by the Post and Courier. Family members joined a team of ten volunteer firefighters on an airboat, which sped to the scene where a terrified Banjo tried to swim away through the mud and murky water. After cutting him off and pulling him into the boat, rescuers wrapped Banjo in a warming blanket. “Within an hour he was back on land and safe,” McDermott says. “It was such a team effort.”
Now, Banjo is back settling into his new home, for good this time, McDermott hopes. “Bernese mountain dogs are the sweetest, most loyal, loving, and sensitive dogs. Banjo will end up being a hundred-pound lap dog,” she says. “The rescues just need a little time.”
