The Yorkie who came home twice
Doges Editorial · 2026-06-15 · 5 min read
Halo, a 12-year-old Yorkshire terrier in Warrenton, Virginia, was adopted from a shelter in 2014. Last week, firefighters had to excavate a groundhog tunnel to bring him home again.
There is a particular kind of dread that arrives when you call your dog's name and hear nothing back—not even the rustling that means they're off chasing a scent, just silence. For Mr. and Mrs. Dellinger of Warrenton, Virginia, that silence was coming from underground. Halo, their 12-year-old Yorkshire terrier, had vanished into the earth.
Down the rabbit hole, quite literally
According to the Fauquier SPCA and a report from the Gaithersburg Daily Voice, Halo had followed a groundhog into its tunnel system beneath the Dellinger property on June 11 and gotten stuck—not near the entrance, but deep inside, past the reach of any standard tool.
Fauquier County Sheriff's Office Animal Control responded first, assessed the situation, and called for backup. Standard catch poles couldn't reach. Even a 20-foot extension pole, one officer reported, couldn't find purchase. The county's Fire Rescue System arrived with shovels.
The excavation
Photos released by the Fauquier SPCA document what followed: fire crew members down on their knees in the distinctive red Virginia clay, then chest-deep in a growing hole, digging toward the sound of a small dog. B.C. Mackison, Lt. McDonald, Tech. Stroop, and Tech. Plaster took turns at the tunnel face, each one working deeper until the space wouldn't allow it, then passing the work to the next person in line.
Groundhog tunnels branch and narrow in ways that make sense for a 12-pound animal and no sense for a human following with a shovel. The crew dug methodically, working by feel as much as sight, tracking toward sounds that were somewhere in the clay ahead of them. The main tunnel alone extended several feet in multiple directions before the crew identified the likeliest branch.
When they finally got close, Halo wasn't immediately cooperative. Startled by the sudden noise and light breaking into his refuge, he pressed himself farther back. He had found what felt like safety down there in the dark, and he needed a moment before he was willing to trade it for a pair of hands reaching toward him.
The whole operation took hours. Throughout it, the Dellingers waited in the yard, listening for any sign of movement, hearing the muffled thump of shovels against clay. What makes this kind of rescue different from a cliff rescue or a water rescue is the silence of it—there's no dramatic drop, no rushing current, just a small dog somewhere underground and a crew working patiently toward him in the quiet of a June afternoon.
A huge shoutout to Fauquier County Fire Rescue System for going above and beyond to help a Warrenton resident in a moment of panic.
— Fauquier SPCA
The original rescue
Here is the fact that gives this story its second layer: Halo had been found before. Not underground—but in the other kind of lost.
The Dellingers adopted him from the Fauquier SPCA in 2014, when he was a puppy looking for a home. He spent his earliest months in a shelter, then found the people who would be his people for the next twelve years. He was twelve years old now, with the gray muzzle and undiminished curiosity of a dog who has lived a full life, and those same people were standing in the yard calling his name downward into the ground.
We are so grateful for these everyday heroes who showed such kindness to Halo and his loving family. Stories like this remind us how much good there is in our community.
— Fauquier SPCA
Yorkshire terriers and what they were made for
Yorkshire terriers were bred in the mid-1800s as working dogs for textile mills and coal mines in northern England—specifically for ratting, chasing vermin into tight underground spaces and staying there until the job was done. The breed emerged when Scottish workers came south to Yorkshire in search of work, bringing their terrier crosses with them; miners then crossed these with Black-and-Tan Terriers to produce a dog purpose-built for below-ground pursuit. They are dogs with strong prey drives and bodies compact enough to go where most breeds can't. A groundhog tunnel is, from a Yorkie's ancestral perspective, essentially a job description.
The proportions make this literal. A fully grown Yorkshire Terrier weighs no more than seven pounds. Groundhog burrow entrances average five to six inches across—tight even for the dog, impossible for a firefighter with a shovel. The fit is almost exact. And where a retriever's prey drive stops at fetch, and a sheepdog's stops at herd, terriers execute what behavioral scientists call the full prey drive sequence: search, stalk, chase, and pursue underground without stopping. That behavior is genetically encoded, not learned, and it does not erode with domestication, age, or twelve years of household life.
Yorkshire Terriers typically live 13 to 16 years. At twelve, Halo sits squarely in senior territory—past the point where most owners would expect athletic subterranean persistence—but not outside the breed's natural lifespan. Senior Yorkies move slower, rest more, and as they pass ten or eleven may show signs of cognitive slowing. They do not, as a rule, reroute themselves deep into groundhog tunnel systems and stay there. The instinct, evidently, did not slow down with the rest of him.
Whether that's a liability or a feature depends entirely on whether you're Halo or the Dellingers. For Halo, apparently, the tunnel was worth the trip.
Home, again
After the rescue, Halo was checked over and found to be in good health—mildly stressed, almost certainly hungry, but otherwise intact. The Fauquier SPCA posted the photos: four firefighters standing around a clay-rimmed excavation in someone's backyard, their hands red with Virginia earth, grinning.
These are people who trained for structural fires, hazmat incidents, cardiac emergencies. They drove out on a Thursday afternoon to dig through a backyard in Warrenton for a 12-year-old Yorkshire terrier who had followed his instincts underground, and they did it carefully and without complaint.
Twelve years ago, Halo found the Dellingers at a shelter in Fauquier County. Last week, in a considerably more complicated way, they found him again—a few feet deeper down this time, but still home.
Dogs who have been adopted tend to carry something in them—a quality hard to name but easy to recognize. An attentiveness, maybe. A particular way of checking in during a walk, confirming that you're still there. Halo spent twelve years in that backyard, on those walks, cataloguing the scents and sounds of a life that was, until one June afternoon, entirely manageable. Some days the groundhog won the game. On this day, the people who loved him dug through the clay to make sure it didn't end there.