Arizona Rescue Group Has Saved Nearly 800 Pets Using High-Tech Tricks: 'Never Give Up Hope'

It was nearly three weeks after Eddie, a skittish rescue dog, escaped through a garage door mistakenly left open and disappeared into the “brutal” 105-degree Phoenix heat last July that Donna Kelly had nearly lost hope. “I felt so bad,” Kelly, Eddie’s foster mom, tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue. “I was supposed to keep him safe.”

So Kelly reached out to HARTT (Humane Animal Rescue and Trapping Team), a group of 50 devoted volunteers who use high-tech cameras, humane traps, and yummy treats — including bacon and cheeseburgers — to capture lost pets — mostly dogs and the occasional cat. 

On the 34th day of Eddie’s disappearance, around 3 a.m., during a torrential rainstorm, HARTT volunteers called Kelly to give her the news that they’d found the pup on a golf course near her house. “I drove there in my pajamas, crying,” says Kelly, who has since adopted Eddie. “He was drenched, disheveled, very thin, but safe.”  

It is joyous reunions like these that motivated Cheryl Naumann, a longtime animal lover and former CEO of the Arizona Humane Society, to start HARTT in 2017.

“Being able to finally save them is like no other feeling in the world,” she says. “It is so rewarding to know that you’ve made a difference in this animal’s life.”

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Naumann started capturing strays on her own in 2012, after a friend told her about a dog living next to a local highway.  Naumann bought a humane trap and safely captured the dog. 

“I quickly realized there was a great need to get these animals that no one could catch, but nobody was doing it,” says Naumann, whose day job is head of the human resources department at the University of Phoenix.  

So she started HARTT, buoyed by a growing network of eager volunteers who create and post hundreds of fliers to alert the public about a lost pet, use high-tech cameras to keep on eye on an animal once it is spotted, and sit for hours, even days, next to traps with tempting treats until the pet enters it and is safely caught. 

“Never give up hope,” says Naumann, whose group has found upwards of 800 dogs and a few cats, some missing for two years.

“If you can recover a lost animal by walking down the street, whistling and putting a leash around its neck, we’re not needed,” says Naumann, who also owns a pet resort with her husband, Roger, and oversees a HARTT shelter that’s helped care for many of the animals HARTT has rescued.  

RELATED: Shelter Dog Now Living His ‘Best Life’ After Waiting 848 Days to Find a Forever Home

HARTT covers the wide expanse of Maricopa County, roughly 9,200 square miles, and have provided incalculable comfort not only for pets but dog owners such as Cheryl Heflin, 67, whose 5-year-old chihuahua, Sheba, wriggled out of her harness during a walk after a dog frightened her, and ran off into the desert at the end of March. “The thought of her outside with coyotes and owls, I was sick,” says Heflin. “The thought she was in danger and may be suffering was awful.”

On the fourth day that Sheba went missing,  HARTT volunteers trapped her following a tip from a park worker who spotted the hungry pup. Says a grateful Heflin: “They’re heroes for what they did.” 

For more on HARTT pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday.