Rabon lives on Gheen Road in west Rowan. She and her boyfriend, Mark Barnhardt, were walking along the road, down toward the pasture, with their dogs when they spotted a big bird about 4 p.m. Wednesday.

While she was saying, “I think it’s an emu,” the dogs raced after the bird. “He was going real, real fast all around, not flying but running,”Rabon said. “I thought either he was going to keel over or the dogs would, because they kept going on and on.”

She caught the dogs, and Barnhardt went back to the house to get the car and take the dogs home because she was afraid they would kill the emu.

“After they left, the emu was still standing there,” Rabon said, “So I started talking to him, and he started following me home.”

Once in her own back yard, Rabon set out a bucket of water for the bird and fed it lettuce and cabbage. “He probably weighed 130 pounds or so, big enough to hurt somebody, but he was not mean,”Rabon said, “I fed him out of my hand.”

When she went into the house the emu even followed her up the steps. Barnhardt started calling her Dr. Doolittle. “Animals just like me,” Rabon said.

By 5 p.m. or so, Rabon said the emu headed toward the pasture and “just sort of walked off into the sunset, down Gheen Road.”

This is the reported second case of an emu wandering loose recently.

Late in November, Stacey Keller rescued an emu that had been hit by a car on Dunn’s Mountain Road, on the opposite side of the county. That emu ended up at the Rowan County Animal Control shelter and was later adopted. Animal Control officials have not returned phone calls about who adopted the emu.

Ralph Baker and his son, Ralph Baker Jr., used to raise emus and at one time had nearly 200 of them. They got out of the business when emu products didn’t catch on the way entrepreneurs had expected. Ralph Baker said it turned out people made money breeding young birds when everybody wanted to invest in them.

But their value dropped when it became obvious consumers weren’t buying processed emu. The value of the birds dropped from as much as $1,000 or more to a fraction of that.

Ralph Baker Jr. speculates that emus have been getting loose lately because their owners aren’t careful about keeping them now that they’re not worth much.

“I don’t think emus are good at getting loose,”he said. “They’re really not very smart. I can’t imagine they’d follow somebody home.

“Ican’t remember we had any get loose.”

In Ralph Baker Jr.’s view, the only way an emu would get out is through an open gate. “Ours never had any desire to get out as long as there was food there,” he said.

The Bakers took their remaining emus to the Lazy 5 Ranch on N.C. 150 in Mooresville. Jean Silliman, mother of the Lazy 5 owners, said the ranch has all its emus and has not had any trouble keeping them confined. “We have pretty good fences,” she said. “Now that the animals don’t mean big bucks, people are just not as careful about keeping them.”

Things could be worse. It could be ostriches getting loose. Silliman said they are significantly bigger than emus.