They're coming to take you away

Ignore the man whose mustache signals that he will find himself at the business end of the Right Fist o' Justice before this story is over. Ignore the woman who might just as well be Cherry Trail, including wearing Cherry's favorite color. And don't be too distracted by Ernest Borgnine in drag there (tip of the hat to Josh at Comics Curmudgeon for noticing that first!).

Instead, focus on what "Sally" is saying to Sassy: I hope your owners find you before they take you away.

Well, duh, Sally; they'd have a hard time taking her away before they found her!

Seriously, what's happening here? Simple: Sally is using the indefinite "they" to refer to the city employees who will be taking her yardful of dogs away. Pronouns, like other deictic elements, take their meaning from the context in which they appear; they don't have any real meaning on their own. What makes this sentence potentially ambiguous is that its structure seems to posit "your owners" for the referent, as in "I hope your owners find you before they have to go back to California", but actually "they" is referring to something not specified in the sentence, but part of the larger context.

Yes, Sassy: they're coming to take you away!

What's really interesting is how easily we parse such sentences; we may note (and chuckle over) the ambiguity, but we aren't actually thrown by it at all. Instead, we are able to quickly identify the pragmatics that make "they" unlikely to refer to "your owners" and then to come up with the contextual identity that makes sense. I don't think we could do it better if we had different pronouns.