...then righted. On Friday when I was out on a bicycle ride with my setter Sophie, we got about two miles away from the house and were approached by a boxer/pit mix pup who was just roaming the neighborhood (blue collar, no tags). I gave Sophie a few "Don't touch" and "Come on Sophie" commands and we turned and started heading home. Well, puppers decided we were a nice couple and she joined too. That little dog followed me all the way home and then sat on my front porch for two hours looking in the window. I finally decided to clip on a leash and lead her back to the area where she started following and try to find her home. For two hours we knocked on doors and wondered around. No luck, so we came back to my house. My dogs were all too happy to have a new visitor, but Lost Dog kept trying to get my cats. With my kitties safety in mind I gave in and took her to the local animal shelter.
We discovered she was microchipped at the shelter and I filled out paperwork while a worker phoned the owners. There was no answer, but a message was left about the location of the dog. I gave myself a mental pat-on-the-back and headed home, happy I reunited a lost dog with its owners.
My family and I were out of town over the weekend and on Monday I loaded up all the dogs and went to a park for our daily walk, instead of our usual route. On Tuesday I headed out with Sophie again for a quick run and got two blocks from my house when I started noticing all these Lost Dog signs on the other side of the street. I decided to jog over and check them out to see if I could continue my dog-reuniting good deeds. Well, on every sign was a picture of the very dog that I took to the animal shelter four days ago. The dog's name was Sophie (yep, just like my dog) and had been missing since Friday morning. I ran home as fast as I could with this terrible feeling in my stomache. The shelter I left her at (the only one in our area) only has a 72 hour hold on strays before "something" was done with them. I called the number from and sign and spoke with a very relieved man about what had happened with his Sophie. He thanked me and then hung up to call the shelter.
While I was finishing my run with Sophie, the man called me back. Apparently, Sophie's time had run out and she was no longer at the shelter. I felt like a horrible human being. I felt like if I had just kept the dog here and tried to find the owner myself that sweet little pup would have been reunited with her family. I cried a few times throughout the day just thinking about that poor puppy.
Around six that evening, Sophie's owner called again and I had my husband answer the phone because I was afraid he was going to yell at me for taking his dog the the shelter where she was put to sleep. But...
He was calling to say that the shelter didn't euthanize her, instead, they transferred her to a humane society near us to be put up for adoption. He had just returned from picking her up and wanted to call and tell me how much he appreciated what I had done for his dog. BIG sigh of releif.
It turns out that this man had recently bought the dog through the newspaper and had no idea the dog was microchipped. The chip was still registered to the previous owners who had called the animal shelter and said they relinquished their rights to her. They didn't bother to mention to the shelter that they had sold the dog to someone else a couple of months before.
Sophie is safe with her family now, with updated microchip information and a dog tag riveted onto the collar.