Posted: October 14, 2009, 5 a.m. EDT
|
|
Gypsy is the black Labrador Retriever seen here with the family’s other dog Rosko, and children Steven, Jasyn and Jayden.
|
It’s every dog owner’s nightmare. One minute your dog is right where he should be, and the next there’s neither hide nor hair of him.
Such was the case for the Reynolds-McPherson family of Huntington, Ore., whose adventurous Labrador Retriever Gypsy went missing on Sept. 25, 2009. Thanks to a good Samaritan and a microchip implanted in the dog, Gypsy was reunited with her family approximately two weeks later, after being found in Seattle.
The day the family dog disappeared started like any other for Emily McPherson who, accompanied by Gypsy, walked her children to the bus stop. After seeing them off to school, she looked around and Gypsy was nowhere to be found.
In the days after her dog vanished, McPherson posted fliers, checked the newspaper, looked at shelter websites and did what any other responsible owner would do to track Gypsy down. By the second week, McPherson was starting to give up hope.
“My children were really heartbroken,” she says. “Every day they’d come home and ask if she’d been found yet. I would go look for her, but come home crying and have to tell them no.”
Gypsy had taken off from home previously, but McPherson was able to find her on the Meridian Animal Shelter’s website after she was located in an apartment complex parking lot not far from home. “We got really lucky that time,” McPherson says. “She was scheduled to be adopted the next day.” Her first disappearance motivated the family to have Gypsy microchipped.
Just as hopes were starting to dim after the second time Gypsy took off, McPherson got the phone call she’d been waiting for. On Oct. 5, a staff member at South Auburn Animal Hospital in Seattle let her know that her dog had been turned in by a woman who’d found her running around at a city park.
Although Gypsy had no visible identification, the staff was able to scan her microchip and obtained the owner’s information from the HomeAgain.com network. The recovery service also paid for the dog to return home.
McPherson has no idea how their dog got so far from home, but speculates that she was picked up by a passerby on the nearby highway who tried to give her a new home.
“I think when Gypsy realized that wasn’t her real home, she took off, and she can really run fast,” McPherson says.
The emotional reunion took place when Gypsy was returned to the family at the airport in Boise, Ore., on Oct. 8.
John Schwartze is the Associate Editor of DOG FANCY.