After disappearing during a storm at his Northern California home, a small corgi shepherd mix has been located two months later and more than 2,000 miles away in Illinois.
How the pooch made the cross-country trip is still a mystery.
Laura Flamion, an administrator at DuPage County Animal Services, on the outskirts of Chicago, said the dog was found on Sept. 28 and was turned in to the Itasca Police Department as a lost pet. There police officers used a scanner to check if the dog had a microchip.
Once the chip was scanned, Flamion said the microchip company reached out to the dog’s owner to let them know that their dog, affectionately named Opie, had been found in Illinois. Flamion said the owner told her she didn’t believe them. After all, the dog had been missing since July from its home in Bieber, Calif. — on the other side of the country.
“It wasn’t until she got the phone number directly to the police department she realized this was really happening,” Flamion said.
The police department transported the dog on Sept. 29 to DuPage County Animal Services to process the transfer. The owner bought the next flight out of California to Illinois, rented a car and then reunited with Opie on Wednesday.
“She wasted no time,” Flamion said. “I spoke to her and she made it as far as South Dakota; she’s driving back.”
The owner believes Opie, a 5-year-old corgi shepherd mix, had escaped the property in early July when a storm passed through the dog’s hometown of Bieber, Flamion said, adding that Opie does not like storms. Bieber is a rural unincorporated community in Lassen County, northwest of Susanville.
She said the owner looked for the dog and tracked him to a local gas station but that the trail went cold from there. Flamion said she believes someone took the dog and somehow he ended up in Illinois. She said Opie had a collar identifying the dog with a different name.
Flamion said it was great that the dog was microchip but also that the information on the chip was current. She said there have been times when pets are found and microchipped but that the pet has a new owner who is not listed under that microchip. She urges pet owners to check if a pet’s microchip is registered and if the information is current by going to the American Animal Hospital Assn.‘s website and using its microchip registry lookup tool.
Opie joins a long list of pets who have gone missing only to be found and reunited with owners.
Last year, a 2-year-old cat named Rayne Beau (pronounced rainbow), went missing when she slipped out of her collar and dashed toward the forest at the edge of Yellowstone National Park. The cat went missing for weeks until it was found in Northern California and reunited with the owners.
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