In a world of news filled with bitterly partisan politics, Russian-Iranian military pacts, and a constant reminder that robots will eventually take all of our jobs, this heart-warming report out of Golden, Colorado brought a much-needed smile to my face.
From NBC 9 News in Denver:
A dog that has been missing for nine years was reunited with his owners at the Foothills Animal Shelter Saturday.
The latest owner of the 10-year-old boxer mix recently moved to Denver from out of state and could no longer care for him. Heartbroken, he gave the dog to the Foothills Animal Shelter August 2.
The shelter did a microchip scan and found that the owner information actually belonged to someone else in Tennessee…
The information led to a man named Lloyd Goldston. He said his dog went missing at the age of one when the family moved nine years ago from Tennessee to Alabama.
The long-lost pooch, Boozer, was reunited with his original owners this past weekend. Goldston and his two teenage children made the 18-hour drive and brought with them a photo album they had made of Old Boozer’s first year of puppy-hood nearly a decade ago.
I’ve seen Homeward Bound. I tear up at Marley and Me. But another reason the Goldston’s mitzvah hits home for me personally is because my family had nearly the same thing happen to us back in 2008. Our full-sized, purebred Collie (Bo the Dog) was stolen from our property in the suburbs of Chicago on Memorial Day 2003. At the time, local law enforcement informed us that there was wave of similar thefts, with people stealing expensive dogs and re-selling them.
I’m the oldest of six children and the dog was meant as a gift for my younger brothers, especially my kid brother Brent who was understandably bummed when he vanished. But then, five summers later, we received a call from a police officer in Rockford, IL (about 90 minutes west of Chicago) who had seen the now disheveled Bo wandering around his neighborhood at the edge of some nearby woods. That same officer brought him in to a veterinarian’s office to get checked out and that’s when they found the microchip with our information.
It was exciting stuff. My parents and brother were on local news and more than 300 newspapers eventually picked up the story. We were invited to be on Oprah that summer, but as luck would have it, a few weeks later her people called back to say that a girl in Atlanta had found her dog after six years apart and so they were going with her family’s “sexier” story instead.
Oprah’s betrayal aside, my dad was so happy to have Bo the Dog back. Until Bo’s passing in 2012, Bob Moeller took care of him as if he were a sick (human) relative. He spoke to Bo as if he were a real person and constantly called him “Hero Puppy.” Like all sentimental Moeller men, my father saw the entire thing as a miracle and metaphor.
So what does the return of the prodigal dogs really mean? And what does it mean that these families kept a light out for them all these years? Well, I won’t be the first to point out that you can tell an awful lot about people (or a society) by the way they treat their pets. Not to get too theoretical but the Judeo-Christian tradition has a lot to say about being good stewards of God’s creations.
Certainly some of us can take things too far and attempt to replace human interaction and parental responsibility with a dog that requires very little from us, but we are the kindest-to-animals society in human history. For all the handwringing about chicken coops and Sea World and elephants in the circus, if you had to be an animal anywhere in the world this would be the place.
