NEED TO KNOW
A 6-year-old Chihuahua mix named Penny was reunited with her owners this week in FloridaThe reunion comes after Penny went missing in Mississippi five years ago“She’s a little bigger,” her owner says. “She’s put on a little weight”
This week, pet owners in Mississippi were reunited with their dog after five years apart, but she turned up somewhere no one expected.
Penny the Chihuahua mix, now 6 years old, went missing a half decade ago, vanishing from her owner’s yard in Mississippi. For years, she had no idea where Penny had gone.
“We thought Penny was a goner for sure,” Kristy Taylor, Penny’s owner, tells local Orlando, Fla., outlet WESH 2 News. “A few months went by. We had posted her in some Facebook missing pet groups, and we never got any bites, so we just assumed that she had moved on with life, with a new family. And indeed she did.”
When Penny turned up in DeLand, Fla., she appeared happy and healthy.
“She’s a little bigger,” Taylor says. “She’s put on a little weight.”
Angela Miedema, the director of Volusia County Animal Services, believes Penny was looked after in her years apart.
“With her condition being so good, it’s conceivable that somebody would have cared for her. Now, she could have even gone through a couple different homes at this point,” Miedema says. “We really don’t know her background or anything like that.”
Local resident Briana Rideout found the pooch when she was wandering the streets last week.
“I put up posters at the intersection. My boyfriend and I knocked on every door for about a block radius around us. We made friends with many neighbors, but no one claimed her,” Rideout says. “No one knew who had maybe lost her.”
Eventually, Rideout brought Penny to the local shelter who scanned the furry friend’s microchip. On Monday, animal services gave Taylor a call and the next day, they were out on the road to pick her up.
“We were coming to get our dog,” Taylor says with a smile. “So glad that we were called.”
According to a study completed by the American Veterinary Medical Association, the median return to owner rate for stray dogs with microchips was 52.2%. Meanwhile, stray dogs without the technology have a median return rate of 21.9%.
Cats, on the other hand, see a 38.5% return for felines with microchips and 1.8% for those without.
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Earlier this month, a dog mom reunited with her pooch named Opie after he went missing months ago during a storm in California. The dog was located more than 2,000 miles away in Illinois.
“To everyone’s surprise, it traced back to California,” DuPage County Animal Services wrote on Facebook. “One phone call later, and the very next day (plus a flight), Opie was back where he belonged — home with his owner.”
They added: “We’ll never know exactly how Opie made his way nearly across the country, but we do know this: microchips work.”