|
I'll be home for
Christmas,
You can count on me.
Please have snow and mistletoe,
[and guess what I'll do to the tree!]
BATHURST, NSW (Australia) —
In all fairness to a
dog's logic, she did come home (nobody ever specified whose home
it would be), and it was well before Christmas (that is, if you
accept the birth of Christ being on March 28, according to historical
estimates based on De
Pascha Computus, written in 243 A.D.).
Ok, if you can swallow that, then the rest of this
article should be no big deal.
The Daily
Telegraph reported today that a tiny Shih-Tzu/Maltese
mix who disappeared on Christmas Eve reappeared just last week on the
other side of the Blue Mountains in New South Wales.
"Sasha", the beloved baby of Jo
Eldridge, had vanished from her yard in Bathurst on Dec. 24 of last year. Ms. Eldridge, 23, went to extraordinary lengths to track down
the four-year-old pooch, knocking door-to-door, contacting radio stations,
newspapers and the local pound on a daily basis.
A full seven weeks later as all hope had
almost faded, the little mountaineer was finally found,
drastically underweight and covered with ticks and fleas but otherwise
healthy. She was passed on to
the Blacktown pound, no less than 200km away from her point of
departure in Bathurst.
Next, it was a miracle of modern
technology that reunited Sasha with her family: a tiny identification microchip
that had been implanted under her skin for just such an occasion. Local
Government Minister Harry Woods explains: "The fact Sasha was
microchipped and her details were on the NSW
Companion Animals Register with 550,000 other cats and dogs was
the key factor in reuniting Jo and her dog."
|
Dramatization: Posed precariously atop Mt. Hay in the
Blue Mountains National Park is "Jiffi",
a female Shih-Tzu. Well, not quite. Jiffi is actually safe and sound at Fuzzy
Paws Shih-Tzu Rescue in Royal Oak, Michigan, digitally
superimposed over a Mt. Hay postcard. Click the
picture if you'd like to take her home today.
The NSW government has been
implementing a program of mandatory, low-cost microchipping for all
puppies and kittens under the Companion Animals Act of 1998. Since then,
lost, injured and stolen pets have been identified and returned home from
as far as 340km away (read about "Teardrop"
from the NSW Companion Animals Advisory Board).
As for Sasha's amazing odyssey in the
Blue Mountains, the world may never know. "I don't know how she
did it," says an ecstatic Ms. Eldridge. "I don't know how she
survived. The vets kept saying, 'Look, she's probably been bitten by a snake,
you'd better forget about her.' But in my heart, I knew she wasn't
dead.
"...the moral of this story is, you
have got to never, never, never, never ever give up hope."
§§§
Headlines
Prev  Next
|
