Fred, bassett hound

Microchip helps reunite dog with its owners
By David Olson, the Press-Enterprise
Monday, June 11, 2007

Nearly six months after Fred the basset hound disappeared from a Moreno Valley family's former home in Arizona, the dog will come home in style: on a private jet to Palm Springs.

Fred, a basset hound that disappeared from his family's home in Paulden, Ariz., will be returned to the family in Moreno Valley.

Tammie Gomez, 30, and her children, Julia, 9, and Jonah, 7, will greet Fred at Palm Springs International Airport on Tuesday, six days after the dog wandered into the parking lot of the Northern Arizona Second Chance Center for Animals near Flagstaff, Ariz.

A veterinarian at the center is a pilot and will whisk Fred to Palm Springs. Shelter staff found the Gomez family through an identification microchip implanted in Fred's neck.

"It was just chaos in the house," Tammie Gomez said of when they discovered that Fred had been found Thursday. "Everyone was screaming and crying. It's like we won the lottery."

The Gomez family last saw Fred in December, when they left Paulden, Ariz., to haul some of their belongings to Moreno Valley. They left Fred in a fenced dog run with a golden retriever and asked a neighbor to take care of them.

When the family returned two weeks later, Fred was gone. They don't know how he got out. The golden retriever was still in the dog run, and the gate was closed.

As the weeks passed, Gomez told Julia and Jonah that Fred was probably "living the good life on someone's couch." But, privately, she believed that Fred had probably been killed by one of the wild animals that inhabit the countryside near Paulden.

Then, on Thursday, Lyn Pierce, office manager of the shelter, called Gomez to tell her that Fred had walked into the shelter parking lot. It's unclear whether someone had dropped him off there earlier, Pierce said.

"She was speechless," Pierce said. "She kept having to stop the conversation. She didn't believe we had found her dog."

When Gomez hung up the phone, she tearfully told Julia and Jonah the good news.

The center veterinarian, Dr. Paul Fink, is certain that Fred did not walk the nearly 80 miles of mountainous terrain from Paulden to Flagstaff. He was healthy when he arrived at the center, and the bottoms of his paws are not scraped-up, Fink said.

No one knows what Fred has been doing for the past six months. Gomez believes someone must have picked him up, because his collar -- which held his dog tags -- was gone.

The Gomezes had lived in Riverside before they moved to Arizona two years ago. They had the microchip installed in Fred's neck about seven years ago, after they adopted him from the Riverside County animal shelter.

Gomez said she probably wouldn't have ever seen Fred again were it not for the microchip.

"I wish I could microchip my kids," she said.

Source: http://www.pe.com/localnews/riverside/stories/PE_News_Local_D_lostdog11.3ea8afc.html