This dog’s tale has a happy ending
By Amy Baratta, contributing writer, Recorder Community Newspapers
Friday, January 7, 2011
Tito, a 5-year-old Chihuahua who had been missing from his Kearny home since July, spent the Christmas holiday with Jim and Eileen Furst of Basking Ridge, who found the dog wandering down the middle of Pond Hill Road. With the help of Tito’s microchip and good old-fashioned telephone detective work, the Fursts were able to reunite the dog with his owners.
BERNARDS TWP. - As unexpected holiday houseguests go, Tito couldn’t have had more beautiful manners.
He seldom made noise during his four-day stay at the Basking Ridge home of Eileen and Jim Furst and he turned out to be great company for the couple.
In fact, he made himself right at home, according to Eileen Furst, who found the 5-year-old light-brown Chihuahua wandering, without a collar or dog tags, down the center of Pond Hill Road on Christmas Eve morning.
“He acted like he lived here all his life,” Furst said. “My husband fell asleep in his recliner with the dog on his lap.
“He barked maybe four times while he was here. As far as a houseguest, you couldn’t ask for anything better.”
A self-professed dog lover, Eileen Furst said she was just being a good Samaritan when she stopped her car at 9am Friday, Dec 24, to try to corral the small dog she saw wandering down the center of the two-lane road.
With the help of another passer-by, Furst said, she put the dog in her car and canvassed the nearby neighborhood, hoping to find someone searching for a lost dog.
While unsuccessful in that quest, Furst said she did come across a woman who worked for an animal shelter.
The woman was heading out of town for the Christmas weekend but told Furst that if she was unsuccessful in finding the dog’s owner by Monday, she would take him to the shelter. In the meantime, the woman gave Furst, who does not own a dog and did not have any supplies, a half a bag of dog food for her new canine companion.
Furst then headed home to Hunter’s Lane, where, while she did some Christmas Eve cooking, husband Jim took up the task of trying to unravel the mystery of the dog’s owner.
“He found another neighbor who also works for a shelter and she suggested we take him to Basking Ridge Animal Hospital to be scanned for a (micro) chip,” Furst said. “Shortly, Jim comes back walking the dog on a red leash. The hospital had given him a leash and loaned us a crate with towels in the bottom and everything. One of the girls who works there also gave us a half a bag of food.
“They were great. They even clipped his toenails free of charge – he got a pedicure - and they scanned him for a chip, which, to my surprise, he did have.”
Armed with information about the Nebraska company that stored details embedded in the chip, the Fursts tried to make contact but to no avail.
“We’re talking Christmas Eve,” Furst said. “Nobody’s around Christmas Eve.”
The question then arose what to do with their tiny visitor the next day, since they were planning to spend Christmas with family in Yardley, PA.
“We took him with us,” she said, adding that they would be gone too long to leave the dog by himself. “He was clean, very well behaved and housebroken.”
Long Journey
A quick call to Nebraska on Monday morning revealed that their mystery guest was born Aug. 7, 2005, and had been purchased from The Pet Company in the Newport Centre Mall in Jersey City, Furst said.
However, when the couple called the pet store to see if they could obtain any details about the dog’s owner, she said, they were told it was closing for the day because of the blizzard.
“So there we were, high and dry again,” she said.
When they called back the next morning, they were told that a Kearny woman named Anna Ferreira had purchased the Chihuahua.
At that point, Furst didn’t know what to think.
“I mean, how would a Chihuahua get from Kearny to Basking Ridge,” she asked.
The answer is still a mystery.
When the Fursts contacted Ferreira, she told them that the dog and her cat had gone missing from her yard in July and efforts to find them – by posting fliers and contacting animal control officers and the police – proved fruitless.
She indicated she had paperwork with the chip number to prove that the dog was hers and showed up at the Fursts’ house shortly thereafter.
“She didn’t even know where Basking Ridge was,” Furst said. “But she came right away – she was here an hour and a half after we spoke.”
The woman, accompanied by her mother, who spoke only Portuguese, “started crying the minute she saw (the dog),” Furst said. “His name was Tito. It was definitely her dog.”
Ferreira told Furst that her family had had another Chihuahua that died, leaving them heartbroken, so she had purchased Tito. Her daughter had been asking to get another dog after Tito disappeared but Ferreira told her that she couldn’t bear to have another pet.
“She must have called every relative she had (about finding Tito) because she was standing in my kitchen and her phone kept ringing. She was speaking Portuguese but I could hear the word ‘Tito,’ ” Furst said.
Despite all the detective work that it took to reunite Tito with his family, Furst said the couple was only too happy to oblige.
“I kept thinking, ‘Here it is Christmas Eve and somebody has lost their dog. They’re sitting there with their family wondering where their dog was and who had him,’ ” Furst said. “Other than the fact that we had this blizzard and it was the perfect storm of not being able to contact somebody (because of the holiday weekend), it was a very happy ending.”
Source: http://newjerseyhills.com/bernardsville_news/news/article_93ed06fa-18f6-11e0-8740-001cc4c03286.html
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