Return of missing dog is owner's ‘Christmas miracle.'
By Jason Buch
Saturday, December 24, 2011
Belinda Gutierrez was reunited with her dog Stevie Oedipus Wonder after ACS volunteers found a listing for him on Craigslist.
Stevie Oedipus Wonder is lucky to be home for the holidays.
The cairn terrier mix pup disappeared from his home on the far West Side at the end of November, was reported dead and had almost overstayed his welcome at Animal Care Services this week when his owner found him.
“This is my Christmas miracle,” said Belinda Gutierrez, who thinks Stevie is about a year old. “I actually thought I was going to have a sad end of the year and a sad Christmas.”
But thanks to Craigslist, an animal-loving schoolteacher and efforts by ACS to find Stevie a place to spend the holidays, Gutierrez picked him up from the shelter Thursday.
And to make this heartwarming story of a puppy making it home in time for Christmas with his family even more so, Stevie's not just any puppy. A veterinarian told Gutierrez her dog was born without eyes, she said, and he showed signs of abuse when her daughter found him wandering around a duck pond at Marbach Road and Ellison Drive early this year.
Gutierrez, 49, said she's a cat person, but when her daughter called her crying — at first they thought his permanently closed eyes were a sign of abuse — she told her daughter to bring over the puppy.
“He wouldn't go up to anyone if it wasn't my voice or my daughter's voice,” she said. “He didn't like men's voices. He would bark.”
But Gutierrez said his friendly attitude won her over. He became a big part of her life, dragging her out of the house to get exercise that she needed as much as he did. So she was very upset when Stevie escaped Nov. 29 and days later, when her landlord told her he was dead.
“We thought, ‘OK, he's gone and he'll have to just wait for us at the rainbow bridge,'” said Gutierrez, a health care provider.
Stevie came to ACS on Dec. 11, said Jeanne Saadi, the agency's live release coordinator. Because he had a collar and a tag, the shelter would hold him for five days before he was euthanized, Saadi said. But the contact information on his tag was out of date and the shelter could not reach his owner.
Luckily for Stevie, Brooke Orr, an English as a second language teacher at Highlands High School and a co-sponsor of the school's Voices for Animals Club, was moved when she saw a post online from ACS trying to find a home for him.
Orr said she asked the shelter to put a Save a Life hold on him, thinking she'd take care of him over the holidays. Also luckily for Stevie, Gutierrez's daughter had placed an ad on Craigslist in an effort to find him.
“I saw the posting of the little dog and I saw that he had a collar and a tag on,” Orr said. “And I thought that he must belong to someone. So I went to Craigslist and went to lost and found and I put in ‘blind dog,' and there he was.”
So she contacted Gutierrez and let her know Stevie was safe.
When she went to the shelter to pick him up, Gutierrez said she was concerned Stevie would be unable to recognize her.
“All he had to do was hear my voice,” she said. “And I stood at the entrance of the kennel building and called out, ‘Stevie, Stevie.' And he started barking all over the place.”
She was so unhappy with her landlord letting Stevie escape, Gutierrez said, that she left the mobile home and moved into an apartment.
On Friday, Stevie was playing with a dog friend in the living room and jumping up to greet visitors of both genders. In the kitchen, Gutierrez had stocking stuffers for him. A couple of the items seemed like the standard gifts Santa Claus would bring for a puppy that made it home for the holidays: doggy treats and rawhide chew toys. But there was an unusual addition to Stevie's Christmas gifts.
“He loves carrots,” Gutierrez said. “We always say he's trying to get his eyesight to improve.”
Source: http://www.chron.com/news/local_news/article/A-happy-ending-to-the-tale-of-blind-pup-2423074.php
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