Microchip helps officers, HSSM return Peanut
By Tammy Smith, Sun Herald
Friday, Mar. 23, 2012
GULFPORT -- Laughter and tears of joy -- sprinkled with a lot of cries of “aw!” -- were in abundance at the Humane Society of South Mississippi on Friday afternoon, thanks to a scrappy little Peanut.
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| Peanut, a rat terrier/poodle mix, gets reacquainted with his owner, Danielle Weatherford, after being missing for four years. |
That would be Peanut the 6-year-old rat terrier/poodle mix, a black-and-tan bundle of wire-haired joy who went through a four-year odyssey from Ocean Springs to Gulfport before he was reunited with his owner.
Danielle Weatherford of Ocean Springs got Peanut as a Christmas present in 2006.
“I picked her out, and my mom adopted her as a gift for me. His little face -- he just stole my heart,” she said Friday afternoon as she waited for her first glimpse of Peanut in four years.
“I was living with my parents, and then I moved, but where I was living, you couldn’t have pets,” Weatherford said. Her aunt took Peanut in.
“She went to work one day, then when she got home, she couldn’t find him,” Weatherford said. “We looked and looked, but we never could find him.”
Then, Thursday night, Weatherford got a call from her mother.
“She said, ‘You remember Peanut? They found him.’ I just couldn’t believe it,” she said.
Nobody knows how Peanut survived for the past four years or how he got from Ocean Springs to Gulfport or why he made the journey. One thing is sure: He and Weatherford wouldn’t have been reunited had it not been for his microchip.
On Monday, Gulfport animal control officer Dorothy Payne saw the little dog at a residence on O’Neal Road. She scanned him for a microchip, a routine procedure for the animal control officers, and was surprised to find he did have one. Her surprise grew when she learned the owner was listed as an Ocean Springs resident.
At first, Payne feared the contact information was no longer accurate -- after all, the dog was about 30 miles away from his home.
“I thought for sure that the microchip information was just out of date,” she told HSSM.
Payne called the associated phone number and left a message and, to her surprise, got a call back a few days later from Donna Nelson, Weatherford’s mother.
On Friday, Peanut was wiggly and sweet, and Weatherford was ecstatic and teary-eyed as her dog alternately gave her kisses and squirmed down to visit with a couple of Pomeranians in the animal shelter’s gift shop.
“Can we go home now?” she quietly asked as she brushed away tears and smiled.
Source: http://www.sunherald.com/2012/03/23/3839009/lost-dog-gets-back-home-after.html?storylink=addthis#.T29-j48I-v8.facebook#storylink=cpy
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