Animals have an uncanny knack for communication, even if we humans can’t always understand their language.
This story is about a five-month-old Australian shepherd named Vango, who used his canine instincts to save himself from dognappers.
The clever pup found himself in a store with his captors and managed to alert the store owners that something was amiss.
The incident took place at an animal store in Gatineau, Quebec, Canada.
Vango wouldn’t stop barking and was constantly trying to get the store owner’s attention.
Yves Jodoin, a staff member at the store and a dog trainer at Au Royaume des Animaux, was quick to sense that something was off.
He knew dogs and their behaviors well, and Vango’s incessant barking was a clear sign of distress.
Initially, Yves thought that Vango was just hungry and was barking for a treat.
But when the barking continued even after Vango was given a cookie, Yves grew suspicious.
As he told CBC Canada, “The dog was barking, the dog was poking and he really wanted my attention. I was giving the dog cookies, but the dog was still barking.”
Yves’ suspicions were further aroused when the couple who had brought Vango into the store couldn’t answer basic questions about the dog.
They didn’t know his age, whether he was sterilized, his favorite food, or where he came from.
“They were evading the questions,” Yves recalled.
Another staff member, Lydia Blouin, also sensed that something was off.
She decided to check local social media pages for posts about missing pets.
It didn’t take long for them to find a picture of Vango, who had been reported missing.
The dog had last been seen at his home in Buckingham, just a few hours before he showed up at the store.
Suddenly, Yves realized that he knew Vango from before—he had trained him as a puppy!
“At that point I said, ‘Vango, come!’ And the dog was reacting, he was jumping,” Yves said. “All along he was barking and poking, trying to say, ‘Hello, I’m not the dog they say I am.'”
Faced with this evidence, the couple confessed that Vango wasn’t their dog.
They claimed to have found him in the woods and wanted to keep him as a support animal because the woman couldn’t afford a dog and was in poor health.
Yves convinced them to leave Vango at the store with her and another employee then contacted the dog’s real owner, Josée Francoeur.
They are the ones who contacted the dog’s owner.
Josée was shocked by the news.
She knew that Vango wouldn’t just run away.
“Is it possible that someone took him? And I was thinking, ‘Who could do that? It’s impossible!” she said.
The call from Yves was a huge relief. “I can’t talk about it without crying,” she admitted.
“Imagine, If those people didn’t go to that pet store, I would have lost my dog forever.”
She immediately made an appointment to get Vango microchipped to prevent such incidents in the future.
As for the dognappers, Josée filed an official complaint with the local police department.
“I don’t want to cause them problems. We don’t know why they did it. But at the same time, they took my baby,” she said.
“I want to discourage others from doing this.”
Thanks to Vango’s clever behavior, he is now back in the loving arms of his rightful owner.
What a smart pooch indeed!
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