Family Comes Home to Find Scrawny Dog Curled Up on Couch. But He Didn't Belong to Them
We’ve all heard of people breaking and entering homes, usually with malicious intent. They’re there to take valuables, money, or sometimes they just take the family dog for some unknown reason.
But have you ever heard of a dog breaking and entering? It isn’t exactly something you can charge them for, since they’re, you know, dogs.
One pooch, though, did manage to break into a house. The family isn’t quite sure how he did it, but coming home to find a dog curled up on your couch that isn’t yours is quite a story.
Tom Sluit and his family returned home from being out and about to find their side door open and a skinny dog making himself at home on their couch. The first thought the family had was, “Is it a raccoon or a person?”
Clearly, though, it was a dog, and he didn’t belong to them. At least he didn’t seem aggressive, because that would’ve been a much scarier situation.
The Sluits recognized him, though. His name was River, and he was — quite obviously — lost.
They’d seen his “missing” posters and were able to locate one to get the distraught owner’s phone number.
Her name is Jean Strobel, and she’d been looking for River for a week; she’d adopted him just recently and was missing him dearly.
The whole community had been, actually. Strobel had teamed up with an organization called Lost Paws, which helps locate lost pets, and they’d put up the posters and been getting updates via social media about sightings.
River had been on the move constantly! He’d show up in one place and then being miles away the next day in a different sighting.
That made it hard to track him down, since going to the location of one sighting probably wouldn’t yield any results.
But the Sluits’ home was only a mile and a half from River’s own home.
With the low temperatures in Michigan, where all this took place, River probably broke into the Sluit househould to warm up. The poor pup was so skinny that he must’ve been even colder than if he’d been well-fed and not out on his own cantankerous adventure.
So when Strobel got the call, she thought it was a joke. How could he be so close after that wild goose chase?
But Sluit sent her a photo of him snuggled up with a blanket, comfy as can be, and she couldn’t be skeptical. That was River, all right.
After a quick and easy return home, River is now gaining weight back and doing well overall. It’s good to have a happy ending to what was probably a very stressful week for Strobel.
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