CHENNAI: The five-year-old Golden Retriever which was stolen from a house in T Nagar on July 26 by a two-member gang returned home in the wee hours of Tuesday at 1:15 am.
''Jackie (the retriever) walked back home at 1:15 and slept on the entrance till 3 am. The owners found the dog and took him home,'' said Rahim, the neighbour of the owner Sharath Ravi.
''CCTV footage shows the dog walking back alone. People who stole him must have left the dog on the road end,'' said Rahim.
According to CCTV recordings accessed from a neighbouring shop, Jackie was stolen on by a two-member gang including a woman. The couple lured him with biscuits at around 11:30 pm in the night and pushed them into their car, which had an Uber sticker on it.
When Sharath found the dog to be missing when he returned from work in the night, his father P Ravi lodged a complaint immediately.
However, the police dismissed the case calling it ‘only a dog’. Later, the video of dog getting stolen went viral on social media and Sharath sought the help of social media to find the dog.
Not the first time
This is not the first time a home-bred pet was stolen in the city. In 2017, a German couple lost their two-year-old Black Labrador named Luke in Chennai’s Marina Beach.
Numerous advertisements in news papers and more than 10,000 ‘Dog Missing’ posters were carried in the city. After 105 days, the dog was rescued by Vijaya Narayanan, an animal lover, who had helped the couple search for the dog throughout.