Adventurous Aussie dog reunited with owner after epic 500km trip
86-year-old owner Kevin still doesn't know how his Jack Russell made it all the way to the NSW capital.
One lucky dog went on the solo trip of a lifetime, travelling from his country town home and winding up in the arms of café workers in an Australian city over 500 kilometres away.
When Duke, a five-year-old Jack Russell, gets out of the house he spends his days visiting his "usual" local spots around Narrabri, a town in the NSW North West Slopes, before coming home to his owner, 86-year-old Kevin.
But around November 10, Duke didn't come home. "I checked the caravan park which is a usual hot spot of his but he wasn’t there so I walked around the streets close to home — but I couldn’t find him," Kevin recalled to Yahoo News Australia.
He called his granddaughter Molly who came to help him search for Duke, but even after checking with the pound in the area, they couldn't find their small dog. That is, until about eight days later when Kevin got a call all the way from the Northern Beaches in Sydney – a 517 kilometre drive away.
Taylor and her partner Ricky were working at The Palms restaurant in Terrey Hills on Saturday, November 18 when Duke walked into their venue. They asked their customers if the small dog belonged to anyone but no one came forward so they took him home and started posting on local Facebook pages in search of his owner.
They then took Duke to a vet to get his microchip scanned but originally, nothing but an old landline came back. Ricky told Yahoo the vet wanted to keep Duke with them for two days before sending him to a pound where he'd only be kept for two weeks before being euthanised, but Ricky and Taylor knew they couldn’t let that happen. "We told the vet we would be keeping him with us," he said.
For three days, Duke became "part of the family" while they continued their search for his owner, cuddling with Taylor and Ricky's other dog, sleeping in their bed. "It got to the point where we thought we now had a second dog," Ricky said.
Do you have a story about your pet? Contact reporter Laura Koefoed at laura.koefoed@yahooinc.com
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Eventually, after continuing to call the landline, a council ranger got through to Kevin and found out Duke was from a country town hundreds of kilometres away. "Yesterday on the repeated calling of [a] landline linked to his microchip, the Northern Beaches council's call was picked up," they shared as an update online after finding Kevin.
"Duke spent roughly five days commuting, then wandered into our family for three days. How he's covered the distance [is] very unknown."
To this day, no one knows how Duke managed to get so far away from home, though Keven believes he hitched a ride with someone. "All I know is someone picked him up because he wouldn’t have gone [so far] on his own," Kevin said.
Getting Duke home
After his holiday in the Big Smoke, Duke is now back in Narrabri. He rode in a pet Uber from Sydney to Newcastle, where he stayed with Kevin's daughter before he was driven by her husband back home to be reunited with Kevin.
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