Kenosha family, dog reunited after 3 months
Published: March 30, 2006
It was a sad Christmas for Sandra Ramirez of Kenosha and her family without their dog, Cooper.
On Nov. 11 Cooper - who had already been a refugee once, before he joined the Ramirezes - wandered through a hole in their fence. He’d done that before to visit neighbors.
But this time the Bichon Frise did not return.
“It was a good dog,” said Sandra Ramirez. “We all got really attached to him, and he attached to us too, so it was so sad when we lost him.” At Christmas “the kids were crying,” Ramirez said.
The family had gotten Cooper only about a year earlier, when his previous owner left him tied to a fence at the Kenosha animal shelter.
Cooper’s absence grew longer, but Ramirez said “we always talked about him. I never gave up.”
They had registered their lost dog with both Countryside Humane Society and the Bristol humane shelter. It’s a good thing they did. Countryside maintains a log of lost and found pets which they check against the pets they take in.
About two months after Cooper vanished, a friend told Ramirez that a dog at Countryside looked like him. The family went to look, but their hopes were dashed when it was not him. But on Feb. 22, a woman driving along Racine Street in Racine saw a small stray dog in the street, picked it up and took it to Countryside.
“It was a really matted, messed-up, dirty dog,” recalled Maggie Skovera, animal health care attendant at the shelter. Rather than try to bathe him, they just shaved off his fur.
They called the Ramirez family, who again came to look. They weren’t even sure they recognized the naked little dog as Cooper. But they eventually took him home and resumed their relationship.
No one knows how he survived more than three winter months away from home.
Skovera said the moral of the story is that people can and do get reconnected with their pets if they contact their humane society. Since winter, they have reunited two long-lost dogs with their owners.
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