Viral beer cans help pup lost for three years find her home more than 1,000 miles away
"This is my dog."
A smiling mutt has a four-pack of beer and a Facebook post to thank for finding her long lost family more than 1,000 miles away after going missing three years ago.
One day in May 2017, the golden terrier mix had been on a leash in the yard of her home in Iowa. When Monica Mathis went outside to bring Hazel in, she was gone.
“She was an escape artist,” Monica Mathis told WWSB. “She was very good at getting loose. Bolting right through the door. Knocking me over just to get out the door.”
Mathis and her children drove around searching for their dog, who had been with them since she was a puppy, shouting Hazel’s name for hours.
The family moved to Minnesota a month later, and gave up hope of finding their dog.
“To be honest, I did not ever think I was going to find her again,” Mathis told the Tampa Bay Times.
Meanwhile, Hazel headed south. No one knows how the dog traveled more than 1,000 miles to Manatee County, Florida, about 45 miles south of Tampa. She eventually arrived at the shelter run by Manatee County Animal Services last March.
“We would have never thought to go as far as Minnesota as a possible match,” said Hans Wohlgefahrt, the outreach and event specialist at Manatee County Animal Services. “We were sort of at a dead end.”
Hazel, who the shelter called Day Day, had waited 10 months to be adopted from the animal shelter in Manatee County. When she arrived last March, shelter employees tried to call the number stored in the golden terrier mix’s microchip. But Mathis had changed her name after a divorce, the Times reported, and she never updated the microchip with a new phone number after she moved to Minnesota.
The shelter gave up and started looking to find the dog a new home.
To help her chances, the shelter partnered with Motorworks Brewing, a local brewery, to advertise dogs available for adoption. Day Day and three other smiling rescue pups graced the cans in a special four-pack promotional brew crafted by Motorworks.
The beer cans were to earn publicity for the brewery and the local animal services division, which is raising money to build a new shelter. The ad campaign went viral, landing features on CNN, HuffPost, the New York Post and even a segment on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.”
When one of those stories popped up in Mathis’ Facebook news feed on Jan. 24, she stopped scrolling.
“This is my dog,” she wrote in a comment on Motorworks Brewing’s Facebook page.
https://www.facebook.com/MotorworksBrewing/photos/a.257358367732131/1813170745484211/?type=3&__xts__%5B0%5D=68.ARCFMVa7MYQsYjYD26QesSXdvb_VrkiIDGD1-UQhpOZjwgxz2E1Wu-X4O-9hilZ2uqONjx2-5fH0wD16aa4pBN_Zn_m7gOYq4pZRdPIRPCrK33G_NrORPC9pQmHudrk3gUOE-e21vc1_TKZyoLpDtu29KsTlOuBEdZztolMMqdFBVlMS-tUorWceUggC2keM8jjakz1gmEtJR82X8PnxK_Esld_GL32W4s4YsysMFn_CHudEDLmR0d_-aXNWvQczDd8GigOiCd-alDzGpBQpIahHcU-nIEw4f0v-IqyFl3LnqbxZ3HC7Zlt0JtRo21IeyVqK1o-6-3LJkzM9_sJJjEELSw&__tn__=-R
To prove it, she shared photos of the pup, which she called Hazel, from years ago that she saved in her Facebook albums. The shelter asked her to send veterinary records and photos to prove she had seen the correct dog.
“I was a little hysterical because I was scared someone was going to adopt her at that point or something,” Mathis told WWSB. “I was scared I was gonna lose her again. I was really nervous. I was like shaking. I was crying.”
Wohlgefahrt said she provided everything the shelter needed to prove the dog belonged to Mathis.
“Hazel found her pawrents!” the shelter posted Thursday on Facebook.
Instead of finding a new forever family, Hazel will be headed back to her old one, now in Minnesota, later this week. Her owners can’t wait to pet her again.
“She’s gonna be getting so much attention,” Mathis told WWSB.
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