A family in Texas was recently reunited with a lost pet three years and one interstate move later.
Rex and Britnee Smith, residents of McKinney, got the surprise of a lifetime when they got word that their beloved pit bull Jill had turned up at the Little Rock Animal Village in late July.
The Smiths had lost Jill and a male pit bull named Jack when both pups presumably hopped the fence of their Little Rock home in the summer of 2020.
The loss hit the youngest member of the Smith household hardest, Rex and Britnee’s then 5-year-old daughter.
Despite Rex and Britnee’s relentless search for Jack and Jill, the hours of knocking on doors, plastering posters, and scouring social media yielded no results.
“I didn’t think our dogs would ever come back because they’re such great dogs and I know no one would ever just turn them in or take them to the vet,” said Britnee, according to USA Today.
Hope waned even further when the Smiths moved approximately 300 miles away to Texas.
The occasional call from shelters or images of look-alike dogs all turned out to be dead ends.
That is until the Little Rock Animal Village reached out to Rex via the phone number used to register Jill’s microchip.
She had been found not far from where the Smiths used to live. Other than some scratches and raw paws from the hot pavement, she was in good health.
Although there was no sign of Jack, the family was elated to have located Jill and arranged a trip to the Arkansas capital to pick her up.
Upon reuniting with Jill, Britnee said she was surprised to find that the pup had hardly changed at all during their three years apart.
“It’s like she never left us,” Britnee recounted. “We picked up right off when she left three years ago. She came right into our arms.”
Back home, it didn’t take long for Jill to settle in. After just a few days, she was content cuddled next to the Smiths’ daughter during nap time.
While Rex is glad to have recovered Jill, he can’t help but be curious about her disappearance, as well as the whereabouts of Jack.
“We wish she could talk,” explained Rex. “We have so many questions and we just want to ask her, ‘Take us from the beginning, what happened?’”
Although microchips aren’t able to provide that kind of data, they can make reunions like this one possible.
“If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it a thousand times… microchips save lives!!!” read a post from Friends of the Animal Village, the nonprofit behind Little Rock Animal Village.
Last November, a similar story surfaced in which a family from Galveston was reunited with their pup named Bolt who was lost in 2017, as previously reported in The Dallas Express.
Fort Worth Animal Care and Control had scanned Bolt’s microchip and contacted the owners, who had since moved to Wyoming. Through the help of the nonprofit group Flying Shepherd Ranch, Bolt was able to join his family in Cheyenne.
