Daisy the dog flies home 6 years later

It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there and it is by some grace or miracle that Daisy, an 8-year-old Jack Russell cross-breed made her way home six years after going missing.

She was flown home after being discovered walking the streets of Beverley Grove, Port Elizabeth by locals and taken to the Kragga Kamma Veterinary Hospital. The Record sat down with the Waspes, who adopted Daisy in August 2010 from the Roodepoort SPCA, to hear the full story. Wife Sharon had lost her previous pet, Jacky, to cancer and felt the best way to deal with the pain was adopting another dog. Browsing around, she found Daisy and completed the forms to adopt her.

“Daisy was surrendered to the SPCA by her previous owners, and so I had reasonable knowledge that this dog might have behavioural problems,” Sharon said.

Once home, Daisy settled in nicely and was loved by everybody around her. She had long, wiry hair and was gaining weight when one day, the Waspes came home from work to find she had completely disappeared, having somehow escaped the yard. At the time, they put up flyers and drove the streets of Roodepoort looking for her and offered a R1 000 reward to anyone who could successfully identify and return her home. Nothing came of their efforts and, heartbroken, they abandoned hope of ever finding her again.

“We wouldn’t believe that she could have been killed or gotten hurt, I always believed her to still be alive,” she said.

The couple and their two sons Brendan, 13, and Darren, 11, adopted Lady the Jack Russell and went about their normal business. Suddenly, on Monday 11 April they received a call out of Port Elizabeth from a Colleen, working for Kragga Kamma Veterinary Hospital.

“She said people had found the dog near a shopping centre in the area and brought her in, where the vets found her microchip,” Sharon explained.

The microchip is implanted as a prerequisite in any dog adopted from the Roodepoort SPCA, a device the organisation has sourced from Identipet in Muldersdrift. The vets could make contact with Identipet and thus successfully identify Daisy and her owners.

“I’m lucky that my contact details have not changed much over the past six years, else I would have never received such shocking news; I couldn’t properly concentrate that Monday. When I discussed it with my husband, his very first words were, ‘We have to get her home’.”

The very next day the family started making arrangements for Daisy’s return. They had to really shop around for solutions as flights from PE do not land at Lanseria International Airport. After much ado they found a pet transit company called Move A Pet in PE who helped them arrange a flight for Daisy to OR Tambo International Airport, including a carrier crate and rabies injections, at a total cost of around R2 500, a very reasonable price to pay to get her back, they feel.

Daisy landed on Wednesday night and the whole family made the trip to Kempton Park as if to fetch a family member.

Sharon said she was disappointed to find someone had shaved her wiry locks, but it’ll grow back. As to why she has travelled so far, the Waspes can only guess that someone had found her locally and moved with her to the area, where she must have escaped once more. She’s again picking up weight and gets along quite well with Lady. The only running concern, the family said, was making sure neither ever travels outside of their home’s fence again. They have new-found respect for microchips and ID collars as it has served to take Daisy off the streets.

How to adopt from the Roodepoort SPCA:

To adopt an SPCA dog, one has to fill in an application form (which costs R50) and present a valid South African ID and proof of residence, after which a home and yard inspection is to be done by one of the inspectors. To adopt a dog costs R600, a cat R550 and a mature cat R400. The fee includes sterilisation, first vaccination, rabies vaccination and deworming of the animal, along with a microchip and ID tag and collar (for dogs). The initial R50 is deducted from the overall price.

Email us at roodepoortrecord@caxton.co.za (remember to include your contact details) or phone us on 011 955 1130.

For free daily local news on the West Rand, also visit our sister newspaper websites Randfontein Herald, Krugersdorp News and Get It Joburg West Magazine

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