German couple Janin Scharrenberg and Steffen Kagerah decided to travel the world one day with their black Labrador mix, Luke, in their red Volkswagen T3 Syncro.
The couple found Luke as a cute little stray puppy in Greece. No one was looking after him, so he wandered the streets while enduring hunger, thirst, and itch from the fleas that infested his fur. Janin and Steffen fed him, then looked for the pup's owner.
Finding neither, they decided to adopt Luke and bring him with them on their epic road trip to Asia—and that's how a Greek puppy came to see several countries in Europe and Asia with two loving fur parents.
However, everything changed when the trio arrived at Chennai, India. They were near Marina Beach, and Janin had tied Luke to the outside of the Syncro as it was too hot to keep him inside the vehicle.
Thirty minutes later, someone knocked on the car to inform Janin and Steffen that an auto rickshaw driver had run off with the black Lab mix for some reason.
Image credit: Syncro Travels on Facebook
The travelers did everything they could to look for their beloved pet. Besides physically looking for him around the area, they sought help from Blue Cross and the Marina Beach police, and they used WhatsApp and Facebook to tell their story.
Three weeks after Luke's disappearance, Chennai-based animal worker Vijaya Narayanan reached out to the couple and offered to assist in the search.
The three of them put out ads in Tamil newspapers. They also printed more than 10,000 flyers and distributed them almost everywhere: car shops, pet shops, veterinary clinics, breeders, and the like.
The animal worker even attended an auto rickshaw meeting and went to fuel stations to put up posters and flyers of Luke.
Meanwhile, Janin and Steffen's visas were expiring, so they had to leave. However, they stayed nearby and looked for work in Sri Lanka and Nepal.
A lot of people contacted Vijaya with alleged sightings of Luke. Because not all of them had phones with which to take pictures, Vijaya had to visit them personally to confirm whether they really saw the black Lab mix.
One day, the animal worker's extraordinary efforts finally paid off. A couple brought who they thought to be Luke to Vijaya, saying that they spotted him with a teenager on Marina Beach. Thankfully, they were able to convince the boy to hand the dog over to them.
They scanned the mutt's microchip and discovered that it was indeed Luke. And thus, 106 days after someone stole the canine, he was finally with his fur parents again.
Vijaya, who has worked on similar cases, tells pet owners to explore every possible course of action when looking for their pet and never “leave anything to chance.”
Watch Luke's touching reunion with Janin and Steffan here:
Source: The Dodo on YouTube