Dog missing since last summer found 2,000 miles away

Mehrad Houman is reunited with his dog Mishka after she was given the all-clear by vet Nancy Pillsbury (Picture: Corinne Martin via AP)

Owners of a dog missing since last summer were shocked to learn she’d been found 2,000 miles away alive and well.

Mishka had vanished in San Diego, California in July and discovered in Detroit, Michigan last week.

US police picked her up in the suburb of Harper Woods after receiving a call about a stray dog.

It contacted the Grosse Pointe Animal Adoption Society, who found a micro chip revealing who her owners were, along with their phone number.

The family live in San Diego, but were planning to travel to Minnesota for Easter when the surprising call came in.

They went ahead with the trip, but after landing husband Mehrad Houman jumped into a car and drove 10 hours to the animal welfare group’s centre in Michigan to be reunited with Mishka.

The group posted pictures and video on their Facebook page.

‘This is a tale that Hollywood would love to tell,’ they wrote.

Mishka had wandered away from Mehrad’s workplace, a car garage, last year and never returned.

The collar she was wearing at the time showed the family’s phone number.

‘We think [Mishka] was stolen and then was sold and ended up in Michigan,’ said Corinne Martin, director of Grosse Pointe Animal Adoption Society.

Corinne said Mehrad’s wife Elizabeth had picked up the phone when they called to say Mishka had been found.

She ‘started screaming’ and got ‘all excited and emotional,’ Corinne added.

Elizabeth said it had ‘been an incredible journey’.

‘I never gave up,’ she said.

‘I put up over a thousand flyers. I had a flyer on my back windshield. I wore her leash whenever I would look for her… Now I just want to find out how she got to Michigan.’

Mishka’s happy owners celebrate Easter with their pet, who had been missing for around eight months

Vet Nancy Pillsbury examined three-year-old Mishka, gave her a rabies shot and cleared her to travel home to California.

‘She was clean, well-fed. Whoever had her took good care of her,’ Ms Pillsbury said.

‘How she got here – that’s a story only Mishka knows.’

In December a dog missing for more than six years was found alive and well after living wild in the woods.

Rose, a black Patterdale terrier, survived by eating food left out for badgers just six miles from where she went missing and was known as the local stray.

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