Luke the pooch found, to reunite with German couple

Chennai: Three months after a globetrotting German couple reported him stolen in the city, launched a desperate search for him and circulated hundreds of ‘missing’ fliers in what appeared to be despairing hope of somehow tracking him down,

Luke

has returned, ready for a reunion with his long-lost, two-footed buddies.

Luke, a 20-month-oldLabrador-mix that Janin Scharrenberg and her partner Steffen Kagerah found in Greece, went missing in July. The couple lodged a complaint after a witness at Marina Beach said he saw an autorickshaw driver take the dog away in his vehicle.

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Vijaya Narayanan, a self-described dog-lover, took it upon herself to find Luke — and received no little help fromlikeminded friends.

“We stuck fliers all around town, on every wall we could,” Vijaya says. “I visited and revisited various localities to follow up on leads we received over the past three months.”

Vijaya trailed multiple leads from posts on social media and made numerous enquiries, to little avail. Then, on Saturday, she received an alert. A stranger made a call to tell her that he had seen a dog that matched Luke’s description that he remembered from a flier at a petrol bunk. The man said he subsequently spotted the dog at the beach and volunteered to bring it to Vijaya.

“When we finally came upon Luke, we immediately checked the microchip that was embedded in his neck,” Vijaya says, adding that the chip’s radio-frequency identification transponder number matched one that Janin had given her.

Vijaya was on Sunday playing foster parent to Luke. Janin and Steffen, she says, will return to the city and take custody of the pooch on Monday.