When Buster disappeared from his home in Colorado, his owner spent hours agonizing over his fate.
But despite thinking about all the different possibilities, including that her beloved Labrador Retriever had been stolen or eaten by a lion, Samantha Squires could never have imagined what really happened to him.
Yet miraculously, six months after Buster Brown vanished from his home in Boulder, Colorado he was found – an astonishing 1,200 miles away in Salinas, California.
“I have no idea how he would have made it to Salinas,’ Squires said. ‘I’ve never even heard of it before.’
Squires had given up hope of ever seeing her best friend again, when she received a letter from an animal shelter.
Someone found the intrepid pooch wondering the streets of Salinas and took him to the shelter where the staff scanned him for a microchip.
The shelter called all the phone numbers listed for the dog, but unfortunately, they were all disconnected.
In a final bid to find his owner, the shelter wrote a letter to his last known address saying that they had until May 31 to contact the shelter or the dog would be placed up for adoption.
Late in the afternoon on May 31, a tearful Squires rang the shelter saying she was his owner.
Buster and Squires were reunited after he was flown back from San Francisco, California to Denver, Colorado.
No one knows how the adventurous dog made his way 1,200 miles across country.
Cindy Burnham, a representative of the animal shelter said they had, ‘no idea how he got here’. ‘He’s the only one who knows. We’re asking him but he’s not telling us.’
A delighted Squires said that Buster ‘looks quite a lot older and quite a lot fatter’.
But she is overjoyed to be reunited with her canine companion.
‘He was with me 24/7,’ she said. ‘He slept with me, ate with me, we ran together, everything.’
