Stolen dog reunited with Nova Scotia family after being found in Alberta

When a Windsor, N.S., family reunited with the dog that had been stolen from their previous home in B.C. almost two years ago, they were unsure whether he would remember them.

Thor, a Bernese mountain and Australian shepherd mix, had been sitting quietly in his kennel at the Halifax airport after a flight from Calgary on Aug. 10.

"As soon as my daughter [Bronwyn] walked over, she said, 'Hey Thor!' He instantly knew who she was. He jumped up and you could hear his tail banging on the kennel cage," said Dawn Mengering.

Thor even licked Bronwyn's face.

"He was super excited. He was just running back and forth from me and my mom," Bronwyn said.

Family's first dog

Thor was taken from the family's Fort St. John, B.C., property in October 2014. They had just got him the Christmas before and it was their first dog.

A neighbour told the family they saw two men call out to Thor and he went missing soon after.

Despite the family's best efforts to find the dog, they gave up hope of finding him and feared he may have been taken for a dogfighting ring.

"We were never getting another dog. It was too heart-wrenching when he left. It was too much," said Dawn.

Last summer, the Mengerings moved to Nova Scotia.

Stolen in B.C., found in Alberta

Imagine the family's surprise when, one month ago, a person from a vet's office in Fort St. John contacted them and said Thor had been found — in Alberta.

"It's kind of a weird story," said Kim Hessel, the founder and president of Heaven Can Wait Animal Rescue Foundation in High River, Alta., about 45 minutes south of Calgary.

She says someone working on a job site in northern Alberta came across two dogs, one of which was Thor, and thinking they were strays, decided to adopt them. The dogs lived with the man at a place he was renting near High River, but after a month or so the property owner said they couldn't live there.

The man then turned to Hessel's animal rescue group about six weeks ago to take them in.

ID tattoo on ear

Hessel says the dog had an ID tattoo on its ear but, when they tried to trace it, it didn't yield any clues "mainly because I was looking in the wrong province."

Once they figured out the dog was from B.C., it wasn't hard to find the clinic where the tattoo had originally been applied. However, confidentiality laws meant the clinic wasn't able to give Hessel the name or contact info of the dog's owner.

A persistent receptionist at the clinic saved the day. While Dawn's phone number had changed because they had moved out of the province, she reached out to people in the community to see if they knew where the Mengerings were and tracked down Bronwyn on Facebook.

An improbable reunion

Dawn was cautious about believing the news.

"I couldn't believe it. I was blown away. I'm like, 'I don't know, we better see, just wait,'" she said.

From there, a person with another animal rescue organization used her contacts with WestJet to get Thor on a flight to Nova Scotia from Calgary, all at a charge of $52, says Hessel.

For now, Thor is living with another family member in Dartmouth because Dawn's rental doesn't allow dogs, but the Mengerings have seen him a few times.

The family says Thor is doing great and seemed to have been well looked after by his interim owners.

"He's the same old puppy he was," said Dawn.