Microchipped Dog Found in Brandon Set To Fly Home to California Owners

Two years and several thousand miles later, a 17-pound Chihuahua-whippet is heading for home.

How Cooper made his way to Brandon, Fla., is a mystery not yet solved.

Nor might it ever be.

But it matters little to a family in Sacramento, Calif., and to the workers at the Care Animal Hospital in Brandon, where Cooper was taken after two girls spotted him walking down Bryan Road in a downpour.

“The girls found him a week ago Thursday,” said Kendra Waters, in an interview from the animal hospital, at 511 E. Bloomingdale Ave., on Oct. 1. “They picked him up and brought him to us and we scanned him for a microchip.”

Inserted under the skin of the 4-year-old dog was a HomeAgain microchip, which led to the dog’s prior owners, the Baetge family of West Sacramento.

In an ABC Action News report, Michelle Baetge said the dog was a gift to her son, Cody, from his dad, who “told Cody he would buy him anything he wanted, something that would be special that he would give to him to have with him when he was gone.”

Cooper reportedly left the Baetge’s yard one day and hadn’t been seen since.

“They said he was a bit of an escape artist,” Waters said, in recounting what the animal hospital employees were told by the Baetge family.

As days turned into years of separation, one thing is certain, Waters said: Cooper was “very well taken care of.”

“He definitely didn’t miss a meal,” Waters said, of Cooper's condition after he was found in Brandon.

It's assumed, she added, that whomever Cooper hooked up with in California moved with him here to Florida, "and he escaped from them as well.”

Despite the media play, Waters said no one has stepped forward in Brandon to claim Cooper, who will be heading back to Sacramento on a plane scheduled to depart from Sarasota on Oct. 3.

As cargo Cooper will fly home to his former Cody, 16, and his family in California, to whom Waters gives great credit for sound identification of their pet.

That a dog is reunited with his owners after two years and some 3,000 miles leaves Waters, as she put it, “shocked.”

“It’s definitely amazing,” she said. “Just the fact that he’s been gone for two years, that’s a huge deal. The fact that he was micro-chipped and his family kept their identification information up to date is a big deal, too.”

Waters said it costs around $16 a year to register a pet with a pet recovery service, such as Home Again, which bills itself as “a lost pet’s best chance.”

The process involves a “little, teeny, tiny microchip injected with a needle underneath the skin between the shoulder blades,” Waters said. “It will be there forever, for the life of the dog. Sometimes it will move a little, down a dog’s leg, but it’s still there. That’s why we scan the entire body, down to the legs and the base of the tail.”

But it doesn’t stop there. As HomeAgain notes on its website: “If your pet is micro-chipped but you have not enrolled, you pet is not fully protected.”

As Waters put it: “It’s only as good as the information you provide.”

In this case, Cooper is going home because the Baetges were found after Cooper was scanned at an animal hospital in Brandon.

“He’s very friendly; he’s my little buddy,” Waters said.