Dog Missing For 7 Years Reunited With Owner In Florida

ORLANDO, FL — After disappearing from her Texas home seven years ago, a dog and her family were recently reunited with a little help from Orange County Animal Services.

Jazzy's happy ending began earlier this month when county animal services officers responded to an abandoned dog call, the agency said in a Facebook post. When officers arrived, they discovered someone had left 12-year-old Jazzy in a hotel room. She could barely walk, and she had no food or water.

"She had a bad case of arthritis, but was extremely sweet and gentle and allowed us to care for her as best we could," Bryant Almeida, public information officer for Orange County Animal Services, wrote on Facebook.

After taking Jazzy to the shelter, staff scanned her for a microchip. Incredibly, they found one. According to the information associated with the chip, she belonged to a family in Fort Worth.

Staff made a phone call and Jazzy's owner, Kerry Smith, jumped on a plane from Texas to Florida a few days later.

Smith told Orange County Animal Services that Jazzy was 5 years old when she was spooked by fireworks and ran away from home. No one knows how she made it to Florida.

"I always wondered if she was alive, I always wondered if she was happy, if she was feeling well, and she's not now, but we will get her better," Smith told WESH.

Almeida called it "a tearful reunion."

"It was incredible to watch Jazzy come to life at her owner's voice," Almeida wrote. "Kerry was overjoyed and regaled us with stories about her. And Jazzy couldn't take her eyes off him. She licked his hand again and again and inched her body as close as she could to him. After all those years, her heart still remembered and was finally whole."

Smith told WESH he plans to "shower (Jazzy) with love and help her get better."

Almeida wrote on Facebook that moments like Jazzy and Smith's reunion make "every minute worth it."

"If we could bottle this type of love and give it to every adopter, we would," he wrote. "If we could write a happy ending like this for every one of our animals, we would."