Hank

After their two Labrador/Newfoundland mix puppies, Hank and Delmar, went missing last week, a Scottsville family got their happy ending Tuesday when the dogs were turned over to the Allen County-Scottsville Animal Shelter unharmed.

Carol and Kevin Crowe and the couple’s two daughters, Laila and Kenzie, noticed the 3-month-old puppies missing from their rural Halfway-Halifax Road home Friday night.

“We live on 37 acres,” Carol Crowe said. “Our driveway is 700 feet long. It’s quite a distance from the road. It’s secluded by a thicket of cedar trees. You can’t even see our house from the road.”

The puppies don’t generally wander close to the road, but Crowe thought they may have followed her down the driveway Friday evening when she left for about 30 minutes. 

On Saturday morning, the family searched the entire property, including a pond and the perimeter.

“Two weeks ago, I was diagnosed with breast cancer,” Crowe said. “We didn’t need this. We needed our little dogs back right now. They make us happy and keep our minds off of the sad stuff.”

Crowe took to social media, posting pictures and descriptions on Twitter, Facebook and Topix. She also contacted veterinarians and animal shelters in Scottsville and Warren County.

Crowe’s husband talked to neighbors and found a neighbor who took down a description of a car, a partial license plate number and the descriptions of two women inside the car after seeing the women take a yellow puppy. 

“He saw a car stop and saw a woman pick up the yellow lab,” Crowe said. “He saw that, and he has a yellow lab as well so he thought they were taking his. As they were driving up the road, he put his hand out in the middle of the road to stop them. They drove around him. He got the license plate, the make and model of the car and (a description of) the women.”

The neighbor only saw the woman take the yellow puppy, but the Crowes suspected she had taken both since both dogs were missing. The puppies came from the same litter and always stayed together.

After Crowe posted information on every animal-related social media site she could think of, an anonymous woman dropped off both puppies at the Allen County animal shelter Tuesday and the family was reunited with the dogs.

She thinks having the detailed description put out on social media helped her get her dogs back.

“There were a lot of good things that came out of this,” Crowe said. “When we were searching our property we found a stray black cat in the barn that somebody had dumped. Our girls named him Edgar Allen Crowe.”

Animal control officers from Bowling Green called Crowe on Tuesday to tell her that the animals had been dropped off in Scottsville.

“When I got the call, the girls were just sobbing,” she said about her daughters, who are 10 and 15. “A woman said she found them as strays and dropped them off. They don’t have any record of who brought them in. We have no idea who dropped them off.” 

They live about 15 minutes from the shelter, and at five minutes before 4 p.m. Tuesday, Crowe called and asked the shelter to stay open a few extra minutes past their regular closing time of 4 p.m. so that she and her family could be reunited with their dogs.

“They went above and beyond,” Crowe said. “It was so kind of them to wait beyond their normal hours.”

On Wednesday, Crowe took the dogs to their veterinarian for their regularly scheduled checkups and had the vet insert microchips into both animals. Both dogs checked out healthy and went for a swim in a nearby creek with Crowe’s daughters Wednesday afternoon to celebrate their return home.

“We are thrilled to death,” she said. 

Hank and Delmar, who will grow to be about 100 pounds and about 80, respectively, join the family’s other pets, Edgar, an indoor cat named Charlene and a tank of fish. 

— Follow news editor Deborah Highland on Twitter at twitter.com/bgdnnewseditor or visit bgdailynews.com.