Dog stolen in Kerry turns up in Dublin

A Yorkshire terrier stolen from his owner’s van outside a Kerry church five months ago has turned up safe and sound, nearly 400km away, on a Dublin street.

Sadly, terrier Keanu’s sister, Indiana, who was also taken in the robbery, is still missing. However the dogs’ owner Gerard O’Donoghue, from Valentia, is optimistic that the ‘tail’ will have a happy ending.

“I’d be fairly hopeful that we’ll get the other one. My guess is whoever stole them kept them together as a pair and Keanu managed to escape,” he said.

“I bought the dogs on September 29 and the next day I had them in the van when I went to Mass in Waterville. I left the window a little bit open so they’d have some air and when I came back out, they were gone. I didn’t even do the full Mass as I was concerned about the dogs. I’d say I was 15 minutes in there at the most before I went back out to check on them.”

He said he suspected he was targeted as the dogs could fetch up to €500 each.

“I got on to the gardaí straight away. Myself and my wife Geraldine were very upset, and I was kind of annoyed with myself over how it happened.

After such a long time we had given up any hope of seeing either of them again but on Tuesday last week we got a call from a vets in Tallaght to say that someone walking along the street had spotted Keanu and brought him into them.

“Lucky enough, the first thing we had done after buying them was to microchip them, so the vets were able to check that. The vets told me he was in the best of form. All the poor thing needed was a wash and that, other than that, he was in great order.”

There was even a family reunion of sorts as, after the dogs went missing, the couple had bought the dogs’ brother and sister to “fill in the gap in our lives”.