A missing senior Poodle is now back in Milwaukee with his family. The lost dog escaped his home over five years ago.
Senior Poodle goes missing
According to WTMJ-TV, Marley is an 11-year-old Poodle. On Sept. 4, 2018, the senior pup escaped the home where he lived with his pet parents, John and Leola Voegtline. John was doing yardwork at the time.
When Marley’s feeding time rolled around, John called upstairs to Leola, who was in the bedroom. He asked if Marley was with her. She said no.
“We looked around the whole house, we looked outside,” Leola recalled.
The couple launched a major search for their fur baby. Leola called all the local shelters. The couple made and distributed flyers. They went door to door. Also, they contacted Lost Dogs of Wisconsin.
But no one could find Marley.
Lost Poodle found five years later
Over five years passed. Still, Leola thought about her Poodle every day.
“1,872 days without Marley,” she recalled.
Then, an unexpected twist happened in the story. On June 1, 2023, Leola’s daughter went to a school picnic. She noticed a man with a Poodle that looked very much like Marley. So, she approached the dog and called, “Marley! Marley!” The dog turned around, wagged his tail, and started jumping on her and licking her.
Leola’s daughter started asking the man questions, like “How did you find this dog?” The man said someone gave the dog to him. He claimed he took the dog to the vet. There was no microchip detected, so the man kept the dog.
The Voegtlines had to go to small claims court, but eventually, a judge agreed that they should have their dog back. Marley returned home on Friday, Oct. 20.
“Marley is our family, he’s not a dog, he’s our son,” Leola said. She maintains that the whole time their pup was missing, “we knew he was out there, we knew somebody had him.”
After this harrowing ordeal, the couple is planning to microchip Marley.
“If we would have found him, and had the microchip, all that court stuff for all those months would not have had to be,” John said.
