Puppy, 10 Months Old, Missing From Hamptons, Found Safe: 'So Grateful'

NORTH SEA, NY — A heartbroken family in North Sea whose 10-month-old puppy vanished without a trace last week — they'd thought he was possibly stolen — is back home safe.

Oscar, a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, was last seen on Tuesday, June 25 at his home, his frantic owner Sharon Lynch told Patch.

Sooner after Patch ran the story about Oscar on Tuesday, July 2, Lynch said she got a call from a Hampton Bays woman, who told her she'd seen a Facebook post from a young man saying that Oscar was fine, but he didn't know how to find his owner. The man, a ride share driver from Mastic, then found her number and called.

"He said he'd found the dog around Southampton, had bathed him, and hadn't been able to bring him to a shelter, but that his niece had Oscar," she said. The man told her he hadn't had time yet to get him to a vet or to a shelter to have his chip scanned, she said.

By the next day, the man and his niece arranged to meet Lynch outside the Panera in Hampton Bays.

"Oscar was wagging his tail as I drove up," she said.

Lynch said, from her experience, she has some hard-earned advice to other pet owners: She said Oscar, who had been in her fully fenced yard, had only been outside about 20 minutes when she noticed he had disappeared.

"We are fully fenced, but he found one small chink," she said. "If he was running after a squirrel, nothing will stop him."

She told Patch: "I am at fault for taking off his collar because walks were over for the day, and not staking the perimeter of the yard. One small chink did it."

Lynch also said that she hadn't realized that even if a dog is microchipped, the chip does not GPS the dog; it has to be scanned by a professional and most important, registered with a security company who will send a tag for the collar by any phone and also include the name of the dog and identity of the dog's owners.

Describing her ordeal, Lynch said the day Oscar went missing, she and her husband and daughter drove around until 2 a.m., calling for him. Thankfully, Lynch said, he wasn't found injured or worse. "We thought then that maybe someone had picked him up, and we started calling vets, shelters — notifying everyone we possibly could."

Teddy Henn of Long Island Lost Dog Search and Rescue, a tracker who has worked tirelessly to bring scores of dogs home safely, headed right to the area with his dog Winston.

"We established that Oscar went up Old Trail Road, off Roses Grove Road, and then, his scent disappeared," Lynch said at the time. "It's likely he was picked up and taken away. He could be anywhere — Riverhead, Deer Park, Setauket."

Lynch, her husband, and her daughter were devastated.

"Oh, my God. It feels like we've lost a family member," she said at the time. "It's incredible. It's like when you lose a human, your brain cells are fuzzy, you can't think straight. That's how this feels."

Sadly, she said, her family had been scammed twice by people saying they had Oscar, but despite the fact that she turned up at the spot mentioned — "I sat there for two hours, my heart soaring," she said — both were false leads. Scammers who capitalize on a person's grief, she said, "are disgusting."

Oscar, she said, had just recovering from a broken leg, too, another cause for worry.

Describing her beloved pup, Lynch said: "He has never met a person he doesn’t love. He is the friendliest animal we've ever come across, and we’ve had plenty of dogs. He's super, super friendly, playful, and loving. All you have to do is sit down, and he will leap into your lap."

Oscar's disappearance was gutting, Lynch said. "It was complete loss and grief," she said. "Last night I sat down to watch TV for the first time since his happened and the fact that he wasn't there, to leap into my lap — it's a hole in my soul. It's awful. I knew I loved him, but I wasn't aware of how much, the depth of it, until he wasn't there."

After he was back home, Lynch said Oscar "spent an hour running through the house at top speed. His tail only stopped wagging when he finally went to sleep and started wagging the next morning the second he woke up. His tail wagging in the crate woke me up!"

Lynch said although the man who'd found her dog made sure he found his way home, there are others who are nefarious — and to those, she said: "Thieves need to know that many thousands of people are at the ready to help find a lost dog. The sheer volume of good Samaritans are endless and have this week restored my faith in humanity. They need to know that even if they threw away the collar and tag, the chip exists, that posters and signs may help them be discovered, even by neighbors."

And, too, she said, there are dog trackers who will help. "These dogs and cats and hamsters are family members, not just animals," she said.

For someone who finds a lost dog, Lynch urged that they bring the animals to the police, local veterinary office, or to a shelter.

Lynch said she's grateful for the outpouring of love from the community who stepped forward in a sea of caring to help. "We are so grateful. I had two scammers, but 573 shares on Facebook. All those wonderful people far, far outweigh the bad ones," she said.