Florida: Man believes woman involved in rescue had his lost dog's microchip surgically removed and then dumped the dog in the parking lot of a PetSmart

Florida: Missing dog's microchip surgically removed while lost. Owner says someone was trying to keep his collie

FLORIDA -- Prince the collie was missing for five days last week after escaping from his home’s screened porch during a thunderstorm.

When his owner, Dr. Bob Fier finally got Prince back, he found the dog woozy from anesthesia with two stapled incisions on his upper back. Someone had surgically removed Prince’s microchip.

 

“They certainly [did not plan to give my] dog back to me,” Fier said.

Fier said a neighbor found Prince a few hours after he escaped Monday, and took him to a nearby veterinarian’s office. The vet scanned Prince’s chip, but Fier had neglected to register himself as the new owner.

Instead, Fier said the chip was mysteriously registered to a former volunteer at the rescue agency where he adopted Prince over a year ago.

That former volunteer admitted to WPBF 25 News that she got a call about Prince, and sent someone to pick him up from the vet’s.

And that’s where the story gets murky.

“She called me Monday night and left a message. When I called back Tuesday morning, she said she had good news and bad news. The good news was she picked up Prince. The bad news was he was lost again,” said Fier.

Fier said the former volunteer told him his dog escaped from her boyfriend’s yard in West Palm Beach, but Fier said she refused to say where that was, so he had no idea where to look. Fier said he was anxious and angry.

 

“Not knowing what will happen, will I find a dead dog? Will I find him at all?” Fier said.

Fier posted flyers and searched all week, and meantime his plight was posted on a Facebook Page called Pet Haven’s Critters at Crossroads, where angry and concerned pet lovers were weighing in.

On Friday, Fier got a call from a local PetSmart. An employee who’d seen his flyer said a woman had just shoved a Collie that looked like Prince inside the store, claimed she’d found him in traffic, and took off running.

In the video clip, the reporter is at PetSmart and calls this woman who denied having anything to do with it.

Fier raced to the store and said he found Prince woozy from anesthesia, with surgical ointment in his eyes, and two different incisions on his back.

“I think they didn’t have a chip scanner and were just doing exploratory surgery in the sites where the chips usually are,” said Fier.

Fier had filed a theft report with the Martin County Sheriff’s Office when he couldn’t get information on where Prince was.

He said he is still going to follow up because someone performed surgery on his dog without permission, and he believes they were going to sell his dog once the identifying chip was removed.

(WPBF - Sept 29, 2016)