A lost dog travelled 100 miles before ending up at Manchester airport.
Three-year-old Cavapoo Ralph vanished while with his owner Georgia Crewe, 28, at a beauty spot on Monday morning. But while she carried out a frantic search for her beloved dog, Ralph took himself off to Manchester Airport after hopping through the open door of a cab.
Georgia said the driver had pulled over to pick up a family near Wrexham, North Wales, when the mischievous mutt got in. Ralph didn't have any identification markings so the taxi driver could not contact anyone and decided that he had no choice but to take him along for the ride.
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After the airport drop, the driver took Ralph home to Mold, Flintshire, and went about tracking down the dog's owners. Relieved Georgia drove to pick up Ralph just a few hours later when she received a phone call from a friend of the driver who had seen her social media appeal.
She said: “He’s never done anything like this before. And I didn’t even mind. I was quite impressed that he had the sense to jump in the cab. He loves people, and he’s not afraid of anybody. So he just jumped in. The cabby didn’t know what to do. He had to do an airport run. So he decided to take him with him.
“I was worried that he would try and make his way home and try and cross the road and the worst would happen. But he had the sense to find safety, and it’s incredible to have him back.”
Georgia, from Wrexham, had been walking with Ralph in nearby Gresford Quarry at 5am when she suddenly realised that he was no longer with her. She added: “We always get up early in the morning and go for a walk. It was dark. He’s normally really good on his walks. But I turned around and he wasn’t there.
“At that point in the quarry, where we were walking, I could pick four different directions to go. So I picked our normal direction, but he didn’t turn up. We spent the next three hours walking and looking for him. We had friends and locals looking for him, but there was no head nor tail of him."
Georgia quickly created posts on Facebook with his last known location and pictures of him to alert local people that he was missing. And remarkably, she got a phone call four hours later from a woman called Becky, who said he'd been on a 100-mile round trip to Manchester Airport in her friend’s taxi.
She said: “At 9am, we got a phone call as someone had seen my Facebook post. It was Becky. She told me what happened. Ralph had been walking in a direction towards home. He was obviously cold, and a cab pulled up to pick up a family going to the airport for a holiday.
“The cabby tried to keep him warm, and the people going to the airport were really nice. He had dropped the family at the airport, and then the cabby made his way back to his house, which is in Mold. His friend Becky looked on Facebook and gave us a call.”
Georgia said that when she got the call, she drove over to the taxi driver’s home and got Ralph back to her address by 10am the same morning. And she said her dog now had an identifiable collar and a tracking device to make sure he wouldn't go missing again.
She added: "He had a new collar on him, and it didn’t have his details. But now he has it - and an Apple air tag as well."
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