Vango was just 5 months old when he solved his own dognapping. In an amazing confluence of events, he ended up in a pet store in Gatineau, Quebec with the people who stole him only to run into his old dog trainer.

But his rescue didn’t play out quite so neatly.

From cat to dog

Yves Jodoin is a staff member and dog trainer at Au Royaume des Animaux. And he got suspicious one day in January of 2020 when a couple that had previously purchased only cat food walked into the store with an Australian Shepherd puppy.

It appears that Vango knew this was a place he could “ask” for help and he either recognized Jodoin or was simply trying to get the attention of anyone who might help him.

“The dog was barking, the dog was poking and he really wanted my attention,” Jodoin told CBC News.

Like any pet store clerk, Jodoin wanted to know more about the couple’s new pet. So despite all the barking and nudging, he started to ask questions – questions the couple simply couldn’t answer.

The trainer became suspicious when the supposedly new dog owners couldn’t tell him – or hesitated to answer queries – about his exact age, whether he’d been sterilized, or what kind of food he ate.

“They were evading the questions,” Jodoin said. “I was giving the dog cookies, but the dog was still barking.”

Suspicions confirmed

Another staff member at the pet store, Lydia Blouin, also saw that something wasn’t quite right with the scene.

In fact, she was so suspicious that she immediately went to a computer to check social media pages for lost and stolen pets.

And up came a photo of Vango, who was taken from his home in Buckingham, Quebec just two-and-a-half hours earlier.

His owner thought he might have run away.

Then, Jodoin realized that not only was the dog in trouble but that this was a dog he actually knew. He had a hand in training Vango as a puppy!

“At that point I said, ‘Vango, come!’ And the dog was reacting, he was jumping,” Jodoin said. “All along he was barking and poking, trying to say, ‘Hello, I’m not the dog they say I am.'”

The jig is up

After confronting the couple, they confessed Vango was not technically theirs but said they had found him wandering in the woods and that his owner was too poor and sick to care for him properly.

But everyone knew that was a lie and Jodoin eventually convinced the pair to leave without the dog.

Then they called Josée Francoeur to alert her that they had found her missing puppy.

“I can’t talk about it without crying,” she said. “Imagine, If those people didn’t go to that pet store, I would have lost my dog forever.”

Unfortunately, that was probably true since even if they had let him go, Vango wasn’t microchipped. But Francoeur had already made an appointment to get it done.

She also filed a police report.

“I don’t want to cause them problems. We don’t know why they did it. But at the same time, they took my baby,” the owner. “I want to discourage others from doing this.”

Be sure to scroll down below for an interview with Vango’s rescuer and owner.

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Source: CBC News, Facebook – Josée Francoeur,