Be sure to reach the end of this article to see the full video!

From the moment the passenger and the dog boarded, the driver could tell that something was wrong. He decided to do something about it.

In Portland, Oregon, a man hailed a bus in the middle of the road. They were far away from any stops, but the driver, Mike Thomas, pulled over to let the man on anyway.

The man was holding a dog.

Things were unusual right away. When the bus doors opened, Thomas saw that the dog had no leash and the man had to drag it onboard.

Thomas was suspicious, but he decided that there was probably nothing to worry about. The driver decided to ask the man about the dog anyway.

The man said that the dog was his, but something still seemed off.

Then the man did something really strange. A woman on board started talking to him about the dog. Then the man offered to give her the dog. The woman, confused, refused to take the dog.

Thomas knew then that he had to do something. When the man tried to get off the bus with the dog, Thomas grabbed the animal’s collar. He told the man that the dog was staying with him.

Thomas now knew that he had to take care of the dog himself until he could locate his true owners.

“He was very well behaved. Most of the time, he just had a tennis ball in his mouth. And he sat and just kind of watched everything going on and seemed like a really happy dog.” – Mike Thomas.

The driver contacted the transit police. Pretty soon, they arrived and called the number on the dog’s name tag.

The dog, Cooper, had a loving family all along. His owners’ son was watching the dog. But that night, the son had been working late. While he was still in the office, the man broke into the son’s home and took the dog.

Cooper was reunited with his owners. They had been incredibly worried as soon as their son had told them of the kidnapping.

Over the next few days, the owners desperately wanted to contact Thomas to thank him for saving Cooper.

Eventually, TriMet, the transit authority, gave the owners Thomas’s contact details. The owners sent Thomas a gift along with a thank you note from Cooper.

The man who took Cooper remains unidentified. No one knows what he was intending to do with the dog. The interaction with the woman on the bus implies that he was going to attempt to sell him to a person who was unaware he had been kidnapped. However, he might have just been trying to get rid of the dog at that moment as he could tell that Thomas was suspicious.

The story of Cooper’s kidnapping and rescue soon made its way online. A YouTube video of the story has made quite an impact.

To date, it has gained almost 350,000 views. It also has more than 13,000 likes.

It’s awful that someone would steal someone else’s dog. Who knows what would have become of Cooper if Thomas hadn’t been there to save him?

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Source: The Oregonian