PALMETTO, Fla. (WFLA) – A woman in Minnesota will be reunited with her dog who has been missing for three years after seeing her pet featured on a Bradenton brewery’s beer can.
Motorworks Brewing partnered with Shelter Manatee to release the cans featuring rescue dogs ready to be adopted. One of those dogs featured is “Day Day,” also known as “Hazel.”
“When we picked Day Day to be on the Motorworks Brewery beer cans, we were just sort of picking. We have 150 dogs at any given time here. We picked four dogs slightly randomly, but she had been here for a while, she came in as a stray in March 2019 and she had not been adopted yet,” said Manatee County Animal Services Outreach and Events Specialist Hans Wohlgefahrt. “So we thought this was a great opportunity to give her some further exposure and exposure she got.”
The story of the four dogs adorned on beer cans went viral.
Day Day’s owner, Monica Mathis, who resides in Minnesota, saw the story and immediately called the shelter. The dog disappeared from her family when Mathis was living in Iowa in 2017.
Though Day Day was microchipped, Mathis’ contact information was not updated.
Wohlgefahrt said she was able to provide all the necessary information, like records and photos, to confirm Day Day is actually her “Hazel.”
He explained even if the shelter did some social media sleuthing, they would have never expected Day Day’s owner to live so far away.
“I have been on the phone with her a lot over the last week. She’s so excited. She’s happy that we’re able to tell this story to so many because you know when pets go missing it’s so scary,” Wohlgefahrt said. “Hazel, when she was born, Monica was there during her birth and so she loves this, this is a beloved pet for their family and hopefully in a couple days, we’re going to make that reunion happen.”
Wohlgefahrt believes the message behind this story is to never give up and for pet owners to be sure the information in their four-legged friends’ microchip is current.
Friends of Manatee County Animal Services are paying the travel expenses to get Day Day back home in the coming days.
Wohlgefahrt is hopeful the partnership with Motorworks Brewing and their beer cans will continue.
“The Motorworks collaboration has been so terrific that I certainly hope we’re going to continue with that partnership because we always have pets here in need of homes,” he said. “And that is really our part of the project is to give awareness to the community of both who we are and these pets, because they’re special, like individuals.”
One of the four dogs originally featured on the cans is still available for adoption at the shelter.
“Candy” is a German Shepherd and Mastiff mix. Wohlgefahrt thinks she is spectacular.
“She is beautiful. She is so trainable that she could be a working dog for some agency or something,” he said. “She is just a really smart, active dog and we just hope that that connection happens and maybe with some of this exposure, that will happen.”
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