It’s always heartbreaking when a pet goes missing, but it’s important to not lose hope. Sometimes pets return to us months or even years after they disappeared.

When one woman’s chihuahua went missing, she never gave up looking — then, 9 years later, she got the call she had been waiting for…

Gizmo, a chihuahua, went missing from his Las Vegas home way back in February 2015, devastating the dog’s owner Judy Monarrez.

According to KLAS, Gizmo and other dogs were playing in the backyard and escaped out the yard gate. While a neighbor wrangled the dogs, a woman — a “random person who wasn’t a neighbor,” Judy says — picked up Gizmo, insisted on taking him to get scanned for a microchip, and never returned.

It became clear that her dog was stolen, and Judy began a widespread search, spreading the news on social media and offering a no-questions-asked reward for his safe return.

“He is friendly and my family misses him! He is like my child and I love him very much!” Judy wrote in one Facebook post.

Months and years passed with no word about Gizmo. Judy pleaded for the dog’s return so the dog could provide comfort to her ailing mother, who suffered a stroke: “My mother misses him dearly and speaks about him often from her hospital bed,” she wrote in 2016.

As months and years passed, the odds of Gizmo returning home seemingly diminished — but Judy remained hopeful that her boy was still out there.

“We still haven’t given up hope that we will be reunited with Gizmo,” she wrote in 2019, then over four years after the dog went missing. “Please, if you have any info send it my way.”

Then, last week, her faith was finally rewarded when she got the call she had waited for for nearly a decade. It was from the pet microchip company Home Again, alerting her that Gizmo had been found, and was at a shelter waiting for her.

“I just started bawling,” Judy told KLAS.

After 9 years missing, Gizmo looked to be in rough shape: he has matted fur, missing teeth and overgrown nails. “I cannot fathom what he went through but we got the call late last night and we were reunited,” Judy wrote on Facebook. “He’s going to need lots of care and lots of love.”

That care came with a hefty price tag, with the original vet visit costing $1,000. Judy set up a GoFundMe page to cover the cost of Gizmo’s treatments, and thankfully people have come through, donating over $5,000 so far.

“Now we just have to make up for this time, and it’s like I’m trying to focus on getting him healthy,” she told KLAS. “We just want him to really spend the rest of his days not outside or being neglected by anybody.”

While Gizmo, who was 2 years old when he went missing, is much older and weathered, there’s no love lost between him and Judy, even after nearly a decade apart.

“The whole way home he was just staring at me,” Judy said. “I feel like we were just kind of like, ‘Is this real?’”

What a miracle — we’re so glad that Gizmo is finally home after 9 years! Judy never gave up hope that she would see her beloved dog again, and we’re so happy she finally has her dog back.

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Source: Los Angeles Times (edited)