Pune: Indie ‘pup’ turns saviour, helps search party trace lost pet dog in Bhugaon | Pune News

PUNE: When Banjo, an Indie dog adopted by Prakalpa Bastianpillai and her husband, wandered away in Bhugaon on Tuesday evening, his frantic owners searched high and low for him, but in vain. The very next day, Banjo’s friend — another Indie named Coffee adopted by a local resident — was roped in for the scout. This time, she led the search party straight to the missing dog.

“Our dog walker takes Banjo regularly to the hill top in our township to play, where they sometimes randomly meet Coffee on her walk with her family. Banjo usually responds well to recall commands, but the walker was probably distracted and lost sight of him on Tuesday around 7pm. My husband and I, along with the walker, searched for him with torches and calling out his name in the forest area till midnight, but we couldn’t find him. We resumed the search at sunrise, but were unsuccessful,” said Bastianpillai, a resident of the Forest Hills Township, spread over 170 acres in Bhugaon .

After posting on social media and forwarding messages on WhatsApp to friends and neighbours, many other people also joined the search for the lost pet on Wednesday.

“Coffee and I joined the search on Wednesday afternoon. She did not realise what we were doing at first, when I made her smell Banjo’s leash a few times. She’s still just a puppy, less than two years old. When she heard people calling out Banjo’s name, she figured everyone was looking for him. She started tracing back to the places she played with him the previous evening, and then led us in the direction of his smell to where he was found,” Amit Bhadbhade, who runs an English-learning startup in the city, said.

The missing dog was found around 3pm on Wednesday, tied near a security cabin by a watchman at another housing society. Animal activist Surashree Deshpande said, “Contrary to popular opinion, Indie dogs are highly intelligent and can be trained very fast and well. Just as in this case, Coffee seemed to be highly perceptive without formal training of any sort. Due to their capabilities, Indie dogs are now also being recruited by police and other departments that require canines. ”