This clever Canadian canine had a hand (or, rather, a paw) in saving itself when it alerted pet store employees to its plight earlier this week.

In a serendipitous twist of fate, a pair of alleged dognappers brought Vango the 5-month-old Australian shepherd into a pet store in Gatineau, Québec.

Yves Jodoin is an employee and dog trainer who was working at Au Royaume des Animaux when the couple brought Vango into the shop. As he chatted with the couple, he became more and more suspicious of the dog’s origins when they failed to tell him how old the dog was, what kind of food he ate, and how much they had paid for him.

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“The dog was barking, the dog was poking and he really wanted my attention,” Jodoin told CBC. “They were evading the questions. I was giving the dog cookies, but the dog was still barking.”

Jodoin continued to talk to the couple while his co-worker ran some internet searches on missing dog reports. Sure enough, they found a picture of Vango saying that the dog had been reported missing from its home only two and a half hours earlier.

Jodoin then recognized Vango from an obedience class that the pup had undergone at the store in the past.

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“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.’”

One of the alleged dognappers was a pregnant woman who insisted that they had found Vango in the woods earlier that day. She told Jodoin that she had planned on keeping him as a service dog since she couldn’t afford a trained canine to help with her poor health.

Jodoin managed to convince the couple to relinquish Vango to him. He then called the pup’s frantic owner, Josée Francoeur, and told her that her dog was safe and sound in the store—and she was overwhelmed with relief.

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Francoeur had suspected that Vango had been dognapped earlier that very same day after she let him out to pee in her fenced-in backyard only to have him disappear minutes later. Since Vango had not yet been microchipped, she immediately began posting to local social media pages. Upon filing an official police report, she began to lose hope—only to have Jodoin call her a short while later.

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

Francoeur, who has since made an appointment to get Vango microchipped, now hopes that their story will spur other pet owners to do the same.

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