Police in Colorado found a lost golden retriever by happenstance over the weekend, three months after the animal fled from a car accident and went missing.
The dog, named Farah, was discovered as sheriff’s deputies in Fremont County, near Colorado Springs, conducted a drone training session on Sunday. They found her almost immediately using the drone’s infrared camera, the sheriff’s office said in a Facebook post detailing the rescue, which also noted that Farah had been “reunited with her family.”
The sheriff’s office said the drone was deployed in the area where Farah was last seen.
“Within minutes, Deputies spotted her using the drone’s infrared camera,” the sheriff’s office wrote on Facebook. “A short time later, Farah was reunited with her family. She is safely on her way home, and the UAS team was able to practice some very valuable search and rescue techniques with our drone!”
Taylor Salazar, Farah’s owner, told Colorado Springs-based radio station KRDO that she and her late husband, Fili, adopted the dog in 2019 when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer and called her “the classic goldie.”
“We needed something to brighten up our household. And she did just that,” said Salazar. “He was in love with her the minute he saw her.”
Years after her husband’s death, Salazar said that her father suffered a seizure while behind the wheel of a car. Farah was with him at the time, and when the vehicle crashed in an area that KRDO described as rural and not well-lit, the dog ran from the scene. Although Salazar said that people had seen and taken photos of Farah in the area over the last three months, they were not able to rescue her, KRDO reported.
“If they got too close, she’d run away and she knew where to go. She was hiding,” Salazar told the station.
She helped sheriff’s deputies catch Farah once their drone spotted the dog and said they were ultimately able to lure her with a piece of chicken meat. “She stuck her head through the barbed wire fence, and then the next minute she’s laying in my lap and I was like, ‘I got her!'”
