Woman Looking For New Pet to Adopt Finds Dog She Lost Years Ago at Shelter
Aisha Nieves, of Allentown, Pennsylvania, began browsing the adoption page of the Lehigh County Humane Society (LCHS) website on June 18 in hopes of finding a new pet for her two sons.
A woman named Aisha Nieves discovered Kovu, a fawn pit bull-rottweiler cross she had lost more than two years ago, while browsing the local humane society’s adoption web pages. In this illustration photo, a pit bull dog wearing a red bandana and chain collar smiles at the camera.
That’s when she saw Kuvo, the tan pit bull-rottweiler mix she had lost more than two years ago.
“I thought, ‘Wait, that can’t be him,'” Ms. Nieves told The Morning Call. But then she noticed the small scar on his eye from when he was injured on a fence as a puppy.
She got Kuvo for the first time when he was only seven weeks old. She named him after the cocky but loyal cub with a scar over his eye in the Disney animated films, the sequel to The Lion King.
She cared for Kuvo from 2014 to May 2019. During that month, he escaped from her home by crawling through a hole in her gate left by a driver who had hit him. When she returned home one night, Kuvo wasn’t there to greet her with his usual kisses and hugs.
“At the time, I was four months pregnant with my youngest son,” she says. “I had a lot of emotions running through me. I was crying, thinking the worst, thinking someone had kidnapped him or hurt him. I was just devastated. He was there for me through everything, the heartaches, the ups and downs, and now he was gone. It was so hard to accept.”
Little did she know that the local humane society took Kovu in after residents discovered him in someone’s yard.
One family adopted Kovu in October 2019. But facing eviction, the family returned him to the shelter in good health on June 12, LCHS development director Deirdre Snyder told the publication above.
LCHS had renamed Kovu “Ash.” But Nieves knew it was her lost dog after seeing his photo on the group’s adoption web pages. Nieves immediately contacted LCHS. The group told her that in order to get him back, she had to bring a photo of herself with Kovu and pay an adoption fee.
When LCHS brought Kovu out to meet her, he immediately started smiling and wagging his tail, Nieves says.
“I automatically go to the floor, like get down, get ready, because I know he’s going to jump on me,” she told WFMZ-TV. “As soon as he started coming, he started squealing and screaming and yelling.”
On its Facebook page, LCHS posted images of Nieves and Kovu’s reunion.
“Upon seeing his long lost mommy, Kovu, previously shy and scared, let out the most exciting cry we’ve ever heard!” wrote LCHS.
After Kovu’s disappearance, Nieves said she felt like she was missing a part of herself. She would look at old photos of the dog and cry. Now that Kovu is back home, she feels like he never left. The two women just celebrated the dog’s seventh birthday, and she vowed never to lose him again.