WHEC - "Imagine dropping your dog off to get groomed and getting a call from Petco that he has escaped. It happened this week to a family in Irondequoit. Hercules, a two-year old Pitbull, was missing for 16 hours and when he was finally found, he was in rough shape.
Hercules was dropped off for his appointment at the Petco on Ridge Road Monday afternoon by his owners, Yvette and Chris Nevison. Not long after, they got a call from the manager telling them, “Hercules somehow got out. Irondequoit police were called, animal control was called,” Yvette tells News10NBC. She and her husband raced back to Petco, “where was the supervision and how the hell did my dog get out? I just don't see how all this could have happened and nobody saw it,” she wondered.
They asked to see surveillance video from inside the store, a manager wouldn’t show them but viewed it herself and said this is what happened: “the groomer had to go on break so she put Hercules in the cage, closed the cage up and then left. Within 5 minutes of her leaving, he broke out the cage, walked around the grooming area, jumped over some kind of fence/partition thing, pushed the door open into the customer grooming area, jumped over the counter, walked around and pushed the door and walked right outside,” recalls Yvette.
They spent hours on Monday night, in the single digit temperatures searching for their dog but it wasn’t until Tuesday morning that a woman who lives nearby found Hercules curled up outside on her porch, “when you drop off your pet, you're trusting them to take care of him. You're trusting them to supervise them and make sure they're safe and my dog wasn't,” Yvette says."
"Hercules has spent the last day-and-a-half at an animal hospital. He was found shaking, his paw pads raw with scratches on his lips, “his nose was bleeding, his snout was all swollen and he had a little bit of tenderness of the top of his head,” adds Yvette. His vet determined he should be sent to the emergency animal hospital but he is expected to be okay. Petco is paying the vet bills and will be paying to get Hercules micro-chipped.
In a statement to News10NBC, Petco spokeswoman Lisa Spark says, “The health and safety of pets is always our top priority and we take this situation very seriously. We’re so glad that Hercules was recovered quickly and safely reunited with his family. We’re conducting a thorough investigation and looking into any potential corrective measures that may prevent this from happening again.” She would not elaborate on what those corrective measures might be."