A dog owner in Ireland was on Thursday celebrating the power of Twitter as she was reunited with her pet terrier after being alerted about his whereabouts through a tweet that was retweeted more than 500 times within half an hour.
Patch, described as a “Jack Russell cross”, was separated from his owner Deirdre Anglin after he mischievously got on to a train in rural Kildare and ended up in the Irish capital Dublin’s Pearse Station.
The net savvy staff there did what the net savvy do: send a “Lost Dog” tweet with a photo attachment of a homesick Patch. Within minutes, Twitter was buzzing with retweets.
Ms. Anglin, who was hooked on to Twitter herself, then tweeted back: “That’s my dog!” By then Patch had become so famous that when Ms. Anglin brought him back people kept asking her: “Is that the dog from Twitter?”
She thought that it was really smart of Irish Rail staff to post Patch’s photo on Twitter. That plus quick retweets by others meant that she couldn’t miss it.
A spokesman for Irish Rail spokesman hailed the power of Twitter but said that some of his colleagues wished it hadn’t worked so efficiently.
“It was good she [Ms. Anglin] showed up so quickly, because the staff in the office were getting quite attached to him,” Barry Kenny told the Associated Press.
