around montreal in 80 days: homer the missing dog has found his way home
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isabelle pinsky and her dog, homer, in montreal, on thursday, feb. 19, 2026. homer was missing for 80 days before turning up across town, looking scruffy, but otherwise fine.
allen mcinnis
/
montreal gazette
only homer, an 11-year-old terrier mix with health issues, knows where he had been since disappearing from the snowdon area on the afternoon of nov. 12.
and he’s not saying.
more than 2½ months after his disappearance, the beloved companion of isabelle and david pinsky is back at home — to the amazement of many.
on jan. 30, homer was picked up from the sidewalk on henri-bourassa blvd., near viau st. — way north and east of where he had jumped out of david’s car.
whoever picked him up had taken him to the nearby proanima facility on pie-ix blvd. the not-for-profit organization recently took over montreal’s animal-control services from the spca.
homer was microchipped, which made it possible to identify his owners, and, the following day, david got a call from proanima to come and get the dog.
isabelle was incredulous when he called her at work — she is a private caregiver at a long-term care centre — with the news. “i freaked out. i said: ‘how do you know it is true?'”
homer was weak and bony, having lost about three pounds of his usual weight of about 13 pounds, and his fur was long and matted. for 80 days, he hadn’t taken the daily prednisone tablets prescribed for his liver disease and he’d missed two monthly vitamin b12 injections.
but he knew them — and their car. “he ran to the car with the leash on,” isabelle said. and once they were back in their côte-st-luc building, he knew that place, too — his bin of toys, his leashes, his many friends.
“he knows everybody in the building,” she said. “he is all over the house, all over the furniture. he is fabulous, back to himself.”
the veterinarian told them the day after they retrieved homer from proanima that, judging from the appearance of his skin, he had probably been outside overnight on jan. 29. temperatures that night were in the mid- to high negative teens. all things considered, the vet said, he was in pretty good shape.
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for the better part of three months, isabelle said she had been worried sick. “it was awful. for 80 days, i was out of my mind. i drove my husband nuts.”
she wondered: had homer been hit by a car? been abducted? they’d gone to the police, reported his disappearance to the spca. isabelle’s daughter, nancy spilberg, came in from toronto to help in the search and put up dozens of posters in the neighbourhood.
one woman reported she had witnessed another woman picking up a dog matching homer’s description by his leash a short distance from where he had bolted from david’s car at st-kevin ave. and beaucourt st.
“we went up and down côte-ste-catherine, beaucourt, st-kevin, lavoie,” isabelle recalled. yet despite their best efforts, there were no further sightings in the area of the little terrier mix.
long after people had said to give up on seeing homer again, “he is here and fine and eating,” isabelle said. he has already put back some of the weight he lost.
“everybody said: ‘forget about it. you’ll never get him back.’ i know it’s only a dog — but it’s my dog.”
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