Russian man loses dog, comes to train station every day pleading for help

A Siberian pensioner from Bratsk and his quest to find his lost friend, an 11-year-old German Shepherd, is garnering growing attention from social media and the press. More and more people are volunteering to help the unfortunate dog owner.

Vladimir Davydov, who lost his wife, then his job and now his best friend, an adopted German Shepherd who’s been by his side for nearly a decade, says he won’t give up. He has been coming to the local market square for over a week with a plaque reading: “Help me find my friend.”

[In the picture: Please help me find my friend tel. 8-952-627-36-00]

The 77-year-old man has difficulty walking and has to use crouches, so he cannot run around the town that is home to just under 250,000 people.

“It’s just that everyone should pay attention, when they’re in a car, a taxi or a trolleybus - maybe they will spot him somewhere,” Anna Ovchinninkova, who volunteered to help find the dog, told Russian TV.

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Davydov is afraid his pet called Yan was stolen. He used to bring him to his work, as a guard at a construction site, and quite frequently received offers from strangers who wanted to buy the dog.

He was there on the day the German Shepherd disappeared.

“I went to the construction site. He stayed behind, lying down by the gates. When I came out - he was already gone. And I don’t know where he went,” Vladimir Davydov said.

Mr Davydov inspected all the sites he had ever visited with his dog, but to no avail.

“I just could not do anymore walking, physically,” Davydov told the KP daily. “So I went to a copy center and asked to print out a leaflet for me. I put it on a plaque and pinned Yan’s photo to it as well… I never expected there’d be so many kind people in our town - they all come up to me and talk, ask how it’s going, console me.”

The pensioner’s phone number, together with his beloved pet’s photo, is circulating the web now and every day volunteers go out into the streets of Bratsk to look for his best friend.

“We have called all the shelters, but they have not seen German Shepherds like this. Also several people called us after spotting a dog that looked like Yan in the street, so we went to check,” Anna Ovchinninkova told the daily. “We are still looking for Yan.”