Australian shepherds are known to be among the smartest dog breeds on the planet, but even with this knowledge, one Aussie hasn’t failed to surprise us with just how smart he is.

Meet Vango, the dog that had a paw in saving his own life when he went out of his way to let a pet store worker know that he’d been dognapped.

Late last month, the then 5-month-old Aussie had been dognapped from his own yard.

As fate would have it, though, Vango’s dognappers decided to take him to a pet store located in Gatineau, Quebec that was all too familiar. The clever little Aussie walked straight up and started barking at one of the workers to let him know that there was something very, very wrong with his current situation.

The worker in question’s name is Yves Jodoin and when it comes to the store employee, there’s more than meets the eye.

Jodoin not only works at the pet store, but he’s also a certified dog trainer with Au Royaume des Animaux. As such, this particular fellow understands more than your average Jo about the behavior of dogs and how they communicate. It didn’t take him long to pick up on what his dognapped customer was dropping.

Jodoin figured the dog was probably looking for treats, so he gave him some. When that didn’t do anything to appease the dog’s excitement, the trainer started to grow suspicious.

“The dog was barking, the dog was poking and he really wanted my attention. I was giving the dog cookies, but the dog was still barking,” Jodoin recalls in an interview with CBC News.

At that point, the dog trainer knew something was up, so he started to ask the couple who’d come in with the dog a few basic questions. They were questions that just about any dog owner would know about their furbaby.

When they couldn’t even answer the simplest of his questions, though, like how old he was or what food he liked, it started to become apparent that the Aussie had been dognapped.

“They were evading the questions,” Jodoin explains.

Lydia Blouin, another staff member, also picked up on the sketchiness of the whole situation. So, she decided to give a quick scroll through some of the local “missing pet” pages on social media and, sure enough, there was Vango’s picture. The dog was reported as being last seen just a couple hours before he entered the pet store from his home in Buckingham.

Just after Lydia showed Jodoin the social media post about Vango, the worker was hit with a sudden realization. He had seen this dog before. In fact, he knew him. Jodoin had had a hand in Vango’s training when he was just a puppy!

“At that point I said, ‘Vango, come!’ And the dog was reacting, he was jumping. All along he was barking and poking, trying to say, ‘Hello, I’m not the dog they say I am,’” Jodoin says.

After Vango responded so readily to the worker’s command, the dognappers were left with no choice but to fess up.

The couple said they’d happened upon Vango in the woods with no signs of an owner. They decided to keep him for themselves so he could be the woman’s service dog, claiming she needed the assistance due to her health, but couldn’t afford to get one of her own.

The woman’s story clashed with Vango’s owner’s account of the situation, which was that she let the Aussie out into her fenced yard to go potty. When she went to check on him moments later, he had vanished.

“Is it possible that someone took him? And I was thinking, ‘Who could do that? It’s impossible!” Vango’s owner, painter Joseé Francouer recalled in an interview with Radio-Canada.

With several witnesses in the store, Jodoin convinced the dognappers to leave the dog with him so he could return him to his rightful owner, who was already on her way.

After having her furbaby dognapped from his own yard, Francouer says she will definitely be getting him microchipped.

Though she doesn’t want to make life hard for anyone, Francouer said she will be pressing charges to teach the dognappers that what they did was in no way excusable.

“I don’t want to cause them problems. We don’t know why they did it. But at the same time, they took my baby. I want to discourage others from doing this,” Francouer explained.

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Source: CBC Canada/Radio-Canada