The trusting world of Cindy Bryant and the Lihue Pet Shop staff was shattered Thursday with the loss of a brown-and-white male five-week old Shih Tzu puppy.
The loss was discovered right after the lunch hour, and Bryant estimates that the puppy disappeared some time between 11:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m.
There were a lot of people in the shop as is normal during the lunch hour, Bryant said, but Thursday was exceptionally busy as there were a lot of younger people as well as adults with young children milling about.
As a result of the loss, the staff immediately turned to a posture of no handling of the pets routine much to the disappointment of their patrons, but Bryant wasn’t about to let another of the five cuddly puppies disappear.
Calls were made to the police department who said they would file a report as a matter of formality, but Bryant shouldn’t expect the return of the pup. When she called her insurance company, they informed her that her policy didn’t cover the loss because it was not due to ‘Breaking and Entering.’
At this point, Bryant also called the radio stations who ran several announcements throughout the day.
“As far as I know, there is only one litter of Shih Tzu on the island at this point,” Bryant said, “so, the loss should be easy to trace. Of the litter in the Lihue Pet Shop, there were only two brown-and-white pups.”
Bryant, who up until this point was trusting of her customers, doesn’t know how something like this could’ve happened to her since in the history of the pet shop in the Rice Shopping Center, she’s only experienced “one or two bounced checks a year.”
“If they don’t have the money, I just tell them to pay me when they can,” she said. “We don’t even use the machine (Telecheck), our customers are that good.” Bryant also says she has a lot of customers who frequent the shop during their lunch hours as a means of stress relief, a pet on one of the cuddly offerings serving as a means of wiping out a morning’s worth of stress.
But, Bryant is firm in her posture, a seamstress arriving in the shop to take measurements for screens that will enclose the three pet cages to keep people’s hands away from the animals. The screens will enclose the pet cages, and people who need to handle the animals need to check with the pet shop staff who will supervise the handling. She does not expect to get the lost pup back, but in the event that it does show up, she said it will be on a ‘no questions asked’ basis.
By getting the word out into the public, Bryant’s goal is to ask people to tell 10 other people about the shop’s loss, and for those people to tell 10 more, relying on the ‘coconut wireless’ system to make giving the lost pup as a gift, or trying to sell it, a difficult task for the perpetrator.
Following the loss, and with the initiation of the ‘no touching of pets’ posture, one customer told her, “It’s a shame that one person’s act should spoil it for everyone.”
If anyone has information on the missing pup, they can contact Bryant at the Lihue Pet Shop, no questions asked.
