Strange phone calls about Danny

Putting our home phone number in the local paper when advertising Danny's disappearance might be a bit of a two edged sword. So far I have received two calls regarding him:

The first one was last night. A young woman rang saying she thought she had seen him last week between Abercanaid and Troedyrhiw on the canal bank. I immediately thought: If he was that near why didn't he just come home? She said she was walking along and the dog joined her and kept running off and laying down on the floor. Didn't sound like Danny's behaviour at all. So I asked her if the dog she saw had one long pointy ear and the other floppy. She said she hadn't noticed. Now his ears are so prominent you couldn't possibly miss them! Not only that there was a very clear picture of him and his ears with a written description in the paper. The final clincher for me was when she said he was wearing a red collar. Definitely not Danny.

The second call came when I had just come in from work this evening with piles of shopping to put away, I hadn't even got as far as taking my coat off. A male voice I would estimate to be in his 60s started talking to me in a familiar way. "I read about your dog missing in the paper..." At first I thought it might have been my father or my uncle, but then it was obviously not. This man, as well meaning as he was, was just ringing to find out if we had found Danny! GRRRR! I felt like saying to him: "Well that's why I thought you were ringing me not the other way around!" Instead, the penny dropped and I asked him if he had any information. To which he replied "No."

To cut a long story short, he proceeded to tell me all about his dog and how it might need an operation. I didn't lose my temper, I just sympathised with him when I really felt like saying: "Why on earth did you bother ringing me?" One good thing though, I found out from him that he'd read about it in the local Rhymney newspaper, so the article is appearing further afield than I thought.

Another thing I noticed about both phone calls is that they were both withheld numbers. Perhaps they were people who just wanted to chat about dogs in general. Those kind of phone calls I can do without right now.