PEOPLE Pets | Sit. Stay. Play!

Venti latte, blueberry scone … puppy? One Boston Starbucks customer got a little more than he ordered earlier this month, when he rescued a young dog that was abandoned outside the café.

The Boston man, who asked not to be identified, noticed the shy, young pup had been chained to the store's outdoor fencing for quite some time on the evening of Aug. 4. When he approached the pooch, he found a note tucked into its collar, reading, "I'm Charlie. Please take me home!" "

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It's not often that tales of missing pets have storybook endings. But for one Australian family, a year of heartbreak turned into happiness last week when their cat, who disappeared a year earlier, was found safe more than 800 miles from home.

"When he went missing ... we heard nothing. We had to assume the worst," owner Kamala Brooks told Australia's Herald Sun. "It's amazing."

The black and white cat, named Timothy, vanished from Brooks's Brisbane garden last year, and despite search and rescue efforts, never returned.

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"There's nothingness in South Dakota," Lanore Hahn tells PEOPLEPets.com. "Just nothing there." So it seemed odd to the Wisconsinite and her boyfriend, Derek Pritzl, when they spotted a piglet all alone on the side of the road during a drive through the quiet state in mid-July.

Concerned for the animal's well-being, Hahn and Pritzl, a musician who was wrapping up his summer tour, pulled over and chased the piglet down. "She was fast," Hahn recalls. "I chased her a good couple hundred yards, then got in front of her, chased her back to our van, scooped her up in a towel and that was it."

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When Jill and Kevin got married last year, their bridal party danced down the aisle to Chris Brown's catchy single, "Forever." 53 million YouTube views later, they're a part of pop culture history. Inspired by the JK wedding dance, the Nevada Humane Society put together this video to celebrate one of their adoptions.

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Playa del Carmen, Mexico, with its teal blue waters and soft sandy beaches, was an idyllic spot for a family vacation for the Pover family from Pennsylvania. But Evi Pover wanted her family to have more stimulating things to do besides just swim and get some sun, so she planned a visit to a local cat rescue for their Friday afternoon kitten cuddling hour.

Her 9-year-old son (pictured) and her mother spent time petting the cats, and were about to head back to the beach when they were told that there was a dog in the shelter, and she was nursing a litter of newborn kittens.

Suddenly, the event turned from being a casual vacation activity to something that felt more like fate.

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Most guests who visit SeaWorld San Diego don't know what happened to Dottie the dolphin just six months ago.

They see the 23-year-old Atlantic bottlenose dolphin swimming along a pool, splashing passers-by and jumping through the air. They watch her feed on fish and look out for her 2-year-old son, Cortez. She's fin-to-fin spunky. She runs the show.

But six months ago, she almost died.

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An African spur thigh tortoise is no match for the New Hampshire winter — layers of snow, frost and temperatures dipping well below freezing. So when Christine and Mike Wellington's 25-lb. tortoise, Lucy, disappeared four years ago and didn't show by Christmas, they assumed the worst.

"We were just crushed," Christine Wellington tells PEOPLEPets.com. "We looked everywhere, and my thought at the time was she's going to die — there's just no ways she's going to make it out there."

Lucky for the Wellington family, they assumed wrong.

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