When an adorable young pit bull pup named Zimba embarked on a cross-country road trip with his human owner’s boyfriend, the last thing he expected was to get abandoned thousands of miles from home.
A breakup between his owner and the boyfriend midway through the trip, though, left Zimba out in the cold—literally. The ex-boyfriend abandoned him in Caroline County, Maryland, a whopping 1,300 miles away from his home in Wichita, Kansas.
He was found by the side of the road all alone in November of 2017. And although his microchip led to a shelter calling his mom back home in Kansas, her job and children left her unable to drop everything to drive out to the Atlantic Coast and pick up the adorable dog.
That’s where a man named Zach Holt stepped in.
Holt was a former employee of the Caroline County Humane Society, who had been sheltering Zimba. He learned about the pup far from home from his girlfriend, who still worked at the shelter, and realized that he was in a perfect position to help out; as a bartender who only worked weekends, Holt knew that he had a handful of free days and a car that could get Zimba from Point A to Point B.
So he loaded up his vehicle with the four-legged friend and some road trip supplies and took off for the Midwest—all to make sure Zimba was able to get home safely.
“I’m a bartender,” Holt explained to WBZ in Baltimore when the world caught wind of the incredible story.
“I strictly work, you know, the weekends and Monday and I have Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday off. And four days is plenty of time to get to Kansas and back, so I said, ‘Why not?’”
The shelter had tried to coordinate another way to get the dog home, even contacting both United Airlines and the shelter in Wichita that had initially adopted him out. But when all else failed, Holt knew that he could use his spare time to reunite a family that had been separated for far too long.
When he was praised for the incredible act of kindness, Holt insisted that he was the one who had the easy job. It was those who had taken the time to stop and rescue Zimba when they spotted him by the road, along with the shelter workers who ID'd his microchip and worked to contact his owner, who deserved most of the credit.
“All the hard work, you know, of coordinating everything and having him found, you know, the person that took time out of their day to actually, you know, wrangle Zimba and make sure that they got in contact with somebody. I mean that was awesome … it was just as easy for them to just ride on by and be like ‘Oh look, there’s a stray dog,’” he insisted.
Finally, at long last, Zimba was back home—and although Holt was headed back for Maryland on another exhausting cross-country trip, he didn’t regret the toll the trip took on him.
“I can’t imagine my right-hand man being gone that long,” he says. (Zach has his own dog, a German shepherd/Shar Pei mix named Forrest, and a cat, Sullivan.) “It was great, I mean, lovely … especially it being so close to Christmas and stuff like that.”
