TERRY the stolen Swindon puppy has been found – more than two months after he went missing and following a nationwide hunt involving thousands of people.

The baby border terrier who was taken from the car of Rosie O’Connor in September is now back at home, safe and well and playing underneath the Christmas tree at the Swindon home of Rosie and her fiancée Jake.

Terry, now seven-months-old, was spotted by a viewer of an ITV appeal launched by Rosie, who has never given up trying to find her pup.

Rosie, 26, had 4,000 ‘missing dog’ posters put up all over the UK as more than 2,000 people joined her Facebook group to look for Terry. Even TV presenter Lorraine Kelly joined the hunt by sharing Rosie’s plaintive pleas for his return.

Terry went missing at lunchtime on September 26 after Rosie and Jake drove to the village of Kingscote, near Tetbury, to look at a venue as a possible wedding reception.

As they toured the Matara Centre, they left Terry in the locked car, which was parked under a tree for shade, with water and with the rear windows slightly down so that he could have plenty of air.

But when they returned to the car, Terry had disappeared. The couple checked the windows but the gap was too narrow for the puppy to have squeezed through.

After searching for hours, Rosie turned to Facebook to ask if anyone had seen Terry. When that drew a blank, she had thousands of posters distributed across Britain and then went to the Swindon Advertiser to ask for help. Our story was picked up by the BBC and then ITV - and good luck happened.

“ITV West Country ran the appeal on Friday and it was seen by the father of a couple who live in Gloucester. The dad rang his son and said ‘that dog you bought is stolen’,” said Rosie.

The Gloucester couple paid £300 for the puppy to a man in the street who claimed that Terry was the only pup left from a litter he had bred. The man’s description has now been given to Wiltshire Police.

“The couple were wonderful,” said Rosie, “they rang me and said, ‘this is not a scam, we’ve got your dog, he’s fine. It breaks our hearts to give him up because he’s so lovely, but you’ll have him back by this afternoon’,” said Rosie, who immediately drove to Gloucester to be reunited with her pup.

“The night before I got the call that he was safe I was completely broken, I just wanted to give up and then, overnight, everything changed. This is the best Christmas present we could have hoped for, we are so happy.”

She added: “We’d like to thank everybody throughout Wiltshire and across the country who kept looking for Terry, their support and encouragement kept me going in the bleakest times.

“I also want to really thank the Swindon Advertiser because it was their story that started it all off, if they hadn’t run their article I wouldn’t have got on the BBC or ITV.”