Dog who escaped UES day care found by homeless man: owner

A cherished Manhattan pooch who escaped an Upper East Side doggie day care is back in his owner’s arms thanks to a selfless homeless man, The Post has learned.

The beige Shiba Inu named Nori managed to escape from D Is For Doggy at East 84th Street and Second Avenue early Monday by sliding through an unlocked gate at the facility, owner Diane Leighton told The Post Wednesday.

A distraught Leighton, 32, said she plastered Manhattan’s East Side from 42nd to 125th streets, including Central Park, with posters of her wayward pet, last seen heading downtown at First Avenue and 80th Street.

Leighton got a call early Wednesday from a man who’d seen her posters and said he found the 3-year-old pooch in Thomas Jefferson Park in East Harlem, where he has been living.

She frantically raced uptown and met the kind-hearted man, who earlier gave Nori a can of tuna.

“We’re at the vet right now,” an elated Leighton told The Post. “(Nori) looks OK, but he’s pretty banged up. He’s limping, he has a cut on his face and his elbows are scabbed. But oh my God, there are no words to describe how happy we are.”

Leighton said she hugged the homeless man in his 40s or 50s who used a cellphone to call her to let her know he had located Nori. She also gave him $5 — all the cash she had at the time, she said.

“We’re going to connect again later,” Leighton said. “Oh God, this is the best ending. We’re so happy.”

Leighton said workers at the day care told her Nori, whom she purchased from an upstate New York breeder, dashed through an open gate as someone else was being let into the facility.

“He saw the door open and was like, ‘This is for me’ and just booked it,” she recalled. “He saw that opportunity.”

Leighton, who works in pharmaceutical sales, said she and her boyfriend consider the shy and skittish canine to be much more than a pet.

“He’s my child,” Leighton gushed. “He’s our baby.”

Nori had been microchipped, but the device wasn’t linked to a GPS tracker, Leighton said.

She plans on returning to the park later Wednesday afternoon to meet up again with the homeless man who ended her two-day nightmare.

The owner of the doggie day care, meanwhile, said he was “really relieved” that Nori had been found.

“Honestly it was an unfortunate set of events,” owner Motty Gutflais told The Post of how Nori got out. “The dog was in the grooming area and wasn’t leashed and one staffer let a dog in as he ran out. It really was an unfortunate chain of events. We’re so sorry, everyone feels terrible. Thank God the dog was found.”