


Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos‘ recent search for their dog came right out of a soap opera — and apparently turned some heads.
On the subject of a runaway dog in Australia being rescued after 529 days away from home on Live with Kelly and Mark on Wednesday, Ripa said she “can’t imagine” Consuelos losing their dog Lena” for a minute and a half,” though he admitted that they “did that the other day.”
The two recalled a recent trip to Palm Springs, where they were going to head to “a nice dinner” on a “windy” night.
“I take [Lena] outside the front house, and she likes to go to the bathroom in this little spot,” Consuelos shared. “And then I go back in to the front door. The garage door was open. She goes into the garage, and I say, ‘No, no. Come through the front door. Come. Let’s go.’ And I see her following me.”
Ripa chimed in, “He walks in. He closes the door and he looks at me and he goes, ‘Where’s Lena?’ I’m, like, doing dishes.”
Consuelos clarified that he asked Ripa this “after about 10 seconds,” when they both began looking for her.
“I go out and look in the front area, and the gate’s open. I’m like, ‘Oh no. So I’m looking. I look inside the house, Kelly’s looking around,” he added.
Ripa explained that Consuelos has a “tracker” on Lena, which indicated that she was “next door.”
“We go next door. No Lena,” she said.

Consuelos noted that “the wind is picking up” at this point, as his “hair is flying in the air” while he’s screaming their dog’s name. Things only got more intense when a “big piece of palm was blown loose from a tree” and was “in the middle of the street down the road.”
“I don’t have my glasses or my contacts, so I see something in the middle of the road, and I start running by this woman,” she recalled. “Now tears are streaming down my face. I’m running because there’s my dog and she’s been hit by a car, and oh my God. So I’m running, running, running.”
Meanwhile Consuelos was “in the neighbor’s yard” checking his phone tracker and screaming Lena’s name. After Ripa realized that “it was just a palm” in the street and not Lena, they met back at the house, where a lady was walking her dog.
Ripa revealed, “A lady was walking her dog, witnessed this, and thought we were having a domestic dispute. She’s like, ‘Oh, you’re the people from yesterday.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, yes. We found our dog. We had lost our dog.’ And she goes, ‘I thought you were having a domestic disturbance and I didn’t know what to do.’ Because I was running down the street crying, and Mark is just standing in the middle of the street.”
As Ripa let out a chuckle, Consuelos said Lena’s AirTag tracker “keeps moving around,” and that they continued looking in the garage and “under” eveything.
“She has this little carrying case that we travel with her that she loves so much because when we pack our bags, we put that case and she jumps in because she knows she wants to come with us,” he continued.
Ripa highlighted that when Lena spots her “with a hairdryer, she jumps in the carrying case” because that means they are “going somewhere.”
Consuelos added, “If it’s an outdoor restaurant, we can take her to dinner with us.”
It turned out that Lena “was waiting for [them] in the carrying case.”
“Spoiler alert: she wasn’t invited to the party,” Ripa teased.
Live with Kelly and Mark airs on weekdays. Check out their website for your local listings.