A group of seven dogs that went missing in China have gone viral after a video emerged of them walking more than 17km back home to their village, reuniting with owners who had been searching for them for days.

The video, first posted online on 15 March, shows the dogs – including a golden retriever, labrador, German shepherd and Pekinese – walking along the highway in Changchun, the capital of China’s north-east Jilin province, where temperatures are dropping below 0C overnight.

Leading the pack is a corgi, later identified in Chinese media as Dapang, or “big fatty”.

One volunteer for a local stray dog rescue centre called Tong Tong said that she went door-knocking in nearby villages and posted missing dog flyers for the hounds after seeing the video, because she was concerned about their welfare in the sub-zero temperatures.

“On the morning of 18 March, I woke up to find it was snowing in Changchun. I was especially worried about the seven dogs, afraid that they hadn’t eaten or drunk anything. So I borrowed a drone and set off to search for them,” Tong Tong said in a video posted by the rescue centre.

On 19 March, it was reported that the dogs had found their way home.

Three of the dogs, including Dapang, belong to a woman who lives in a village near Changchun. She told Chinese media that she had been looking for her dogs for four days, and was on the point of giving up, when Dapang wandered into the house on 18 March. The owner then searched in nearby villages and found the other dogs, who had been taken in by another villager.

It is not clear why the dogs went missing but some netizens raised concerns that they could have been kidnapped for dog meat, which is still eaten as a delicacy in some parts of China. However, some theorised they could have also been stolen to be resold as pets or for other purposes, or have wandered off by themselves.

On 21 March Jilin’s provincial culture and tourism bureau said that the dogs had wandered off of their own accord, attracted by the German shepherd who was on heat and has been known to disappear for a few days at a time. State media warned that the incident “reflects the shortcomings of online information dissemination – a mixture of true and false information, where subjective speculation is easily taken as fact and spread”.

Some netizens joked that the dogs’ adventure could be turned into a film, or a real life version of Paw Patrol, a Canadian cartoon for children about a boy and his pack of rescue dogs.

“Watching this made me want to cry. Dogs are humans’ friends forever,” wrote one Weibo user. (The Guardian)