Panama City, Fla. ? Like the celebrity she’s become, Pooh Bear the poster pooch for high-tech pet identification seems to be enjoying the perks of fame.

The star of a real-life “Homeward Bound” adventure that rivals Hollywood’s tear-jerkiest lost-and-found-pet pic is lounging on a Victorian settee, receiving admirers.

After six years of doing who knows what, who knows where, “Bear” can lounge wherever she wants (even on a tapestry-covered antique that her owner hopes to sell for $700).

“I’m just so happy to have her home,” says Bambi Lesne, the 45-year-old metals artist who concluded sometime in the late ’90s that her six-pound Pomeranian was history.

Then, in a happy ending that owes as much to Silicon Valley as to a Midwestern stranger’s kindness, Bear returned.

A woman named Peggy rescued the bedraggled stray from the streets of Cincinnati, then a subcutaneous microchip scanned by an alert veterinarian linked the diminutive dog to a Florida Panhandle humane group.

A few phone calls later, and Pooh Bear was headed home last month to a household reminiscent of a George Booth New Yorker cartoon. Tokyo Joe, Static, Porsche and Mia-yow, the cats, sprawl under an old boat.

Templeton and Disney, the rats, poke their inquisitive snouts through the wires of a cage in the dining room. Max, an 8-year-old Sheltie, rolls in the overgrown grass.

Living on a boat?

In 1996, Bear “got lost from our family,” as Lesne prefers to describe it. Lesne cried for two years, placed ads in several Florida newspapers and endlessly called shelters.

“I felt like I would find her, that I’d track her down,” says Lesne. “But I didn’t.”

Fluffy and black with a white muzzle befitting a senior canine citizen of 13, Bear looks like a button-eyed plush toy. She has an astoundingly long tongue.

How a dog small enough to hide in a handbag vanished from Panama City and materialized at an Ohio River marina could forever remain a mystery.

“She not talking,” confides Lesne.

“All she says is woof, woof,” confirms Pierre Lesne, Bambi’s Moroccan-born husband of four years.

The Cincinnati-area vet who scanned Bear’s microchip has one theory.

Because Bear originated in Florida and turned up near the water, Oak Crest Animal Hospital’s Dr. Cheryl Divine speculates Bear might have lived on a boat.

“She was not thin and she’d been clipped” when one of Divine’s longtime clients brought Bear in for a checkup early last month.

The client a 50-ish woman named Peggy, with a family doesn’t want to be identified or interviewed. Divine calls her “an excellent pet owner.”

“She found this little dog that had been out on the streets awhile. She was very dirty and my client was very worried about her. She’d already taken her home and given her a bath.”

Ratty as she looked, “her foot pads seemed OK,” says Divine. “She seemed very calm. We think of little bitty dogs as nervous, but she wasn’t. I like to think she’d been well taken care of.”

Bambi Lesne has her own notion of how Bear went missing, but she’s reluctant to discuss it publicly. Suffice it to say it involves someone she once knew who took Bear home for a visit before vanishing out of Lesne’s life (and, apparently, Panama City).

Microchips to the rescue

Shortly before Bear disappeared, Bambi took advantage of a deal that her then-employer, The Humane Society of Bay County (Fla.), was offering on identifying microchips.

She recalls paying $18. Commercial vets charge up to $65.

“‘What a great idea!'” she remembers thinking about the implantable microchips. “‘That way, if anything happens, I can get her back.'”

While most American pets remain unchipped, the technology is growing in popularity. Avid, the California company that made Bear’s chip, reports having sold 3 million in the United States, another 8 million elsewhere since 1985.