You hear about them every day. See the signs stapled to telephone poles. Maybe have someone with a frantic look on their face stop you to ask if you've seen a small brown dog with a purple collar. If you're a dog owner, chances are good that this will happen to you at some point in your life. What you do the moment after you discover Buddy is missing will play a huge roll in your ability to get your dog back ASAP.
Here are some tips to help you find your lost dog.
- Check out the Pet Detective: http://www.pet-detective.com/index.html this is THE go-to site for a lost pet. The owner, Melody Pugh, decided to make finding lost pets her life's work after losing her own cat, Norman. She has a fantastic site full of tips from an experienced hand at reuniting lost pets and their owners. Follow her advice, in addition to the tips below.
- Don't wait to see if Buddy comes back on his own. Start looking right away. The sooner you start, the less chance he has to travel.
- Make up flyers and post them everywhere. Give them to bus, delivery service, & utility company drivers as well as cabbies and, especially, your mail carrier. These people go everywhere, they may spot your missing pal.
- Take flyers to local veterinary clinics and your shelter. Speaking of shelters, visit the shelter, don't just call. They are understaffed and very busy. They want your animal home as badly as you do, but with the volume of pets they deal with, yours may slip through. It's your dog, take the responsiblity of making a visit to check for yourself.
- Walk, don't drive. You'll be distracted, putting yourself and others at risk. Plus, your chances of actually seeing your dog in someone's backyard, whiling the time away with a little play session with their dog, will be much greater if you're on foot.
- Knock on every door, and leave a flyer, whether it's a residence or a business. Visit your local schools and ask if you can post a flyer.
- Join K9AmberAlert: http://pets.groups.yahoo.com/group/K9AmberAlert/ and place a post about your pet.
- Put ads in your local paper and on craigslist. Call your local radio stations and ask if they'll make an announcement.
- If you have solid evidence your pet was stolen, contact the police.
Above all, don't give up. Your pet is out there, somewhere. While not all pets find their way back home, many do. Following the tips above will help insure that you're one of the one's with a happy story to tell. I was one of the lucky one's. My Belgian Tervuren, Barry, got out of our yard one day, and was gone for a month. I posted flyers, placed ads, looked, and looked, and looked for that dog. I spent more time than you can imagine driving to obsure places to look at found dogs who ended up looking nothing like the description of my dog, I looked at dead dog's next to highways and roads, I was almost a fixture at my local shelter. Finally, one day, a nun at St. Joe's hospital looked out a window and saw a dog on an island in the middle of the Huron River. He was still there the next day. So she called the shelter, who called the sheriff's department, who called their marine division (it was March, and most boats were still in storage). They trailered a boat in and took it out to rescue my dog. He was so skinny his collar would go around his neck twice and he had an irregular heartbeat. But he came back to me, and he lived to be 17 years old.
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