PET TRACKER
Chapter 10, Part 4: Lost Pet Behaviors, Pt 3 of 8
NOTE FOR THE VISUALLY IMPAIRED: This story is also available as an audio recording, read by Kat, the author.
You are about to read a section from the middle of my memoir, Pet Tracker. To read the FULL Substack version (for free!) from the very start of the book, go to this link, scroll down until you see the “See All >” button, and click on it. Then, scroll all of the way to the very bottom, and you can start reading the beginning of the book with the “Dedication & Introduction.”
If you missed the previous Pet Tracker story that preceded this post, you can find it here.
By carefully examining the information I had about each factor on a lost pet case, I was often able to predict what likely happened to a lost dog or cat and what the chances were that the pet would be recovered. These interrelated behaviors are central to the online training courses that I currently use to train pet detectives, trappers, K9 pet trackers, pet rescuers, drone operators, private investigators, and other animal industry professionals.
I began to examine the behavior of guardians in my investigations. I discovered that one of the biggest human behaviors that causes dog and cat guardians to give up too soon when a beloved dog or cat goes missing is their emotions—mainly grief that their beloved companion animal is missing and the fear that the animal might be deceased, or that they will never be found. It was heartbreaking when I encountered people who gave up searching for their lost dog or cat too soon, especially when their decision was motivated by fear or grief instead of statistics and probabilities.
In one case that I worked, a fourteen-year-old outdoor-access cat named Tony vanished from his home in Aptos, California. His owner, Catherine, had already searched the neighborhood for Tony but was not able to find him. Three days later, after reading about my work in the paper, Catherine called and asked me to respond. I used Rachel in an area search and checked under decks, porches, and in heavy brush within a five-house radius of Tony’s home. After conducting an extensive search of his territory, we determined that Tony was no longer there.
Catherine had mentioned that the day Tony vanished, she had a roofer at her house doing repair work. The man had a van that he left open during his stay at the home, and Catherine suspected that Tony, who had a history of climbing on cars, might have climbed into it. Catherine told me that she had already called the man and asked him to look in his van. The man had checked, but said Tony was not there. Because Rachel indicated that Tony was no longer in the area, it was obvious to me that the inside of the van was a high-probability search area.
I instructed Catherine to be assertive and call the roofer again, suggesting that she simply ask him to tell her all the locations he had stopped at for the past three days. I figured that Tony could have jumped out of the van at one of the locations the roofer had stopped at. But Catherine took my suggestion even further. She drove over to the roofer’s home. When she discovered that the work van was parked in front of the roofer’s home, Catherine walked up to the van, peeked inside, and called Tony’s name. Up popped the head of Catherine’s panicked, disoriented, and elderly cat!
When the roofer unlocked his van to let Catherine pick up a very dehydrated Tony, he remarked how he couldn’t believe that Tony was inside his van for five days without making a sound. This is very common behavior for cats—being silent is one of their primary ways to protect themselves from predators.
Catherine’s behavior is a perfect example of how the actions of a pet owner, especially one who deeply loves his or her pet, will influence whether or not a lost pet will be found. Catherine recovered Tony because she was not afraid to a hire pet detective or to enter her neighbor’s yards (with their permission, of course) to search for Tony herself, and she was willing to take matters into her own hands, without caring that the roofer would think she was a nutty cat lady.