The Lost Pet Problem
Everyone Involved in the Pet Industry Should be Trained!
Every year, millions of dogs and cats escape from their homes and are never reunited with their family. Lost companion animals that are not found by their families are a major contributing factor to the high rates of “stray” animals that clog our animal shelters, no-kill shelters, rescue groups, community cat populations, and feral cat colonies across North America.
The worst part of what I call “The Lost Pet Problem” is that the entire burden of finding and recovering a missing dog or cat rests solely on the shoulders of the owner/guardian, who, in most cases, doesn’t even know how or where to search. The majority of pet guardians are not equipped with nor trained in how to use animal capturing tools like catchpoles, snappy snares (see video), game cameras, and humane traps. Why do we expect grieving, panic-ridden people to recover their lost pet when they are untrained, unequipped, and too distraught to think straight? This gapping hole in the animal welfare system—the failure to develop lost pet recovery services—is something that I’ve never understood.
This video is of an intact, male Pitbull that an animal control officer (ACO) in Federal Way, WA asked me to help capture using a technique I call “magnet dog / snappy snare.” It’s a technique that I teach in my 8-week online Missing Animal Response or “MAR” Field Course (I will teach a new group class starting Jan 15th—more info on that below). This Pittie had evaded capture by the ACO for over a week. The dog would jump fences in and out of people’s yards in order to play (or mate) with female dogs. As soon as the ACO entered a yard with a catchpole, this clever boy would jump a fence and evade capture! In this video, you can see him turn to go jump the fence when I first entered the backyard. However, because I used “calming signals” where I moved sideways slowly, yawned, and did not make eye contact, the dog stopped to watch me. As I move into the frame and right before his capture, you’ll see that he looked down at my dog Kody, then up to my face (to see if I was a threat), then back down to Kody. The moment he sniffed noses with Kody and was distracted is when I was able to use my snappy snare to catch him.
One of the principles of our MAR Field course is that we train our students in the fundamental principle that dogs and cats are two very different species and that they behave differently when lost. So, this begs the question—why then are animal shelters, humane societies, microchip companies, GPS tracker companies, and most lost & found websites all giving out generic advice? Why do they instruct dog guardians to use the exact same recovery techniques that they also instruct cat guardians to use? Dogs and cats are like apples and oranges! They are two very different species that behave differently when lost and they require two very different recovery techniques.
Here’s the typical generic lost pet recovery advice that you can find on most animal shelter websites:
Post and search for your pet online with social media (Facebook, Next door) and Lost & Found websites.
Walk through your neighborhood and call out loud for your pet.
Tell your family, friends, and neighbors that your pet is lost. Post notices throughout the neighborhood using a clear, up-to-date photo.
Contact your local animal control agency and file a lost pet report.
Notify your veterinarian and microchip company to let them know that your pet is missing.
Visit your shelter every 3 days in the event someone found and brought your pet to the shelter.
While these are necessary steps for all lost pets, it is outdated advice! Dog and cat guardians also need behavior-based lost pet recovery advice. Here are some of the behavioral differences between dogs and cats when they become lost:
Dogs will bolt-and-run when panicked while cats will dart-and-hide (in silence).
Dogs are often picked up (“rescued”) by passersby who mistakenly believe they were “dumped” or are “homeless,” whereas most people don’t even notice a loose cat since they independently wander freely. Seeing a cat unattended in a neighborhood is normal.
Dogs that were born with skittish, fearful temperaments are mistakenly assumed to be “abused” while cats that were also born with skittish, fearful temperaments are mistakenly assumed to be feral and untamed. It’s the same behavior that developed for the same reason—fear due to genetics and puppy or kittenhood experiences and/or a lack of socialization—but two different false interpretations (by would-be rescuers) that prevent these dogs and cats from being reunited with the family they were separated from.
The strategies, tactics, and equipment that should be used to recover a lost dog are vastly different from those that should be used to recover a missing cat. With lost dogs, it is all about finding the person who has your dog or has seen your dog (i.e. marketing with neon posters and social media). But with lost cats, its all about a slow, methodical search of all hiding places within a 3 to 5-house radius of where the cat was last seen (i.e. surveillance cameras, detailed search of neighbor yards).
And not only that, the strategies, tactics and equipment that you should use to recover an outdoor-access cat that failed to return home are very different from how you’d recover a “displaced” indoor-only cat that has escaped outside. An outdoor-access cat that fails to come home means “something has happened” to that cat, whereas an escaped, displaced cat means “the cat is hiding nearby.” These two very different scenarios require very different recovery techniques.
Dog guardians are not told by animal shelter staff that giant, neon LOST DOG posters are the #1 lost dog recovery tool to develop leads.
Cat guardians whose outdoor-access cats vanish aren’t told by animal shelter staff that the #1 way to recover a missing cat is to conduct a slow, methodical search of their neighbor’s yards.
And cat guardians whose indoor-only cats escape outdoors aren’t told by animal shelter staff that their cat is most likely hiding in silence very close to the escape point. Animal shelters don’t know to tell cat guardians that they can lure their escaped cat back into their home (in the middle of the night) by propping open a door, smearing smelly cat food above the door frame, and hiding behind the door which they then kick closed once the cat has snuck back inside. This is a recovery method we call “House as Trap.”
Why do we leave the process of searching for lost pets up to grieving, brokenhearted people who are discouraged, overwhelmed, untrained, unsure of what to do, and are often overwhelmed with too much (often bad) social media advice? No wonder our shelters are full of “stray” dogs and cats, most of which are actually LOST companion animals where families failed to recover them. No wonder the hearts of so many desperate dog and cat guardians are broken when they fail to find their lost pet!
There are many things that pet owner/guardians do wrong, but can you blame them? Through social media they are bombarded with bad information like “pee in a bottle and then use that urine to lay scent trails for your dog to follow that ‘pee trail’ home” or “put your cat’s litter box out on the porch to bring him home.” They deal with scammers galore who claim they will show up with a tracking dog or drone, take their money, and no one ever shows up. They falsely believe that all coyotes are cat-killers and since they’ve seen a coyote in their area, they don’t even search for their missing cat when the reality is that animal shelters kill (euthanize) more cats than coyotes actually do! And here, to me, is the saddest part: if they fail to find their pet within a week or so, they are pressured by friends, coworkers, and even family members who tell them to “give up” or “go adopt a new dog” because they can’t stand to see that guardian continually grieve.
With everything working against them, people who lose their beloved dogs and cats need all of the help that they can get in order to achieve a successful reunion. We offer every imaginable service under the sun for our companion animals—pet sitters, dog walkers, veterinary care, doggy daycare, acupuncture, massage therapy, behaviorists—yet when it comes to our beloved pets becoming lost, an owner/guardian is typically left on their own.
Since 1997, I’ve been involved in hands-on lost pet recovery work. I started out as a K9 pet tracker where I used my retired cadaver dog, Rachel, to track lost pets (my serialized memoir PET TRACKER here on Substack tells Rachel’s story). Through my 27-year journey of training other pet detectives, I’ve presented lost pet behavior workshops at countless animal welfare conferences in Canada and the USA, year after year, encouraging shelter staff to update their Lost & Found counter services. However, very little has changed in what animal shelters tell pet guardians who’ve lost a pet, so sadly, I have given up on animal shelter education. In 2022, I retired from speaking at animal welfare conferences. In 2025, I plan to incorporate a new focus of addressing the emotional and spiritual needs of the families who’ve lost but never found their beloved companion animal. In this new era, I will continue to train volunteer and professional lost pet recovery specialists (“pet detectives”) to offer community-based, hands-on recovery services.
Many of the “MAR Technicians” that graduate from my course coach owner/guardians, create neon lost pet posters, rent out recovery equipment, offer sophisticated humane trapping and surveillance methods or utilize drones or trained K9 pet trackers (most, but not all, K9 handlers and drone operators are paid, not volunteer, professionals). Sadly, there are entire portions of North America (especially on the west coast and the Midwest) where there are NO MAR-trained resources. If you live in these areas and you work in the pet industry, please consider taking my (online) course! Every pet sitter, dog walker, veterinarian and veterinary technician, groomer, dog trainer, doggy day care staff, and anyone who works with companion animals needs to know what to do should a dog or cat escape from your care. Do yourself (and your clients) a favor and become educated! Here are some of the topics that I cover in this fascinating (if I say so myself) course:
The Lost Pet Problem, Where Do Lost Pets Go, Lost Pet Behaviors, Grief Avoidance, Search Probability Theory, Search & Recovery Applications, Deductive Reasoning to Process Clues, Utilization of MAR Search Dogs, How to / How NOT to Approach Stray Dogs (Calming Signals), Neuroscience of Skittish Dog Behaviors, Lost Dog Recovery Techniques, Car Tagging, Drones in Lost Pet Recovery, Intersection Alerts, Creative Dog Captures, Magnet dog / snappy snare, Lost Cat Recovery Techniques, Detect & Reunite, Trap & Reunite, Magnet Cats, Creative Cat Captures, Other Species, Flyers vs. Posters, Inattentional Blindness, Physical Evidence, Animal Tracking, Forensics, Pet Loss / Grief Counseling Programs, Ethics in MAR, Search Hazards, Lost Pet Phone Consultations, and Predator Risk Analysis.
I’m offering a Group 8-week online MAR Field course that will start Wednesday January 15, 2025. This class will meet (via Zoom) every Wednesday (for one hour) at 4pm PST / 7pm EST for an investment of $350 (discounts if you have a group of 4 or more attendees) and you can make 3 monthly “split” payments of $116.67. WHY NOT ASK SANTA to give you this training as a special Christmas gift this year? We also offer a “self-paced” option for those who cannot make the Weds meetings.
If you know someone who loves animals and you think that they might want to be trained in how to offer proper lost pet recovery assistance, please suggest our training and refer them to our registration page. If you have any questions at all about this training or anything I’ve shared here, you can either comment below or we can chat about it! This is my first time trying to use the Substack Chat, so bare with me please!
Wow! I just read snippet after snippet out loud to my vet student daughter. So much we don’t know that your experience has taught you. Thanks for the enlightenment!