Bonded Person as Lure

After my last update, I will offer a contradictory lesson, since I’ve learned both lessons. Both are important.

I had briefly discussed a scientific explanation of why a dog that has been out on its own for a while, eating a bad diet, will fail, at lealst initially, to recognize its owner when seen, heard and even smelled.

It remains true, that in many cases, a dog will show no signs of recognition when first reunited with a person or people with whom he was bonded before disappearing. But on the other hand, and in other cases, the dog’s bonded owner, or anyone that had been close to the dog before it went missing, may still be the best lure there is.

When Vixen went missing, we were told all about her many fears. There was almost nothing and no one that she was not afraid of. After a few days of fliers, large signs, and other outreach to the community about Vixen and her plight, we started to receive sighting calls from people that were seeing her. This gave us our first ideas about where to start putting feeding stations, which we would want to swap out for a humane trap. Pretty soon, we realized that we had a problem since the chance that she would approach even a feeding station was looking really remote.

But protocol was to contact the people that she had stayed with before she was adopted – two days before she went missing, by the way. Prior to that, she had spent several months in a dog day care facility, after having been rescued from a bad situation. Several of the employees had become familiar to her, so they were to be called if a live sighting was to come in.

And such a sighting call did come in, and they were called. After all that build-up, Vixen pretty much went right to the person within minutes of her arrival.

So, the successful lure here wasn’t food, which we always think of first when considering possible lures. It was a familiar and trusted person.

I could point to any number of stories that ended similar to Vixen’s story, with family members serving, in effect, as the lure. Luna’ story is another one that I will tell.

When we were working together to try to round up a stray beagle that had taken up residence in a neighborhood, we posted a picture from our wildlife camera, once we captured the first few, to Craigslist. We were looking for the owner, and within a day, a woman came forward after comparing our picture to those of her family’s beagle that had disappeared four weeks earlier, from their home 22 miles away. The woman came out with her small children and her mother. Once she emerged from the woods, it did take the dog a few minutes to focus, or to catch a whiff of their scent, or do whatever it took to recognize the family. When she did, she went running to them. I’d love to have seen it, as I’m sure it was a beautiful scene.

The advice, then, for the pet detective, is to caution the dog’s owner that the dog may not recognize the person, but then also, to include people that the dog was bonded to among the responders for live sighting calls.