Let's Start Learning!

Oh wait, I already have started learning . . .  but I want to share what I've learned, and continue to learn, about searching for and recovering lost dogs. I know that some of the body of knowledge about searching for missing pets (dogs and cats if not other domestic animals) has been developed and recorded, but I believe that so much of it has yet to be.

My plan with this blog is not to try to organize the lessons, or post them in a specific order. If I waited until I could organize them, I would never even get started. But hopefully with the use of blogging features such as labeling and pages, I can eventually give the reader a way of searching for lessons on topics of interest to them -- when I have enough updates for that.

I anticipate that I will use stories from one of my other blogs, Lost Dogs Found, to illustrate lessons. In other words, I will offer a lot of anecdotal evidence to support the points I make. And hopefully I will also be able to draw some attention to blogs of associates, in other areas, with their own blogs related to searching for missing pets. See the menu at right to view some of those blogs directly.

I have been collecting stories of lost dog reunions for more than a decade, both because they are interesting and more importantly to me, to learn from them.

And I've been working to search for and recover dogs lost in my area (Northern Virginia) since 2008. (Recovering lost cats requires such different skills and tactics that I feel I should stick to just one, dogs, at least until I become expert at it, which I'm not -- yet!) Some others that do what I do call themselves pet detectives, and I may occaisionally use that term when brevity is more important than expressing my vision of what I do. I think of myself as a lost dog recovery specialist, with recovery encompassing the searching part of recovering a lost dog, while containing an at large dog is outside of searching, or working to determine the lost dog's location.

I look to this blog to help other lost dog recovery specialists, or pet detectives, learn, and to help me continue to learn, too. If the blog also helps individual lost dog owners pick up tips and hints, great. But I think of frantic owners of dogs that just escaped as needing a far more brief overview of what they need to do, and presented to them in ways that keep their stress and panicked states in mind than this blog does. The targeted reader is someone looking to use the information learned from this blog in future lost dog recovery cases, not necessarily right this minute, and especially not "yesterday"!

Best wishes to all viewing this blog. I hope you will return often in the future to learn more, and even better, to contribute to learning by blog visitors, too!