This update passes on a tiny tip, or trick, to put in your bag if you are a pet detective or a lost dog recovery volunteer or specialist. It’s one of those brilliant ideas that, when Donna, my lost dog searching associate, came up with it, I said a silent prayer of thanks for having hooked up with her to do this type of volunteer work.
We had been searching for a dog that had been sighted a few times, and tracked just about as many times by a missing pet scent trailing dog, well trained and with years of experience, that our area is lucky to have. It seems that he had been sticking to well travelled routes. There was plenty of automobile and foot traffic where this dog had been spotted and scented.
As is normally the case when trying to recover a dog known to be at large for a period of time, we believed that when this dog was encountered, he would not come easily, so that the effort would shift from a search effort to a recovery effort. We knew we needed to at least plan to use a humane trap, and if it turned out that he came running once he saw and smelled his family member, then great.
Since he was traveling such a highly populated area, we knew that we needed a way to draw him off the beaten path, because any humane trap we would set up had to be located away from the traffic. It needed to be in a spot that wouldn’t draw the attention of humans. This is always true, pretty much.
But what could we use to lead him astray, so to speak, when he seemed so intent on sticking to sidewalks? Naturally, a scent lure came to mind quickly. Bread crumbs, literally? No, if nothing else, any kind of treat or meat trail or something like that would be gobbled up overnight by other free ranging animals of all types – raccoons, squirrels, foxes, possums, cats, you name it. Once that happened, even if the other animals didn’t follow the trail to the bonus feeding station, the trail leading the prized dog off of his route would be gone.
Although the dog has never been seen or scented since, and we don’t know where he is today, the solution to that problem has stuck with me, and I would love to pass it on and eventually, get feedback to see how this works for others to resolve this particular problem. The solution is: a grease trail.
Donna got some fast food joint to agree to hold out a container of grease for her, though when she picked it up, the guy saved too small a container to work for us since we needed to lay a longer trail than the grease would have created. So we ended up picking up bottled gravy or broth or something like that. But the idea is the same – some form of scent trail that isn’t removable as would be a trail of food or articles of clothing.
As I’m writing this, I’m remembering that this is the same thing as the scent water that we instruct bonded dog owners to create. We instruct them to soak dirty socks in water, bottle the water, and spray a scent trail from a sighting location to their home. This is actually huge – when there is a relationship between the lost dog and the person. Where the dog is newly adopted, or fostered, or just in from transport (such as a rescue dog brought in to our suburban area from high kill shelters in rural areas, a common rescue practice), this grease trail is well worth trying.
If you use this luring method, let me know how it works!
