Who Can View Stray Pets at a Shelter

Animal shelters are, it should be obvious, one of the first places to check for a missing pet, especially a dog. There are many assumptions people can make about shelters -- until they spend time at shelters, or talking to people about them, or reading up about the differences between shelters. I think they are like snow flakes, with no two being exactly alike.

A common assumption is that once you file a lost dog report with your local shelter, you can mark it off on your list and spend your time on other items. This is typically not true, and a future update will probably address that issue.

This update addresses something that I found out more recently, about a shelter in the next county over from mine. Actually, I think I heard it once before, in conjunction with a different shelter in a differnt county, but the memory of that first exposure is not so clear as this recent exposure. Here's what it's about:

At this time, there's a shih tzu lost in my general area (which is Northern Virginia), by the name of Toby. He had been adopted from one of the many local animal rescue organizaton about three days before he slipped his collar on a walk. Sightings, and tracks run by a dog trained to trail the scents of missing pets, have him basically meandering in the same neighborhood from which he was lost. The volunteers assembled are focusing on such activities as fliering, checking feeding stations, and monitoring a humane trap.

But some attempts have been made to check the Loudoun County (VA) shelter, since Toby's location is within that county. Recently a volunteer reported that she had learned from talking to the staff at the shelter which she had visited, that only the owner of a lost dog is able to view the strays in the shelter. Her point, which she made after relaying that information to us on our email list, was that we, the volunteers, would no longer be able to help Toby's adoptor in that way.

(Eventually, the adoptor dropped out of the picture, and relinquished Toby back to the rescue organization. So I guess now, volunteers from the rescue can view the stray dogs in the shelter.)

You'd better be my owner, or you can't look at me!

WHAT?????  What would be the reason for this rule????  PLENTY of people that have lost their dogs get help from others to conduct tshelter searches along with fliering, feeding station checking, etc. So, friends and other volunteers need to be able to conduct this task. Yet in Loudoun and in who knows what other counties, there are probably lots of lost dogs in the shelter that never get home because the owners can't get to the shelters, or not during operating hours, to find them.

I'll research this and eventually find some reasons for this rule. I would welcome any help from readers to figure this one out! Leave a comment, and it is emailed to me.

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!