YOUR PET IS GONE. NOW WHAT?
You cannot believe it happened. Nothing in your relationship with your dog or cat thus far would ever have indicated that he/she would get spooked, wiggle out of their gear, and take off. As you are screaming their name down the street, your pet disappears leaving your imagination of disaster to run wild. Whether you see your pet take off with your own eyes, or you come back to an empty car, yard, or leash, you are still filled with the same emotion. Panic. In today’s technologically savvy world, we have an abundance of apps and businesses that can fulfill our many needs. Even in a situation like this. We have GPS collars that will track your animal’s every move (if you are lucky enough to have thought of it beforehand). But at some point, the battery will die, and you will be left in the same predicament as the person who did not even have a chip or collar on their pet. This is where you will hear crickets and constantly receive prayer emoji’s and “shared” on your social media feed. You are on your own.
One of the many things that drew me to lost pet recovery, is that very gap between what we are prepared to control and what we are not. The part of the pet that goes feral begs us to use other means of understanding our fur baby’s next move and nothing can be done for us. We are the ones that must drive the campaign hard, even during a near emotional breakdown. It is the time when you must start thinking like your dog or cat and using techniques that usually bypass the average pet owner's awareness. “Aren’t we supposed to ‘catch’ or ‘get’ the dog or cat?”
There are some steps that will improve your chances of recovering your dog or cat. And like everything else, time is of the essence. First is creating the physical poster and making sure you have plastered it everywhere in the vicinity that your pet went missing. Without the physical poster, your chances are diminished. Online is wonderful, but it will not do you much good if the person who sees your pet is someone who does not go online to begin with. The very first thing that people usually want to do is go out and look for their pet. This is not going to help the situation. Because even if you manage to “find” your missing cat or dog, the odds are against you when it comes to getting them to come to you. You will never be able to chase and catch the dog or cat, as their agility and prowess is beyond anything we can muster up on the spot. So, if your only recourse is calmly getting this feral pet to come over to you, in a feral state, mobs of people searching, and chasing after them, you will only drive your pet farther away.
On most of the cases I work, the hardest part is convincing the owners to trust me in not acting on that first instinct: running to the spot where they were last seen, calling their name, and begging for them to snap out of it. This puts your pet's safety at risk. In my Brooklyn neighborhood, there was not much time for one dog owner. His beagle wiggled out of his harness and was scare. The owner made a move to chase after him, and the beagle ran in front of a car and died. The whole thing lasted no more than a minute.
Another difficult aspect of lost animal cases is getting the clients to refrain from posting sightings online. Usually, when a sighting comes in, there’s excitement. There's hope. But keep it to yourself. With the immediacy of social media, volunteers with good intentions will put your pet at risk. Plenty of people want to help and won’t hesitate to run out and chase your dog for you, messing up your chances of recovery instead of improving them.
Nobody wants to prepare for something they hope never happens, but it will be a lifesaver in your time of need to prepare. The three most important things to remember are this:
1. Physical posters that state “Do Not Chase,”
2. download or create a To-Do List of all the essential places to contact
3. and keep all sightings to offline – not for public consumption.
Starting with these three things will place you on the right track to bring your animal home. If you or someone you know is ever faced with the scary emergency of a pet on the loose and lost, you can always reach out to me for professional help or use my free resources online at theintuitivewalker.com.
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Jim Tierney is an Intuitive Pet Tracker based in Brooklyn, NY. He has worked many cases in the difficult urban environments of Jersey City, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, Bronx as well as Los Angeles. Jim first made the connection with animals through his business, a pet care service, where he spent six years walking and pet sitting. His passion is using his gift of clairvoyance, coupled with practical lost pet strategies to give each lost pet the best chance of being recovered. Jim treats intuitive impressions as leads that need to prove themselves, just like any other. He has helped reunite several pets with their worried owners and has never given up on those that have yet to be found. He is a certified Missing Animal Response Technician and a member of the Missing Animal Response Network.
