Danger! A Lost Dog Story

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98 – March, 2024

By Caroline Coile

If you’ve never had that moment you’re lucky–the moment you realize your dog is truly, undeniably, really lost, and you can never cover the amount of area you need to search by just driving around and calling. I’d arrived at that moment about an hour after my neighbor had called to report seeing two of my dogs on his trail cam. I’d rushed out in the car and immediately located the two, but had noticed a third was also missing–8-month-old “Danger”–and he was nowhere to be found. I’d driven around the area, called at the top of my lungs, checked back home, searched a larger area, called louder (and note: “Danger” is not a good choice of names when it comes to driving around homes and yelling it out of your car window), checked back home, searched inside my house, searched a much larger area–and then called my friends to help. The problem was, they could do little more than I had. After we all searched for another hour, I arrived at that moment of realization: I had a lost dog.

Years ago I had written an article about how to find a lost dog, and sometimes I actually remember some of what I write. The main thing I recalled from it was that after about an hour of searching your energy is better spent getting others to search for you. That means posting on social media, posting signs, and contacting animal control, veterinarians and anyone else who may have eyes in the area.

Psychologically, it turns out that step is difficult. Taking it meant my dog had entered that classification of truly lost dogs. The last time I’d had a dog in that category was when I was 9 years old, and our family Whippet was actually spotted being stolen. We never got her back.

Despite knowing this was my best use of time, it was still hard to sit inside and try to gather information to make a post and a poster when I felt I should be outside searching. Things that should have been easy now seemed to take forever. I started by using his baby puppy names of “Baby” and “Mako,” which he still answered to now. I didn’t think “Danger” was a great choice for having people approach him. Mostly, I needed a photo–but I had no current photos of my puppy. The best I could find was a similarly-colored and aged puppy I had in a photo from the 1990s, and one of his sister that didn’t show an outline. I used both for a post on my local Facebook pages, and the old photo for a printed flyer, but the contrast was so poor it didn’t show up well on my black & white printer copies. Still, it was the best I had and I ran off 100 copies for starters.

Click here to read the complete article
98 – March, 2024

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