I hope everyone is doing well this New Year. I’ve got lots to write about, but resolutions can wait a week or two. Maybe that will be the perfect time for a reminder.
A lot of people have been polite over the holidays, asking how my Christmas was. It’s very standard small talk. Christmas was great, but the next three days went very, very badly.
We were set to go to NYC for a day or two and then continue to Hershey, PA, for a couple more. Finally, we’d do a day at American Dream in New Jersey before coming home for New Year’s Eve. I’d love to get more creative with our planning, but that’s the best we can do with all the holidays, my son’s birthday, and the start of school.
We dropped off our dog, Cora, at our dog sitter. I have a thriving dog-sitting business on Rover.com, so it’s a little unusual to be on the other side of the transaction. We got in the car and drove to NYC. Not long after my kids made custom Lego Minifigures, we got a call from the dog sitter. Cora had escaped their house!
She had the standard name tags and microchipping. I had also gotten her a Ring pet tag. I quickly went to the Ring app and reported her as lost. However, she wasn’t lost in my neighborhood, so I had to figure out how to create the equivalent of a vacation home at the sitter’s house.
I saw that a few people had reported seeing her about a mile from the dog sitter. We posted about our lost dog on social media and canceled our hotel stays. A lot of the money wasn’t refundable, but that wasn’t a big concern at this time.
On social media, a lot of people asked us to make the posts public instead of the default of sharing with friends. This would allow them to spread the word to more people. We started to get posts about drone services. It sounded legit because it was coming from social media, and the person said, “This service found my dog in an hour. It’s great!” I realized that these people weren’t friends, and the services required me to reach out through the Telegram app. I came across red flag after red flag and told them that I would work with them on a reward basis. Obviously, I want my dog back, so if they can get the dog, we can make the exchange. I wasn’t going to give them money upfront. They didn’t like this arrangement, so I think they realized they couldn’t scam me and moved on to another lost dog.
My wife had been following up with another drone service. This one had been covered by a local news story. They also didn’t ask for any money upfront. He was working on another lost dog at the time but was able to spend some time with the drone looking for our dog before his drone batteries were done for the night.
We drove back from NYC and got into town around 11 PM. The drone guy had searched for a while and sent us a map of all the places he covered with no sign of her. We went home and picked up a second car so that we could cover more ground. We searched until about 1 AM and called it a night. It was dark, and we were tired. Perhaps we’d do better with some rest and more light. As tired as we were, Cora had to have it much worse. It was only 21 degrees out. Our last dog, a husky mix, would have loved it, but we weren’t sure about our Austrailian Cattledog, Shepherd mix.
We got up at dawn the next day and drove back to the last place she had been seen. We were basically looking aimlessly as we didn’t know this town well. The dog sitter had been looking, too, but we had little confidence that Cora would go back with them after escaping them. Over the next 12 hours, we got a few sightings via a combination of Facebook, Next Door, and Ring owner posts. Finally, at around 7 PM, we got a big break – someone had a video of her in her backyard on a Ring camera. We rushed to the area. At this point, several people in the community had joined us in our search. We were amazed at how kind people could be in a crisis.
When we got there, a few people had spotted Cora. Even the drone guy said she had come pretty close just to go down another street. We kept having these near misses. It seemed that everyone in town had seen her except us. Each time someone saw her, she’d bolt. She was in fight-and-flight mode – but she wasn’t a fighter. Since the breed can run around 30mph, there was no chance that a person could get her. In two minutes, she could be a mile away.
These sightings and running happened another 6-8 times over the next 24 hours. That was when we got another sighting. She had made her way north but was hemmed in by a couple of highways. At this point, we knew that her fear of cars and busy streets would make that impossible. Nonetheless, we called and got no response. The drone guy had a family emergency, so he couldn’t search that night. We were exhausted, so we got into a local hotel and spent the night. By morning, she had been on the run for 60 hours.
I got a dog booking in the morning from a regular client. It was Cora’s biological sister. I explained what had happened, and she came out to meet us with her sister. Perhaps the scent would help Cora stay in one place or come out. My wife had a hunch that Cora was in the backyard on one street of the few streets where we had her hemmed in. She was right! However, Cora spotted the owner of her sister and bolted. The next sighting came three hours later. She had gone two miles south, near the very first sighting. We looked for a couple of hours, and I decided to bring the kids home to change clothes and regroup. It was an hour until dusk when we tend to get the most sightings, and the drone’s thermal capabilities are most useful.
My wife stayed behind a little bit and got another sighting. With the help of the drone guy, a local deer hunter who noted fresh tracks, they were able to find her underneath the porch of a house. After blocking all the exits, my wife went in to get Cora. It took Cora some time to recognize her, and then the celebration happened. The kids and I drove back to find that all the people who had helped search had thrown a small party.
Cora licked my face for at least ten minutes, stopping only to lick the kids’ faces.
Lessons Learned
I had intended to write up a list of things to know and to do if your dog escapes. There are a lot of things that seem like common sense that are actually very counter-productive. The most important thing to know is that your lost dog is not really your dog anymore. We were under the delusion that we’d just call her name, and she’d recognize our voice and come back to us. Nope. When a dog is in that fight-or-flight mode, its rock brain can’t process the sound of a familiar family member’s voice. It’s called “lost dog syndrome.”
That’s what makes the process so extraordinarily difficult. The dog can stay under a porch or in someone’s yard for quite a while, and it’s impossible to search everything. It feels like the only hope you have is to use your voice. For a dog experiencing lost dog syndrome, calling her name loud is going to sound like angry yelling. When we learned about this, we tried to use normal voices and words she’d recognize, but I doubt she ever heard us.
The reason why I’m not writing up a whole list of things to know is that there’s a perfect list on Reddit already. Why reinvent the wheel?
Before Your Dog Escapes…
I mentioned above that we had the standard tags and microchipping on Cora. The Ring tag was an extra step, but it’s hard to say how much it helped. It’s a metal disc with a QR code on it. If someone scans the QR code, they’ll get information about the dog and how to return it to us. It’s the same information that was on her other tags – our phone numbers. Having it allowed me to “join a club” and post Cora as missing in the app. A few people wrote in the thread, but most of the people spotting her on their doorbell cameras didn’t post in the Ring app.
… Get a Tracking Device
- Apple AirTag ($30) – These would have helped as she was running through people’s backyards. However, our family is in the Google ecosystem, so it’s difficult to make that work. Nonetheless, I took the plunge. I have an old iPad Mini for my kids to use iMessage. I walked Cora around the neighborhood, and the location was never updated. I might need to take her to a busier place.
- Pebblebee or Chipolo ($30) – These trackers work with Google’s Find My network. I bought a Pebblebee as well. It’s a little larger than a standard dog tag. It’s rechargeable and can light up, which are two nice features. Unfortunately, the Google network is terrible. It seems that the devices need to opt into the program, which few people are going to do. It also seems like it may take several devices to get a location. Unsurprisingly, I have yet to see the location on this device update on walks around the neighborhood. In recent months, Google has supposedly made the network better. If this trend continues, it might be useful.
If we were in the Apple ecosystem or if Apple created an Android app for their trackers, I would have skipped this.
- Tractive GPS Tracker ($6/mo) – A GPS Tracker is the best solution. It’s the only thing that will help if she runs through the woods. However, you have to charge them about once a week (depending on the brand). I was going to go with the FI brand, but the drone guy said that the Tractive brand works much better.
The device itself is between $30-$50, but the main cost is the cell service, which is necessary to report the GPS location. I bought a 5-year plan, which brought the total cost to about $5.25/mo. I got it yesterday and took Cora on her first walk. It seemed to work very well.
The idea is to have layers of protection. The GPS collar should be all we’ll need, but if the battery is at 25% when she escapes, we won’t have a lot of time to find her.
It might sound like we have a bunch of gadgets on our dog, but these trackers are quite small. The AirTag snugs against her collar and barely bulges. The GPS is bigger, but that’s to be expected – it has to have electronics for GPS and cell phones.
Other Preventative Measures
There are a couple more things that we could do going forward. The main one is to socialize Cora with more humans. Our last dog would have gone up to any human and said, “Please find my owner.” Cora needs to have that kind of confidence over her anxiety. It’s a double-edged sword, as that anxiety kept her from going on busy roads and getting hit by a car.
We could also vet dog sitters better. As a dog sitter, you’d think this would be easy, but I honestly have no idea how to go about it. Cora had stayed at this house for four days in October without a problem. In a lot of ways, it seemed ideal to have humans she already knew.
Finally, we’ll look to have a sitter stay at our house. We did that once before and it worked well. I have a theory that Cora wouldn’t leave the familiarity of her home.
Financial Implications
We added up the financial costs and it looks like it’s going to cost around $3,000. That includes losing the hotels on our vacation, the cost of the drone operator, and incidentals over the three days.
It’s a little difficult to say how any recompensation is going to go. I’m working with Rover, and they have a “Rover Guarantee” that specifically says, “In general, the Guarantee reimburses costs in the event the responsible party is unwilling or unable to pay.” That sounds like we should be covered, but it seems like anyone who has ever tried to implement the guarantee has found that the legalese makes it useless. In early conversations, it sounds like that’s the path they are going to take. I have flashbacks of the famous Tommy Boy scene about the value of a guarantee:
The next step is to reach out to the dog boarder and see if we can come to some kind of agreement. I hope they have pet sitting insurance as I do, but I think most dog boarders on Rover do not. If it comes to that, perhaps our next communication is between lawyers.
Final Thoughts
It’s really hard to see a silver lining in this, but if I squint a bit, it’s there. First of all, Cora was found relatively safe and is back home with us. Secondly, I think everyone in our family reassessed their level of gratitude for what we have in our everyday lives. You don’t miss water until the well runs dry.
They say that you shouldn’t sweat the small stuff. Everything that we run into on a daily basis qualifies as “small stuff.”
The only problem with this realization is that it’s fleeting. In the week that she’s been back now, we’ve slipped back into the normal routine which includes sweating a lot of very small stuff.
