Page 62 - Chow Life - 2025 01 Spring

DANGER!
A Lost Dog Story
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 I started by using his baby puppy names of “Baby”
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 off 100 copies for starters.
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 means 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
60
by CAROLINE COILE
I felt I should be outside searching. Things that
should have been easy now seemed to take forever.
and “Maco,” which he still answered 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 and white
printer copies. Still, it was the best I had and I ran
My dog sitter, neighbor and fellow Saluki owner,
Robert Mowry, had come to help and he is much
better on the phone than I am, so he was in
charge of calling animal control, vet clinics, the
Sheriff’s Boys’ Ranch and my next door neighbor
2 miles away. Another local Saluki friend, Maggie
Ferrando, was already posting signs.
I should mention that I live in a very rural area,
with my property bordered to the east by 2,000
acres of Boys’ Ranch, wooded and recently logged
property; the north by the Suwannee Rover (at
least we didn’t have to search there); the west by
several thousand acres of mostly wooded acreage;
and the south by a road, a few homes and, 2 miles
away, a highway with fast moving traffic. I live on
the end of a dirt road and, although I checked it
for paw prints and found none, I still initiated the
searching and posting in that direction, as it was
the most dangerous direction he could have gone.
Besides, it was the only direction with roads we
could drive or post on.
The two initial escapees had been spotted on a
trail cam on my property next to the Boy’s Ranch,
and the fence between our property is still down