We got a response from someone that lost a beagle with similar markings, four weeks ago, from Woodbridge -- a distance of 22 miles. While we wait (not necessarily patiently) for the woman to come out to see the dog that may be hers, volunteers are comparing their notes about what differences and similarities they see between the pictures of the stray and the picture the woman provided of her lost dog. And there is speculation about the probability of the woman's dog traveling 22 miles from Woodbridge to Alexandria.
So, the following story was provided by Sam Connolly of Pure Gold Pet Trackers, and she refers to Laura Totis, who also, like Sam, works with her dog, trained to track missing pets.
From Sam, on 9/4/09:
The dogs that Laura and I refer to as "abducted by aliens" where the track just disappears near a road or parking lot are probably picked up by kindly strangers that just got lucky and got the dog in their car.
The way this dog (referring to the stray we are trying to bring to safety) acts when she jumps on the side of Ronnie's car, means that she recognizes a car "type" and may have done the same when she first got loose and jumped into an open car door. If the people were at work (when they picked her up in Woodbridge) and then brought the dog back home (to Alexandria) to have it scanned by their vet, she could have bolted as soon as that car door opened again. We know she's fast!
I had a client in Rockville (Maryland, a suburb of Washington DC) who had an 8 mo old Bichon that was let out by someone working on their house. The track ran around the block and up to a drug store parking lot, then disappeared.
She put ads in the paper, put up hundreds of posters, did the FindToto calls, etc. Two weeks later she had not had any sightings and thought that she would never see her little dog again. The third week she got the surprise of her life.
She got a call from a man in Central New Jersey who had just had her dog scanned by the neighborhood vet. (Thank goodness she was microchipped!) It took a little investigative questioning to get the rest of the story.
Apparently the dog had run up to his (the NJ man's) sister's car that was parked with her kids in the parking lot in Rockville while she ran into the store for some snacks for their trip to NJ. The kids opened the door and the pup jumped in. No tags or collar so they deemed it a "stray". They decided to take it to Grandma in NJ because she lives alone and would love a puppy!
Fortunately, after a couple weeks, Grandma decided she really didn't want a puppy. She called her son, who lives nearby, and asked him to come get the dog that his sister had dumped on her.
When the son saw the dog, he (unlike his sister) knew right away that it was NOT a stray. The dog was imaculately clean and freshly groomed so he took it to the local vet to see if it had a microchip.
The moral of the story (besides MICROCHIP all of your animals) was that a pet can get very far away in a very short amount of time (over 200 miles in 1 day) with human assistance. Twenty two miles in a week is NOTHING!!
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