So one morning, a case that our lost dog recovery volunteer network was working broke when George came home. He'd been out for 2 months, and his "aunt" Jaime had posted to Craigslist frequently until our group finally stepped forward to help. When George was found, Jaime posted one final notice to Craiglist, to say he'd been found, and she made a point to mention that it couldn't have happened without the help of a group of volunteers.
She got a response from Diana, whose min pin was lost, and wanted to know who the volunteers were that helped her. Jaime forwarded that email to the George search leader, Daphne, who responded to Diana and copied me. I invited Diana to call me for a chat, which she did. However, by the time of that email, our group had already moved in to pick up another case that was over a week old, but was being handled by a rescue with no experience in searching for lost dogs. So all I was going to do (and did do) with Diana was have a conversation with her.
Duchess
As I told Diana, Daphne's email did say pretty much everything I'd want to say if I was going to do a brain dump about looking for lost dogs. But we managed to find enough new material to discuss and we talked for a half hour or so. I found her to be pretty sharp, and clearly she'd been acquiring a lot of knowledge in the several weeks since the dog was lost. There were a few things I could tell her, but honestly, very little.
I was clear about the reality that I and our group could not help her, beyond this conversation, as Daphne's email did, too. She understood, and we agreed that she'd stay in touch with the search for the other dog, a dachshund, so she would know when we were available.
I told a couple of the other volunteers about Diana's dog -- one of whom has min pins of her own, so you can only imagine how much she wanted to help Diana find Duchess. As with me, the volunteers that I told about Duchess, Diana's lost min pin, found they kept thinking of her while working to find Gus, the lost dachshund.
To my surprise and delight, several days after our conversation, Daphne and I got this email from Diana:
Ladies: I'm very happy to report that Duchess was found and that she is doing great. All your advice and suggestions were very valuable to me. Thanks to all the flyering I did, on Friday AM I got a call from someone who had seen Duchess that very morning in the same spot that she had been seen on 9/24. I went back there and on Saturday 11:45am, she showed up. Dirty, sad, skinny, but in one piece. First she appeared not to know who I was, she sniffed the air for a minute or two, she began wagging her tail, jumped on me and told me to take her home. Thank you from my heart for all your support, your time and your dedication to helping find lost pets.
When I asked her if she would write up the story for my blog, she responded this way:
You were wonderfully helpful and supportive and your advice and tips were very very valuable. I have been so overwhelmed with this that I'm just gettng back to my senses and have not been keeping a journal, which now I realize I should have done, because all the details are blurry. Thank you from my heart and from Duchess' who is resting peacefully in her bed as if she had never left.
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