Garfield & Cleo, doberman pinschers

Virtual Lost Pet Tracking Helps Garfield & Cleo Find Their Way Home
April 2nd, 2010

Nadene had spent the last two months working with others to try to help find a lost little dog, and that search had never gone well. She wanted to give up, but giving up was as hard as going on. So when she found herself with a few minutes and a Washington Post newspaper, she turned to the classifieds. You never know when someone might decide to run a classified ad to say they'd found a dog that might be someone's lost dog.

Well, there wasn't anything like that, but there was an ad that jumped out at her. It's hard to miss an ad for TWO dogs lost together, especially when both of them have the presence of doberman pinschers.

Here's the web version of the ad that Nadene saw:

By now, Nadene had memorized all the dogs at the Fairfax County shelter, having looked at their postings on the website so many times in the last eight weeks. She knew she'd seen a pair of dobermans listed as being at the Faifax Shelter on Pet Harbor. Here are the postings Nadene had seen so many times:

It didn't matter that Marshall VA is around 25 miles down the road; how could there be 2 dobes missing and 2 stray dobes within 25 miles of each other that aren't the same pair of dogs? Both black & tan, and both consisting of a male and a female? Not a chance this could be coincidence.

She called the number and spoke to the woman, Lisa, who told her that with their children grown, the dogs now ARE their children. Within minutes, Lisa looked on the website and saw her family's prescious family members right there, at the Fairfax shelter where they had been since five days after they went missing from Marshall - a little more than two weeks now. Shocked, she said she would never have thought to check with the Fairfax County shelter because of how far away it is from where they went missing.

So let this be a lesson to us all -- several lessons. Virtual pet tracking can help lost dogs get reunited with their humans; it usually takes patience (and nicely for Nadene, it can also happen unexpectedly) but it can pay off big time. Another lesson: a lost dog is not necessarily going to be found within a 25 mile radius of the escape point. And a lesson that I for one need to heed, which is that people do still place little classified ads in newspapers. I thought it was a practice that had all but died.