Pepper, poodle

Pepper the Poodle
Told by Kat Albrecht to HomeAgain

I’m skeptical whenever I hear someone say that their dog was stolen. Although some dogs are occasionally stolen for profit, my research has shown that the majority of supposed “theft” cases are actually incidents where a dog has strayed from home and was picked up by someone who decided to keep the dog. Unfortunately, in the following case, the owner’s suspicion of theft was correct.

Pepper was a ten-year-old tiny black teacup Poodle who lived with her human, Martha, in a posh apartment in a very nice area of town. Unbeknownst to Martha, several apartments had been burglarized in her neighborhood over the past month. Of course, Martha didn’t think twice about leaving Pepper alone in her apartment while she ran several errands.

When Martha returned to her apartment one day, she immediately knew something was wrong. She was normally greeted by a yapping, wiggling ball of fur – but this day, there was silence. As soon as she entered the apartment Martha’s worst fears were confirmed –items that were once neatly in their place were strewn around the apartment floor. Drawers were open, seat cushions were out of place, and CDs littered the floor by her bookshelf. Martha yelled for Pepper but there was no response. She quickly called the police and waited until they arrived to search the apartment. Pepper was gone.

The point of entry and exit were the same – the window in Martha’s bedroom. The window was too high for Pepper to climb out of on her own. Pepper had been stolen.

By the time that Martha learned about our services, Pepper has been missing for two days. Martha had done the usual posting of flyers in the neighborhood, searching the shelters, and placing a classified ad in the paper. One mistake that Martha made, which I quickly corrected, was to change her flyers and posters so that they read “REWARD LOST DOG” instead of “STOLEN DOG.” The worst thing we could have done was to scare off any potential witnesses by letting them know the dog was stolen. Very few people are willing to be a snitch, but many are willing to be a hero by helping reunite a lost dog with his family. But as day two ticked by without any leads, we decided it was time to pull out the big guns – an intersection alert.

An intersection alert is when four to six volunteers stand on the corner of a major intersection near where the pet was lost (or stolen) and hold up giant florescent “REWARD LOST DOG” posters. Similar in concept to companies that pay people to stand on corners holding marketing signs, intersection alerts are designed to capture attention and get information out to the community that a dog is missing.

We started our intersection alert the following morning at 6:30 a.m. in order to capture the traffic for the morning commute. Our florescent orange posters read, “REWARD LOST TINY BLACK POODLE” and within twenty minutes we had our first lead! A gentleman in a white pickup truck pulled over and told me that his nextdoor neighbor, a woman in her early twenties, had a new small black Poodle. The description seemed to match, even down to the blue bows in Pepper’s poofy ears. I obtained the address, thanked him profusely for the tip, and never let on that Pepper was stolen. I didn’t call Martha just yet. And I didn’t go to the house myself to confront the woman. This was a felony investigation and the last thing the police needed was for us to interfere. So, I called the police and gave the information to the officer when he arrived.

Within twenty minutes, Martha was at the woman’s house and identified Pepper. The woman at the house claimed that Pepper was her family’s dog that she had owned for years. But Martha had told the police officer beforehand about a tiny patch of white fur on Pepper’s left hind foot and the royal blue bows in his ears. His markings matched and Pepper was recovered. Of course, there would have been no question of identity that it was Pepper if he had been microchipped. Martha was very lucky, because if Pepper was generic-looking there would have been no proof that Pepper was her dog and she probably would not have left with the Poodle in her arms.

It was exciting to see a happy ending to a case where there seemed to be no hope. But by changing one word in our message – from “stolen” to “lost” – and by using a bold method to get our message out to the community, Pepper was home again, where he belonged.

Source: http://fpblogengine.com/PetRescuerStories.ashx?blogid=2&postid=36