Attaboy, sheltie

Pet 'detectives' find lost Attaboy in Forest Hills
By Linda Wilson Fuoco, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
First published on May 2, 2007 at 3:46 pm

The face of a little dog named Attaboy adorned at least 500 "lost" posters displayed throughout Forest Hills, North Versailles and other suburbs in eastern Allegheny County. The posters started going up March 13, when he ran away from his new home. The posters started coming down Monday night.

Deb Jugan spent about four hours taking the posters down. Her progress was slowed because some people stopped their cars to talk to her and others left their houses to talk to her.

All had the same question: "Why are you taking down the posters?"

Some asked if people had stopped looking for the tricolored Shetland sheepdog. Others feared the dog was dead.

Ms. Jugan was thrilled to report that Attaboy had been found Monday morning after a seven-week search.

The dog hunt included dozens of volunteer "pet detectives," who mounted search parties and spent countless hours tramping through heavy woods behind the Forest Hills recreation center on Barclay Avenue. Uncounted animal lovers dutifully phoned and e-mailed reports when they sighted the skittish dog.

Ms. Jugan is the founder of TrackAPet-Pittsburgh, an e-mail list on www.yahoogroups.com that works to reunite lost pets and owners. The 57 members on the list sent hundreds of e-mails, giving everyone permission to forward the messages to other animal lovers who could help look for Attaboy.

Retired schoolteacher Peggy Buckley, of Brookline, joined in the searches and e-mailed prayer chains to everyone in her voluminous Internet address book.

There's really no way to count how many people were out looking for this dog.

In the end, a humane trap was set up in the woods. Volunteers staked it out for several days, for hours on end. Ms. Jugan checked the trap at 7 a.m. Monday on her way to the Allegheny County courthouse, where she works as an assistant district attorney. She cleaned up the mess that had been made by a marauding raccoon and reset the trap. Sandy Reech, one of the more dedicated TrackAPet regulars, found Attaboy an hour later, sitting calmly in the trap.

This is a nice enough story in its own right. But the Attaboy search took many twists and turns. Before they found Attaboy, pet detectives trapped quite a few raccoons and a few stray cats. Before they found Attaboy, they found two other Shetland sheepdogs.

Who knew that many tricolored Shetland sheepdogs could be lost at the same time?

Ms. Jugan and Ms. Reech thought they had trapped Attaboy in North Versailles on April 10, but it was a different Sheltie that happened to be wearing a collar with an ID tag. That one was Shaggy, whose family had been searching for him since Aug. 7 when he bolted from his fenced yard during a thunderstorm.

Shaggy's family was thrilled to have him back, and they've continually sent updates and pictures to TrackAPet. Type the name Shaggy into the search box at post-gazette.com and you can read that story, topped by the headline, "Wrong lost dog is found."

But now back to Attaboy. The pet detectives continued to get reports of sightings, and continued to follow up.

"I was just crying when I saw him in the trap," Ms. Reech said. "He was calm when I talked to him." When she got him to her home in Level Green, it didn't take long for Attaboy to come around.

Ms. Reech said Attaboy was quickly settling in, playing with her and her husband, Jim, who was one of the search volunteers.

"He's very dirty and he lost so much weight you can see all his ribs," Ms. Reech said.

Attaboy weighed 39 pounds when he ran away and now weighs about 20 pounds.

Attaboy's short-term future includes rest and recuperation at the Reech residence, where he will be well fed and well petted. His long term future is a bit up in the air.

His legal owner is the Animal Protectors shelter in New Kensington, where he was taken after an animal control agent found him in a vacant house. He had been left behind when his prior owners moved. The shelter adopted him out to a Forest Hills family seven weeks ago, and he bolted out a door two days after they took him in.

Though the new owners reported that he was lost, they never helped looked for him and never called or e-mailed for search updates, so he's not going back to that family, a shelter spokesman said.

And the third lost-and-found Sheltie? Several days after Shaggy was found, a woman waiting at a bus stop saw a tricolored dog wandering in Munhall. While she was using her cell phone to leave a message with TrackAPet, neighbors told her the dog lived nearby. The woman personally escorted that Sheltie to its home and gently admonished owners to keep closer tabs on the canine.

Source: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07123/782766-62.stm