Bubba, a cocker spaniel

For those who give back to the community by helping people find their missing pets, keep this in mind: no matter how long you spend helping people find their missing pets, you never stop learning new lessons. Enjoy the story.

Bubba had been missing for a week when his dad mentioned to a neighbor that his dog had disappeared.

The neighbor, Kat Albrecht, offered to help by making Lost Dog signs for him to post in the area. She was familiar with the neighbor’s dog, who is a black cocker spaniel.

She spent about 10 minutes making up the signs, and was preparing to deliver them when she decided to check Craigslist. She checked all the way back and saw that one week earlier, someone from a nearby business (a Baptist church) posted that they had found a "very friendly dog" and "please call - he misses you!" Because the church was less than 1/3 mile from the neighbor’s home, which is where Bubba disappeared from, she figured it was the neighbor's dog.

So she called the number and described her neighbor's dog as she remembered seeing him, which means she described him as shaggy. In the conversation she had had with the neighbor, they hadn’t discussed the fact that the dog had recently been shaved.

The person from the church said it sounded like the dog, except that the dog they’d found was not "a very shaggy dog."

When Kat later talked to the neighbor and mentioned that she had described his dog as "shaggy" he said, "OH…we had just shaved him!"

Kat is a very experienced pet detective, having helped many, many people find their missing pets. But she still takes lessons from cases she works. Since she and the neighbor had essentially begun by simply chatting outside in the neighborhood, she didn’t ask the questions that she would normally ask someone that has called or emailed her for help. She didn’t find out what he’d done up to that point to look for Bubba (and he must not have checked Craigslist), and she didn’t ask for a description of the dog.


So there went some printer ink and paper down the drain, and not to mention about 10 minutes of her life that she'll never get back! ;)

But hey, Bubba came back home, and that’s what counts.

Kat Albrecht is founder of the Missing Pet Partnership (file://www.missingpetpartnership.org/)