10,000 dogs will go missing in King County in 2024.

This is a disaster we can avoid.

In 2024, the citizens of King County are planning to lose 10,000 dogs, letting them run in the street.  Imagine a football stadium full of dogs, and then imagine that a community of dog lovers simply decided to turn them loose in the streets and let them wander, lost. 100 of those dogs will be killed by cars or predators.  1,000 of them will never be found.  When I say that the citizens of King County plan to lose 10,000 dogs, I mean that there is no plan to do anything differently than it has ever been done, so without any changes, 10,000 dogs will go missing next year just like they did this year, and last year, and the year before.  10,000 missing dogs is a minimum number, that we know of.  In all of Western Washington, 50,000 dogs were lost this year.  In the next ten years, 500,000 dogs are going to disappear in Western Washington, unless we do something different.

This sweet little puppy is Raven.  She has been in my family for 6 weeks.  She is terribly cute, and an absolute hell raiser.  If we survive her puppyhood, there is a high probability she will become trained to find lost dogs, like her big brother, Valentino.  She will be the fourth search dog that I will have worked with to find lost dogs.  Kelsy, my first search dog, started helping me find lost dogs in 2008.  After she went on several hundred searches with me, and she retired, Fozzie took over for a couple of years.  Tino is my current search dog.  After 18 months of training, Raven will start her career.  I hope she can search for lost dogs for 10 years. In that time, she and I will probably search for 500 to 1,000 lost dogs.  During that time, if things go on as they always have, 500,000 dogs are going to go missing and potentially need search services in the area that Raven and I cover.

Is the answer to train 1,000 search dogs like Raven?  No, obviously.  The answer is to stop letting so many dogs get lost.  Not only is this the simplest solution, it is by far the easiest answer.  Of the 1 million households in King County, it is estimated that 25% have dogs.  If the owners of those approximately 250,000 dogs would take a few simple precautions, the number of dogs lost in King County could be reduced to under 1000 every year.  These loss prevention measures are not difficult or expensive.  There are multiple ways you can protect your dog, and they aren’t hard to learn.

First, Lost Dogs of King County offers a guide to loss prevention.  It might take you seven minutes to read.  Second, be aware of what steps you should take to find a lost dog.  It is best if you know these techniques before your dog goes missing, because if you start looking for your dog without an awareness of the basics, you could just make things worse.  The Guide to Finding Your Lost Dog might take you an hour to read.  The basic equipment you would need to provide for your dog to make sure he does not get lost, such as a Martingale collar, a harness, an extra leash, an ID tag, and a microchip, would cost you less than $100, probably.  You could add a GPS tracker for maybe another $100, just to be safe.  So, for less than 2 hours of your time, to read loss prevention information, and less than $200 spent on equipment, you can greatly reduce the odds of your dog becoming one of the 10,000 dogs that will go missing in King County in 2024.

If we can’t, or won’t, take simple and inexpensive precautions to prevent our dogs from going missing, then it is as if we are deliberately planning to turn 10,000 dogs loose on the streets each year.  I know that it is statistically likely that I will have to pick up the remains of at least a dozen dogs in 2024.  These would be dogs who, in all likelihood, could have been saved if people knew about loss prevention.  Accidents can happen, even if you do everything right.  But, if 500,000 dogs are going to go missing in Western Washington in the next 10 years, and we know that in advance, and we don’t take simple and inexpensive loss prevention steps, then that is not an accident.  It is cruelty, if we don’t take better care of these dogs.

My dogs are my family.  I protect them every way I know how.  I am anxious to train Raven to find lost dogs, and I look forward to working with her for ten years or more.  We ought to be trying to find dogs who escaped even though their owners took abundant precautions, but random accidents thwarted their best efforts.  Raven should not have to be responsible for trying to save 500,000 dogs in her ten year career.  Don’t do it for Raven, though.  Give your dog the best loss prevention protection because you love her, and because she is family.

Please share this article, and maybe 2024 will be the first time in a long time when we have fewer than 10,000 lost dogs in King County.