Dogs and Cats Lost at the Airport

Never open a travel kennel until the dog or cat is safely inside the final destination.

Dogs and Cats Lost at the Airport

Saturday night, as I was about to go to the grocery store, I saw a post about a dog that had escaped from the air cargo area at SeaTac airport.  It had happened only an hour or two before, so Tino and I went to the airport, only ten minutes away from us.  When we got to air cargo, I saw a man standing beside an empty travel carrier, looking off into the distance.  He had to be the owner.  I stopped to talk to him.  Brownie is a dog they were adopting from Guam, and she had just arrived.  He got her out of the crate to walk around a little, and she backed out of the collar.  This same scenario happens at least ten times a year at the airport.  I told him I would look around for Brownie.  We have looked for more than a dozen dogs and cats at the airport, and I was familiar with all of the places dogs liked to run to.  The freeway funnels into the airport right next to Air Cargo Road, and the 518 freeway runs perpendicular to that.  With the airport runways on the west side and the busy terminal to the south, dogs usually run across heavy traffic where the freeway dumps traffic into the airport.  I looked in the likely places, including the cemetery on the far side of the freeway.  As I was looking around, Brownie’s owner called me to say that she had been seen by the parking lot near the terminal.

We went there to look but didn’t see her.  Eventually, her owner located her just outside the parking area, in the narrow strip of landscaping between the lot and the freeway entrance to the terminal.  A steady stream of cars rushed by her without knowing she was hiding behind the bushes.  In fact, I had driven past her twice and not seen her, apparently.  When the owner slowly approached her there, she moved away from him.  I asked him to wait.  The rescue organization that sent Brownie from Guam to Seattle said that she preferred to deal with women.  Kari had been following the post and she agreed to come to the location and use Calming Signals.  While I was waiting for Kari to get there, I brought the trap up near her and set it up.  I could tell she didn’t want me to approach too close, so I set the trap about 40 feet away.

When Kari arrived, I went out onto the airport expressway shoulder to try to do something, I don’t know what, if she bolted into traffic.  I could at least see which way she went.  Or pick her up if she was struck by a car. Kari had chicken and other food and she was able to get fairly close to Brownie.  She moved the trap closer to Brownie’s hiding place.  When she ran out of food, she went to get more. A couple of women came out of nowhere and tried to grab Brownie.  They were making her nervous, and I was able to stop them just in time before they made her bolt.  Apparently they had been following the story on Facebook.  If several people were already working on catching a dog, why would you just run up and try to grab her?  Wouldn’t you assume that, if you could just run up and grab a dog, we would have already done that?  Did they think it never occurred to us?  After I got them to go away, Kari continued with Calming Signals, and Brownie went closer to the trap.  Traffic varied from a standstill to people whipping by at about 40.  At one point, a fire truck came roaring through, with the siren and the mega-blast horn.  I thought for sure it would make Brownie bolt, but she just stayed crouched in the bushes.

Eventually, she came close to Kari, who was sitting near the trap, and Kari was able to put a slip lead on her.  Once she was safe in Kari’s arms, I helped Kari get her in the trap. The plan was that she would go all the way home to Port Orchard inside the trap, with no transfers and no opportunities for escape.  All of these escapes at the airport could be avoided if people would just not open the transport kennel until the dog or cat was safely inside the destination home.  People think they are being kind to a dog or a cat, to let them get some fresh air after a long flight inside a kennel, but it creates too many opportunities for escapes.  Better to let the dog or cat sit in the kennel for another hour, and then let them out when they are safe at home.  The owner’s wife was coming with a van that could transport the trap with Brownie inside, so we sat and waited for a while, with Brownie in the trap in the back of my car.  As Tino and I waited with Brownie I thought of the time that Mu found a lost cat at the airport.

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Mu stood on top of a large rock in the landscape, in a fenced-off area of the airport.  His orange vest, emblazoned with SEARCH, might seem normal for the airport, but this search dog was not looking for bombs or drugs.  The lean and powerfully built dog stood on the boulder and whined and cried, and a cat started meowing back at him from deep underneath, in a crevice.  It had to be the lost cat, Mr. Kitty, who had gone missing 5 days earlier.  From the sound of him, he was quite interested in Mu, and it almost seemed like they were talking to each other.   I was able to shine my flashlight into the deep crevice, and I could see just enough of the little black and white cat to know this was our quarry.  At that point, Mu couldn’t help any more, so I asked the airport employee to stand guard at the rock while I took Mu back to the car.  I was quite proud of him, but then I’m always proud of him.  Mu had found the lost cat in five minutes after it took five days to get permission to search that area.  As I walked him through the terminal, into the elevator, and out to the parking garage, people noticed the sturdy dog in the orange vest, and my jacket that said LOST PET RESCUE in large letters across the back.  At seven years old, having been working for six years, Mu had already found hundreds of lost cats. I got him settled into the car, and pulled out the catch pole and snappy snare, tools that might be useful for getting a cat out from under a huge rock.

When Mr. Kitty’s owner first contacted me, the cat had already been missing two days.  She explained how they were moving to Japan, for the military, and their cat had gotten away from them at the airport.  With a leash still attached, he ran under some temporary fencing for a construction zone.  The Port of Seattle was redoing an expansive area, roughly the size of a football field, that had once had a large water feature, a recirculating stream running between boulders set in concrete.  It had been drained long ago, and just a little rainwater had collected at the low spots.  I told the owner I would try to help with the search dog if we could figure out the right person to talk to for permission.  In the meantime, Mu and I searched the publicly accessible areas outside the construction fence, just in case Mr. Kitty had bolted across the street in the middle of the night.  The parking garage had lots of nooks and crannies, but Mu did not catch a scent, and I saw no feline footprints in the dust, only little rat footprints.

On the fifth day, we finally got permission to go in, with an escort, as long as I wore a hard hat.  I wanted to say that I shouldn’t be wearing a hard hat if Mu wasn’t, but I knew it was pointless to try to argue with an employee of the federal government, since he wasn’t the one who made the rules.  As we started working the area closest to the point of escape, Mu of course took an interest in the cat traps that had been set.  In the several days that the traps had been deployed, I think they caught one rat.  I worked Mu along the rocks, and he hit upon a place where I couldn’t even see the possibility for a cat.  It was a large rock, the size of a washing machine, probably 500 pounds, and the concrete walkway had been poured right up to it, as a continuous surface.  At first, I didn’t see any way for a cat to be there.  When the cat started meowing back at us, well, obviously there was a cat there, whether it seemed possible or not.  This type of situation shows the value of a search dog’s nose when looking for a cat.  Although most cats are found with just a visual search, there will be times when a dog’s nose can find cats that wouldn’t otherwise be found.  After I took Mu to the car and came back, I was able to fit my hand into a crevice, just barely, and feel the leash still attached.  If Mu hadn’t found Mr. Kitty, it seems likely that he would have remained stuck under that rock until he starved to death.

Shortly after Mu located Mr. Kitty, I was able to send a video, via Facebook Messenger, to his owner in Japan.  You could see Mr. Kitty, with his blue collar, and hear him talking loudly as Mu whined in the background.  She was delighted and amazed, and relieved.  She called a relative who lived an hour away from the airport, someone who Mr. Kitty knew, and he started driving to us to see if he could coax Mr. Kitty out.  While we were waiting, we tried different ways to try to cat the cat out from under the rock.  I was able to snake a snappy snare in through the crack and get it around the neck of the cat.  A snappy snare is like a dog leash except that it has a springy rod in the handle.  You pull the end of the snappy snare back toward the handle, with a metal ring sliding up the length, and it forms a large loop that is spring loaded.  When you let go, the ring slides down the tether, and it tightens around a dog’s neck.  When the dog pulls away, it tightens more, and he can’t back out of it.  It was definitely not designed for getting cats out from under rocks, but in this case it was the best tool we had.  So, I had the snare on the cat and I had his leash in my hand, but the crack between the big rock and the next big rock seemed awfully small to try to squeeze a cat through.  He might fit, but not if he was resisting.  When the owner’s relative got there, Mr. Kitty seemed to recognize him and come close to the crack, but we still couldn’t get him through.

After a couple of hours of trying to get the cat out from under the rock, including fashioning various poking devices to try to prod him toward the opening, unsuccessfully, I had the idea of pouring water down the back side of the rock, to move Mr. Kitty toward the opening.  This worked better than I hoped it would, and Mr. Kitty came toward the crevice.  As the water came out the bottom, we could see that there was actually a larger opening under the adjacent rock, where Mr. Kitty could get out without having to squeeze through.  I eased up the tension on the leash and the snappy snare, and Mr. Kitty willingly walked out to this man that he knew.  We quickly secured him in a carrier, to make sure he wouldn’t get lost again.  After five days under a rock, Mr. Kitty began his journey home to Puyallup.

We have saved other dogs that got lost at the airport, such as Lani.  She was hiding in the woods between the two freeways.  We set a trap for her, and she went in in the still of the night.  A couple of other cats we searched for were never found.  A few dogs have been found deceased, hit by cars.  A few dogs were never found.  Brownie may not have survived if we hadn’t responded quickly.  As we witnessed, people were approaching her directly, which was bound to spook her into heavy traffic eventually.  Brownie got to go to her new home, with a new dog friend that she clearly liked, judging by the pictures, because UBS volunteers knew how to respond when a dog gets lost at the airport.

If you are traveling by air with your pet—first of all, don’t. Don’t put a cat or dog in the cargo hold of an airplane if you can possibly avoid it.  It is a terrifying experience for most animals, and a significant percentage of pets are lost at airports when carriers are opened accidentally or inappropriately.  If you absolutely must put your pet on a plane, as when the military requires you to move to a foreign country, do not, do not, do not open the carrier for any reason.  You may think you are doing the cat or dog a favor, giving them some relief from confinement.  While that may be true to some extent, you are exposing them to too much risk.  If you are receiving a dog from an out of state rescue, perhaps saving her from a high kill shelter and giving her a chance at a new life, you may want to open the carrier to greet her and make her feel loved.  Don’t do it.  Do not open a pet carrier until you have reached your final destination and you are in the house and all the doors are closed securely. Then you can welcome her into her new family, safely.