How to Succeed by Failing
If you are missing a cat or a dog, chances are that you will become frustrated and discouraged that you put in many hours of searching and haven’t found your pet. On average, roughly, the owner of a lost cat or dog will invest 80 hours in searching, by various methods, in the first week of a pet’s disappearance. Friends and family will contribute another 120 volunteer hours in the search, typically. Your dog or your cat is somewhere. He or she didn’t just vanish, although I know it seems that way. Your goal should be to check everywhere your pet could be. It may feel like there are an infinite number of places a cat or dog could be hiding. You can search smart by checking the most likely places first. If you don’t find your pet in those places, it doesn’t mean your effort was wasted. If you have spent 80 hours searching and still haven’t found your cat or dog, it is normal for you to be exhausted and discouraged. Most people would feel that way. Another way to look at it is, every failure is new information, and it can help you narrow down the search.
It’s like Wordle. Your first guess is unlikely to be the word of the day, but it can give you clues to what the word is. Even if all five letters were wrong, at least you have eliminated those letters. In searching for a pet or playing Wordle, you want to have a strategy that gives you the best chance of finding the right word, or your pet’s location, in the fewest steps. Most people playing Wordle use SLATE as their first guess because it uses some of the most common letters and gives you information about which letters are in the hidden word, and in what order. If SLATE ever is the actual word of the day, millions of people will get it on the first try.
When you search for a cat or dog, you want to guess where they might be based on where cats and dogs have been found in the past. There’s no way the average person would know this, which is why we have created guides to help you with the best strategy for your search. The Three Retrievers Guide to Finding Your Lost Dog, and the Three Retrievers Guide to Finding Your Lost Cat are based on years of training and experience. We try to guide you through the steps in the order that is most likely to yield the best outcome. If the first steps don’t succeed, if your first efforts fail, it’s not really a failure if you find out where your pet is not located. You can check that off the list and keep searching, keep trying the other methods.
Mu has been searching for lost cats for 11 years, and he has found more than 300 lost cats. When we search for a lost cat, our goal is to search all of the most likely hiding places, within a zone of highest probability, and keep searching until either we find the lost cat, or determine that he is not in those hiding places. Mu has been on more than 1200 searches, so you might say that we fail more than we succeed, if you were inclined to look at it that way. On the other hand, Mu is one of the most successful search dogs in the world, as far as I know. It is very rare for a search dog to find more than 300 lost souls. (Statistics aren’t publicly available for the success rate of most search dogs. Certainly I don’t know of any dog that has ever found more missing animals or people than Mu, but there could be a more successful dog I don’t know about.) Over Mu’s career, and on any given day, we mostly fail to find the lost cat, if you want to take the pessimistic view. But that is our goal, to check all the hiding places, eliminating them one by one, until we find the cat or determine he is not in the high probability areas.
Many of the cats found by Mu could not have been found by other means. Mu found a cat in an old pile of rubble in Bothell. The owner and other searchers had checked there many times because it seemed like a likely spot for a cat to hide. Only because of Mu’s nose, because he insisted a cat was in there, did I look deep into the rubbish heap using my iPhone, recording video with the light on, until I could see the back side of the lost cat. He was well hidden, and nearly impossible to see. Mu found a cat at the airport who was hidden under a giant boulder in the landscape. The cat’s leash was caught, and he was stuck in a gap deep under the rock. The cat had been missing for a week. People could search that area day and night and not see the cat under the boulder. Indeed, it didn’t even seem possible a cat could be under there. Mu found the cat in about five minutes, with his nose.
A search dog is not going to be the answer to every missing pet. Although our search dogs have found cats and dogs that could not have been found by other means, in most cases we don’t find the lost pet using the search dog. Our success rate is about 25%, on thousands of searches. That is failure in a sense, but it is a positive failure, meaning we explored those possibilities, even though we were right only 25% of the time. A batting average of .250 is average for the best baseball players in the world. Not every swing is a home run, but you keep swinging, always trying to improve your odds.
If you are missing a dog, there are five main ways you will find him. He will come home on his own 25% of the time. You shouldn’t just sit and wait for him to come home, but it is a common way dogs are found. Large posters, when done properly, lead to the location of the lost dog about 25% of the time. Social media often results in dogs being found, although I would hesitate to put a number on it. Probably roughly 25% of the time. More than 10,000 dogs go missing in King County every year. Most of those dogs are found, one way or another. Although those dogs are posted as found on social media, such as Facebook, it’s not always due to the social media exposure. We need an AI to comb through social media and try to determine how those approximately 7,500 dogs get found every year. Search dogs are not used in every missing pet case. There aren’t many search dogs in the area, and obviously we can’t search for 10,000 dogs a year. When Tino and Mu do search for cats and dogs, we find them about 25% of the time. The search dog, as a method, is as successful as any other method, when the circumstances and conditions are appropriate for a search dog. (And when one is available.)
The point is that you want to use a spectrum of tools when looking for your lost pet. Each of those methods, on it’s own, is likely to fail. If your dog is at the shelter, a search dog isn’t going to find him in the ravine behind the houses. If your dog is hiding in a ravine behind the houses, you aren’t going to find him by just checking the shelter. To find your missing pet, you want to use signs, social media, talking to neighbors, physically searching the area, and watching for him to come home. In some cases, you also want to try a search dog. Any of those methods, if you tried just one of them, is likely to fail. Using all of the tools at your disposal is going to give you the best overall chances of success.
If you use the search dog, don’t just rely on the search dog. You stand the best chance of finding your pet if you don’t rely on any one method. Many people, when they hear of a search dog that finds lost pets, think that hiring a search dog is the ultimate answer, and if the search dog doesn’t work, then nothing will. I hope you won’t look at it that way. Of course, Mu and Tino and I always want to find the lost pet, and we do the best we can. If we don’t succeed, that doesn’t mean that you can’t find your pet by the other methods. Certainly do try the search dog if the circumstances warrant. If we try the search dog and don’t succeed, I hope you won’t be discouraged, and that you will continue to search for your lost cat or dog by all of the other methods available to you.
If you fail to find your pet, after days of using the methods with the highest chance of success, don’t look at it as failure. You should view it as having checked those boxes on your list as you are getting closer to where your cat or dog actually is. Keep trying. Keep looking.
Please share this with someone who is looking for a lost pet.