How would you tell a dog you love him?
You protect what you love.
These are my search dogs, Mu and Tino. Mu searches for lost cats, and he has found over 300 lost cats in his 11 year career, so far. Tino has found dozens of lost dogs. We are entering a time of year that is very busy for us, and we can’t keep up with all of the requests for search dogs.
Every day, I get calls from people who are devastated because they lost their dog or cat. To them, their pet is a family member, and they would do anything they could to get them home. I certainly understand. My dogs are my family. They are my working partners, my best friends. I am with them all day, every day. I can’t imagine my life without them. (I’m sure people get tired of hearing me say so.) Because I deal with people every day who have lost their pets, I am acutely aware there is a risk I could lose my dogs somehow. I have nightmares that I have lost one of my dogs and I can’t find him. It makes me appreciate them more, thinking how my life would be over if I lost one of them. I want to tell them, as clearly as I can, how much I love them.
Of course, I tell them that I love them in words. That just seems to annoy them. They would prefer I express my love in cookies. And cheese. As far as they are concerned, cheese is love. I can’t give them too much cheese, though, if I really love them. I have more than 100,000 pictures and videos of my dogs. I write books about them. When we aren’t working together, we go for walks and hikes and rides in the car. Right now, they are sleeping, and I like to watch them sleep and I listen to them snore gently. Today has been a challenging day, but when I came home and saw my dogs, I was immediately happy. My dogs are my family. My dogs are my home.
You protect what you love. I have health insurance for my dogs, in case they are injured or ill. I have security cameras, not to protect the contents of the house so much as to protect my dogs and family. My dogs all have tracking devices. Although they are at a low risk of running away or escaping, accidents can happen. Tino wears two tracking devices because he is with me in more wilderness areas, and I have fears, probably irrational, that something would happen to me and he would be running around alone. He has a Whistle GPS tracker, which uses cell towers and GPS to tell me his location anywhere in the world, but it only has a battery life of about 10 days. He also wears an Apple AirTag tracker, which only tells me his location if he is within 30 feet of an iPhone, but it has the advantage of a battery that lasts an entire year. Between the two devices, I have a good chance of locating him in a disaster. My dogs wear collars with my phone number embroidered, so I don’t have to worry about tags coming off. All the dogs have microchips, and I use my chip scanner to make sure they are working. Fozzie wears a coyote vest, which is thick and tough and covered with spikes, in case a coyote might attack him. My dogs are on leashes almost always. They are almost never out of my sight. They sleep next to me.
I have made scent articles for each of them by rubbing a sterile gauze pad all over and placing it in a ziplock bag and putting it in the freezer. Each bag has the dog’s name and the date the scent item was collected. These scent items are good for up to three years, although I make new ones ever year before the 4th of July. The scent items can be used if any of the dogs goes missing, so Tino can track them down. If Tino goes missing, he can be tracked by Haas or Max or Layla.
The week of June 26th through July 3rd is Lost Pet Awareness week, where we try to get the word out so people will be prepared. Prevention is typically not expensive or difficult, and anyone who has lost a pet will tell you that they wish they had taken some or all of these precautions. In our Facebook group, Lost Dogs of King County, 10,000 dogs are posted as missing every year. That’s 10,000 dogs per year that go missing in King County, at least. Probably many more. In Western Washington, maybe 50,000 dogs go missing every year. Our shelters are full, operating at double capacity. Each dog in the shelter would have just gone home if he had a microchip and/or a collar with an ID tag. Simple, inexpensive, effective loss prevention measures could drastically reduce the number of lost pets.
Every year, we try to increase awareness of Loss Prevention and inspire more people to take action. It seems that we have failed, because the number of lost pets never seems to go down. I thought I would try a different approach this year and appeal to owners to take these loss prevention measures as a way to show their pets how much they love them. US residents spend $77 Billion per year on their pets, to show them how much they care. We buy our dogs and cats fancy collars and toys to show our love for them. We buy the best dog food and cat food. Some of our pets eat better than we do. We take them for special photo shoots by professional photographers. We are always looking for ways to tell our pets how much we love them. One way you can tell your dog that you love him, which is not very expensive or difficult, is to take steps for loss prevention. Protect what you love. Show the world you love your dog by outfitting him with an embroidered collar, a harness, two leashes, a tracking device or two, a coyote vest, and armed security guards that follow him everywhere. Okay, maybe not the security guards. It would probably be better to use robots and drones.
Please read and share these articles on loss prevention. Let’s show our cats and dogs how much we love them.
LOVE it...great tips (and photos)!