If I Didn’t Reply to You

I’m sorry.

One consistent complaint I get is that I don’t respond quickly enough. In some cases, I might not respond at all. I am trying to help everyone. Some days, I don’t get any requests for help, and other days I get ten requests. In general, Three Retrievers Lost Pet Rescue receives about 1000 requests for help every year. Useless Bay Sanctuary, the nonprofit I started, helps about 100 stray dogs per year. Lost Dogs of King County, a Facebook group I started, helps more than 10,000 dogs every year. Also, Google has my business improperly categorized. If someone is looking for their local shelter, Google gives them my contact information. I don’t know why. I’m not a shelter. I get ten calls a day from people wanting to surrender dogs and cats to me. I want to help them, but I have no facility. I don’t have a budget in the millions of dollars like public shelters do. Also, as President of Useless Bay Sanctuary, I often get urgent calls or messages to help a stray dog. Usually, the stray dogs that are brought to my attention really can’t be helped by anyone other than Useless Bay Sanctuary, with our training, skills, equipment, and volunteers. If there is a dog in need, that only I can help, I usually drop everything and run out the door.

When I get more requests for help than I can effectively handle, I have to ask, where can I do the most good? If a request comes from out of state, I can’t drive or fly there, because I don’t have the time. There are too many cases locally. Recently, I received a request for help for a cat lost from a houseboat in Amsterdam. The email was in Dutch. I didn’t reply because I would have no idea what to say. Sometimes I will not respond to a local request for help, if I don’t feel I can be of much help, and I am tied up on other cases. Some people contact me many months after their cat or dog has gone missing. In those cases, a search dog probably won’t be useful. As far as providing advice, I can give general instructions, but probably not much more than what is in my free guides. When a cat or dog has gone missing in a recent time frame, I can learn details and circumstances, and provide tailored advice based on my experience. Dogs and cats who have been missing a long time, they don’t really fit into patterns where I can give specific advice, other than keep looking. Cats and dogs can be found even after they have been missing many months. If a cat or dog has gone missing just recently, then there is more of an opportunity for me to be helpful with a search dog, a trap, or advice.

Why don’t I hire people to help me? I would if I could. I’m trying to train new people and search dogs. It’s not something where you can just grab someone off the street and plug them into the job. With many aspects of the work I do, if people have good intentions and just dive and start trying to help a dog or cat in need, they can do more harm than good. Also, people don’t go to school to do what I do, although I wish they did. As a profession, my work doesn’t even really have a good title. People call me a Pet Detective. I don’t like that title because the cats and dogs I search for really aren’t pets. They are family members. You could call me a Missing Animal Response Technician, but people don’t really know what that means. In a perfect world, every local jurisdiction would have a person like me that would be paid by the government to go out and help people find their pets with a trained search dog. I think we are a long way from that happening.

To try to compensate for those times when I can’t get to everyone in a timely manner, I have written the guides to finding lost pets, and also hundreds of articles on how lost pets are found. Whatever your situation, you can probably find helpful information on my web page or in this newsletter. You can read every article I’ve ever published here. I try to be upfront with people to let them know in advance that contacting me for help doesn’t guarantee a reply. If I can’t help you in person or with a consultation, I hope my writings will prove valuable.

As you have probably gathered from my articles, I love my dogs. They are my working partners and my friends. They are family. If one of my dogs or cats went missing, I would ask for all the help I could get. I have had dogs and cats go missing, and I have been grateful for the help I received. I wish a search dog had been available to me when I lost my cat, Charlie, in 1997. I understand that you are missing a family member, and a rapid response can make a big difference in your chances of getting your pet home. If my dog or cat was missing, and I knew there was someone with the specific training and experience and tools to help me, but I couldn’t reach that person, I would be frustrated. So, if I didn’t help you, I’m sorry. It’s not because of indifference. I would help everyone if I could.