Mu & Penny Moo

Two cases solved on this date, four years ago.

Mu and I each solved a case today. (September 30th, 2019.) Unfortunately, Mu discovered evidence that the cat had been taken by predators. My success was much happier: I found a sweet little puppy under the freeway. We started the day searching for a cat in an interesting neighborhood where each street is a peninsula out into the lake, and most of the homeowners have their yacht docked in the canal behind their house. It was of interest to our search for the cat because it was a unique terrain to be searching in. When we got there and started the search, the cat’s owner said that many neighbors told him there had been coyotes seen recently. I thought they probably wouldn’t go down his street because it was a dead end surrounded by water, leaving nowhere for the coyotes to go. Mu and I started the search going away from the water, towards a large park with dense woods, the kind of place a coyote might go. We didn’t find anything. I should say, I didn’t see anything visible. Mu obviously found interesting and relevant scents.


When we started searching the other direction, Mu immediately found fur. It was in the next door neighbor’s yard. There really was quite a bit of fur, once you started looking, but obviously many people had walked by this evidence while looking for a cat and they didn’t see the white fur. This was a demonstration of Mu’s value. He finds things that people miss. Looking at the color, texture, and distribution of the fur, it seemed most likely to me that the lost cat had actually been taken by a coyote. After Mu pointed out the fur on the neighbor’s lawn, we asked that neighbor to check his surveillance recordings to see if he documented any predators around the time of the disappearance. We took a large amount of fur home to test with Luminol, to see if any blood was present.

After we left that search in Bellevue, we drove to North Bend to look for a little puppy named Penny Moo. Her family had been in a rollover accident on I-90 the night before, and they couldn’t find her. They asked for our help, but there’s no way for me to work a search dog on a freeway, especially where the speed limit is 70. Mu and I drove up there just to look around the best we could. On my first two passes by the crash site, I noticed that the north edge of the freeway was bounded by dense blackberries for miles. Perhaps a little ten pound dog like Penny could work her way through the brambles, but it seemed like a hard struggle. The center median was much easier to get through, with sparse Scotch Broom, and it was about sixty feet wide between the lanes of traffic. Also on my first two passes of the crash site, I scanned for any signs that Penny had been struck, and i didn’t see any. I had noticed on many previous cases that dogs on freeways tend to run against traffic because that stops people from chasing them. If a dog runs with traffic, people chase. If a dog reverses direction, you can’t back up on a freeway. Dogs soon become conditioned that people stop chasing if they go against traffic.

​After another two passes, I decided to check out under the bridge, fifty feet east of the crash site, which would have been going against traffic for Penny Moo. The freeway goes over the Snoqualmie River, and the bridge spans an area of low land near the river. I could see how a dog could get into the center median and follow the path of least resistance right down to this low, sheltered area under the bridge. To get there, I had to quickly work my way across four lanes of 70 MPH traffic and then get onto the left shoulder and stop fast, short of the bridge, without causing an accident. I managed to get parked away from the lanes of traffic, and I got out carefully to make sure there was no chance of Mu getting out. I locked the car and started winding my way down through the Scotch Broom, slowly and quietly, looking for any sign of Penny. Once at the bottom of the dip under the bridge, I looked across the gravel area under the freeway, and there was Penny Moo, peeking around the corner of the bridge abutment. She looked like she might panic and run, so I pretended not to see her. I used Calming Signals. I turned my body to the side and walked in an arc, so I wasn’t walking toward her, but I was slowly getting closer. She watched me for a while, and then she tentatively came closer to me to check me out. I wasn’t one of those people who would chase her, so she didn’t need to run. She was actually on the other side of a chain link fence, which may have helped her feel safe to check me out. As she listened to me talking softly, she kept inching closer.As I was calling her mom on my phone, Penny came right up to me on the other side of the fence. When I put her mom on speakerphone, Penny started yipping and jumping up and down. She was ready to be rescued. I walked over to a section of the fence where there was a slight gap over the gravel. I bent the bottom of the fence up so Penny could wiggle under. Once on my side, she practically climbed up me to get in my arms.She nibbled on my ear a little. She has sharp little teeth. I wrapped her in my arms very tightly, half in my jacket. I was nervous as we approached the car. I didn’t want her to panic, perhaps having a flashback of the car accident, and try to wriggle out of my arms right next to the freeway. (Note to self: you should always have a leash in your pocket when looking for a lost dog.) She was tense, but she didn’t try to squirm away as I loaded her into the car next to Mu. Penny Moo and Mu sniffed each other a little, and then Mu went back to sleep. Penny stayed on my lap the entire trip home, and had a nice long nap. It was such a relief to catch little Penny Moo, alive and well, in such a dangerous area. We got home and then her mom came to pick her up. She very happy to be back with her family.

I performed the Luminol test on the cat’s fur, and it confirmed the presence of a large amount of blood, consistent with a predator attack. Because Mu had pointed out the area where the cat had been attacked, the neighbor was able to find a recording of the night the cat disappeared. It was hard to see, but in the corner of the video, you could see two coyotes on the lawn. One of them had something in it’s mouth, which looked very much like a cat. Although it was a sad result, Mu’s work at least let the cat’s owners know what happened. Otherwise, the landscape crew probably would have blown away any evidence, and they would always be left wondering if their cat was still out there somewhere, waiting to be rescued. It’s not always easy to tell, but I got the impression the cat’s owner appreciated knowing what happened, even though it was the worst news.


Penny Moo and her family were really happy to be reunited, but it also helped me out considerably. I always prefer to give good news than bad. Having Penny jump into my arms and then sleep on my lap for the ride home was a much needed happy ending.