Today Tino searched for Pepper, a young cattle dog who was playful but sometimes skittish. Pepper ran away last night around midnight. She ran from the owner’s parents’ house near North City Park. Pepper’s owner went there around 4:30 AM, and he saw her three times on the street near the park, about a quarter mile from where she had been staying. Pepper ran from her owner, which is to be expected in a situation like this. The owner didn’t know to use Calming Signals.
By the time the owner contacted me, I already knew about Pepper, from Facebook. I told him he probably didn’t need a search dog. There was a concrete sound wall in that area, (or so I thought because you could see it on the satellite photo) so she couldn’t get on the freeway even though it was just one block over. I thought he would find her soon, and the key would be to use Calming Signals. I explained what they are and how to do them, and why dogs run from their owners in these situations. I told him that we would come later in the day if he didn’t find her, but that I didn’t think a search dog was really necessary. I also told him I had a trap if needed.
In the afternoon, he still hadn’t found her, and he wanted Tino to try, just so they could find her faster. We got there at 5 PM and got started. It was about 57 degrees with a light sprinkle of rain. I presented the scent article to Tino in the car, in order to get him to spend more time smelling it. It seems to work better this way, rather than presenting the scent article when he is out of the car and all wound up. Tino got onto the scent trail quickly. He seemed a little distracted by all the places dogs had peed, but he kept getting back to the scent trail. It appeared that Pepper went into a run down property with derelict vehicles. I was dreading having to ask permission to go in there, but then Tino reversed course and continued south. He followed for about 3 blocks until we hit a construction site. Heavy equipment, huge excavators were everywhere, and there was a deep pit inside the fence. Tino really wanted to go past the gate, which they had just closed because they were done for the day. A resident pointed out to me where the fence was open on the other side, near the freeway. I asked Pepper’s owner to go talk to the construction workers before they left for the day, to ask them if they had seen Pepper. They said they hadn’t. We went around to the other gate, and we saw that the concrete wall had been removed in order to put in the new light rail. The neighborhood was essentially open to the freeway, with no fence. As we were starting to look around near that gate, the construction worker caught up with us because he remembered that a WSDOT truck had come to that area of the freeway because a black dog had been hit in the morning, around the time Pepper’s owner was looking for her.
I looked over the jersey barrier, and the remains of a dog that probably looked like Pepper (as far as I could tell) were pushed up against the base of the jersey barrier. It appears that the WSDOT worker had moved her off the lane of travel, and into the narrow strip next to the concrete barrier. She was in very bad condition, but I could see a portion of the back of the head and ears, and it appeared to be a match, visually. The paws were about the right size and color.
I told the owner that he definitely did not want to look over the barrier. Tino and I ran to my car and got a sheet of plastic and a chip scanner. I needed to get the body off of the freeway, with no way to stop or divert rush hour traffic. The flow of traffic wasn’t too fast, maybe 35 MPH, but there were no breaks for me to reach in. I was going to be outside the white line, so I decided to just do it fast. With the owner well back and out of sight, I reached over the jersey barrier for the remains. Just as I was lifting her up, a large diesel pickup truck blasted its horn right in my ear. I hoisted the remains up over the barrier and into the box lined with the plastic sheeting. I covered my chip scanner with a plastic bag, to keep it clean, and scanned as throughly as I could. I did not find a chip. I wouldn’t be surprised if the chip was crushed. Also, I was only able to recover maybe 60% of her remains, and the rest was lost to tires on the freeway. I told the owner that I couldn’t find a chip but that I was 90% certain it was her. He asked about the tail. He showed me a picture of her tail and I compared it, and told him I was now 99% sure it was her, even though I couldn’t find a chip. I thought the odds would be pretty low that a dog of about Pepper’s size, with similar coloring and features, would just happen to be hit on the freeway during that window of time that Pepper had gone missing. Theoretically it would be possible that this wasn’t Pepper, but it would have to be a massive and unlikely coincidence.
I placed the box with Pepper’s remains in the back of his pickup truck, and he was going to transport her to the vet clinic a few blocks away. Pepper’s previous owner was actually a veterinarian at that clinic, so they would be able to take care of the remains.
That morning, I had told the owner that I really didn’t think he needed Tino, and that he would probably have found her without our help. It turned out that he never would have found her without the work of a search dog like Tino. No one would have reported the remains to a Facebook Lost Dog group because you really couldn’t tell it was a dog unless you looked very carefully. Someone driving by on the freeway would have assumed it was just the usual roadside debris, since there are always portions of truck tire treads everywhere you look. The owner couldn’t have found her remains just by looking because it would be very difficult to see her there, and it wouldn’t register as a dog. It turned out Tino was the only way that Pepper would have been found.
Pepper’s story is terribly sad, but I wanted to tell my students, and others interested in pet rescue, about finding Pepper for three reasons. First, that it is hard to know how any search with a search dog is going to turn out. you can give advice based on probabilities, but then sometimes you just have to trust your search dog. What are the odds that Pepper would run through the area where the concrete wall had been removed and the construction gates just happened to be open before they fired up the heavy equipment? If she had been a little earlier or a little later, she probably would have stayed in the safe neighborhood. When advising Pepper’s owner about the utility of a search dog, I didn’t imagine she could make it to the freeway.
Second, Pepper would have lived if her owner knew Calming Signals. If you are someone who helps lost pets, probably the most good you can do is to spread the word about Calming Signals to anyone who will listen. So many dogs, probably hundreds of thousands of dogs, could be saved if the general public was aware of and knew how to use calming signals. I’m certain Pepper would have come to her owner if he had known that your lost dog won’t just automatically come to you like you assume, like she would under normal circumstances.
Third, people who take my class are going to have to deal with death and loss and failure. Why would you, why would anyone want to do my job if I have to deal with such horrible situations like the death of Pepper? While I hate for any of you to have to experience what I did today, on the other hand, I’m actually very glad that I could help Pepper when no one else could. I’m also glad that I could handle the remains in a respectful way so that the owner would not have to see her like that. It’s not an image any owner would want to have etched in their mind. Because I was able to get her off the freeway and identify her as best I could based on pictures, they can know what happened to Pepper, and not be wondering for months or years if she is still out there somewhere. How much time would they have spent searching for her, wondering if she was suffering? Would they have given up after a month or would they have searched hard for a year? If Tino hadn’t found her today, they never would have known what happened. Maybe they could imagine that she had been picked up by someone and given a new home. If it were me, I would want to know. If I lost my Tino, through some freak accident, if Tino died on the freeway, I would want to know. I can’t imagine losing him and just never knowing his fate.
The next day, one of Pepper’s owners called me and said she very much appreciated Tino finding Pepper, and that, while it is horrible that she died due to such strange circumstances, it would have been worse to never find her and never know what happened.
I have probably picked up more than 50 bodies of cats and dogs from the freeway. My dogs and I have located remains at least 125 times during our searches. While I hope that you don’t have to deal with deceased pets as often as I have, it seems likely that anyone doing this work will have to at some point. The way I look at, the way I manage to deal with that much loss and suffering, is that I am providing a service to the cats and dogs, letting their families know what happened to them, so their families won’t suffer indefinitely. I would greatly prefer that owners of cats and dogs take my advice about loss prevention and calming signals so they won’t need my services. But if a dog or cat has died, I want to give their families a chance at closure, so they can remember and grieve properly. I certainly
would want to know if one of my dogs was lost and had died.
The other way I deal with all of the loss and failure is just to enjoy my dogs, to be present with them and just enjoy hanging out. On the ride home, I petted Tino the whole time, and told him that I love him, which he hears all the time. Tino was not upset about the finding because he never got close enough to see or smell the remains of Pepper. I was careful to keep him away. As far as he knows, he did his job tracking the scent, and we were stopped for whatever reason, as often happens on our searches. He was not unhappy, and I wanted to be sure to not be sad around him after the search, so he wouldn’t have a negative association with searching. (I think Mu may have picked up on my sadness about all of the deceased cats we found in the spring and summer of 2020, possibly leading to his anxiety about doing searches.) So I just enjoyed spending time with Tino, sitting in traffic on a rainy night, knowing that he did an excellent job. I told him I am proud of him, and that he is the best dog in the world. Tino provided an answer to Pepper’s family when absolutely no one else could. I am immensely proud of him for that.
Nice job, Tino and Jim. Enjoyed the story and information.
Good job as always Tino❤️