Why We Charge a Fee for Services

I would do this job for free if I could

Why We Charge a Fee for Searches

If I were independently wealthy, I would do my job for free. I love working with my search dogs. I always want to help every lost cat and dog that I can. If I won the lottery, I would find more ways to help dogs and cats. Recently, we searched for a lost cat, and when we were done with the search, checking all of the yards where we had permission, I asked the owner of the cat how she wanted to pay for the search. She was shocked that I would charge for the service, or so she said. I pointed out that it states right on the contact form she filled out that the fee for the search dog is $350. She said she hadn’t seen that, and if she had, then she wouldn’t have requested the search dog. People certainly have the right not to hire us, if they don’t want to. I have since changed the contact form so that the owner of the lost cat or dog has to fill in a blank acknowledging that there is a fee for the search dog. I hope this prevents any such misunderstanding in the future.

If your son or daughter were lost in the mountains, and you contacted the police, they would eventually activate an organized volunteer search and rescue team who would go out looking for your child, possibly using search dogs. You would not be charged for this. I agree with this policy, but the nine volunteer teams in King County are activated 200 times a year, and they have support from the Sheriff’s Office. More than 10,000 dogs go missing each year in King County alone. Possibly just as many cats go missing, but the records for lost cats are not as complete. In the counties I cover, King, Snohomish, Pierce, Thurston, Mason, Kitsap, and Skagit, hundreds of thousands of cats and dogs go missing every year. Although many people help keep an eye out for these lost pets, through various Facebook lost pet groups, only one person has been offering search dogs services in Western Washington for the past 18 years. If I worked a full-time job doing some other work, I would not be able to help as many people as I do.

Dogs are expensive, even if they aren’t working dogs. The average dog might cost $2,000 per year with food, vet bills, insurance, and medications. That doesn’t even count the value of furniture and carpets destroyed. Until recently, I had five dogs. Now I have 4. Between dog expenses, car expenses and groceries, I am just barely making enough to get by. I am not getting rich off of searching for lost pets. If I had done pretty much any other job for the past 18 years, I’m sure I could have been better off financially.

Because I am the only person in Western Washington, that I know of, offering the services of a search dog for lost pets, theoretically I could charge whatever I want. There is no law saying that a search dog should cost $350. There is a person living in another state who will bring a search dog here for $5,000. I definitely don’t recommend you hire this person, but people can charge whatever they want if people are willing to pay. I have tried to keep my fees low so that people don’t feel like they can’t afford a search dog. The fee for a search dog is probably less than you would pay for a typical vet visit.

One reason I’m glad we do charge a fee is because, if we didn’t, if we did searches for free, then everyone would ask for the search dog, all the time, and of course we could not do 100,000 searches for lost pets every year. I quite often advise people not to use the search dog if I think our chances of success would be low due to the passage of time or the conditions. If the search dog was free to everyone, then there would need to be some sort of criteria or governing body to decide when the search dog was both necessary and likely to succeed. It would not be a good use of the resource to have a search dog searching every single day for lost dogs and cats when he has little or no chance of finding them. Before we come out and do a search, I let people know what I think our odds of success are, based on the facts of the case and the environment and conditions. Success is never guaranteed, but I like for people to have a realistic idea of what we can and can’t do.

I would greatly prefer that no one ever needed our services. Our web page, www.3retrievers.com, has loss prevention advice for cats and dogs. This newsletter has over 250 articles about finding lost pets, and also loss prevention. For 18 years, I have been telling anyone who would listen how to keep their dogs and cats safe, how to protect them against coyotes, and how to find your pet fast if they should go missing. If hundreds of thousands of pets are going missing in Western Washington each year, it seems like my message is not reaching people. If you don’t want to pay for the services of a search dog, please read my website and my newsletter for all of the ways you can keep your pet safe. I understand that we probably will never get the number of lost pets down to zero, but if everyone followed all the advice in my guides, we could eliminate 90% of the missing pets in Western Washington.

If your cat or dog is lost right now, you have available to you this encyclopedia of knowledge from 18 years of finding lost pets, telling you which techniques are most likely to work. If you decide not to hire the search dog, you still can find your cat or dog using the many other techniques I describe in my free guides. If you decide to hire the search dog, please know that I am not doing this job so I can make money. I have to make money so I can do this job. If I could manage to do it for free, I would.

My search dogs and I have found the lost cat or dog, or their remains, at least 500 times. In at least 250 of those searches, the pet would not have been located by any other means besides the search dog. When Tino found the 150-pound dog stuck in mud up to his neck, in the middle of hundreds of acres of forest, that dog would not have been found by any other means. If one of my dogs was missing, I would happily pay for a search dog to find him. I hope you never need our services, but if you do, I just wanted you to know why we charge a fee.