We want to thank our dedicated and compassionate volunteers who monitor our FB page; post lost/found dogs & reunions, maintain our website; follow up on lost/found dogs; monitor Craigslist, attend special events, provide IT and Twitter support, provide statistics, write articles and photo tips, and the list goes on. Without them this page and the website wouldn’t be possible. Thank You LDI Volunteers!
Your lost dog has been missing now for several weeks (or months) and your sightings and leads have fizzled out. Don’t despair. It is never too late to jump-start the search for a long-lost dog.
This article is designed to give you some ideas for reigniting your search to give you a place to pick up again. Hopefully, you have read our other articles on shy lost dog search strategies and friendly lost dog search strategies. If not, please check the categories at the right that link to many more articles. We also hope you have mapped all the sightings on a map, either a web-based map like Google Maps or a large-scale paper map.
Now, imagine you are a detective working on a cold case. You may talk to 99 people who have not seen or heard anything. You are looking for the ONE person who has. Someone, somewhere has seen or knows something. Be persistent and don’t give up. Even if they haven’t seen your dog, they may see your dog tomorrow. Putting a flyer in their hands ensures they will know who to call when they see him.
Look at your map and draw a circle in a one mile radius around the last confirmed sighting. Go back to the last confirmed place that your dog was seen and flyer heavily in a one mile radius. Don’t let false assumptions or geographic barriers deter you. Don’t assume that your dog would NEVER have crossed the highway or the river or the lake. False assumptions will make you miss possible sightings and leads.
Make sure you have listed your dog with our partner, Pet FBI at www.petfbit.org so that his or information is maintained in a centralized, national database. Talk to everybody! Put a flyer in their hands and ask them if they have seen your dog or if they think a dog may have been hanging around their house or farm. Did they see dog tracks under their bird feeder? Was their dog poop in their yard when it shouldn’t be there? Was their outdoor cat food disappearing faster than normal?
Visit EVERY place that serves food in the one mile radius. Don’t forget convenience stores and gas stations! Talk with the kitchen staff and management. Did anybody see a dog hanging out near the dumpsters? Did anybody notice dog tracks near the dumpsters in the winter? Did any restaurant patrons mention a dog hanging out in the parking lot? Did anybody see a similar looking dog being walked in their neighborhood?
Think about the demographics of the neighborhoods in the one mile radius. Maybe you need to print some flyers in Spanish or another language? Or, maybe there are some older residents who don’t get out much to see signs and flyers but may have taken pity on your dog and fed him over the winter? Think about the people that may not have seen or understood your first round of flyering.
Now is a great time to refresh your posters and intersection signs. You may want to change the heading to STILL MISSING – so that people know that the search is still on. Think outside the box. Ask every business in the one mile radius if you can hang a flyer in their window and employee break room. Maybe your dog approached workers on their lunch break. Or maybe they saw him when they were driving to or from work.
If you don’t get any new leads in the one mile radius; you will need to expand your area. You may want to consider using USPS Every Door Direct Mail. Beware of some of the other lost pet mailing services that you will see advertised. Some of them are scams and do not reach the number of homes that they promise.
Refresh the memories of the animal control facilities, shelters, police departments, vet clinics and municipal offices in your county and surrounding counties. Send them fresh flyers.
Give a new flyer to postal workers, delivery drivers, school bus drivers and garbage truck drivers. Don’t forget pizza and sandwich delivery drivers also! They are out and about in the evening, when your dog may be moving around, looking for food.
Check with your local Department of Transportation. Have they found any deceased dogs alongside the road? Or has a dog been spotted eating on a deer or other wildlife carcass?
Check with your local railroad companies to see if they have any reports of deceased dogs along the railroad tracks. Lost dogs often use railroad tracks as a path of travel between their hiding places and food sources. Deceased wildlife hit by trains also make a good food source for hungry lost dogs.
Repost your dog on Craigslist, Next-door and your local online classifieds. Consider taking out a print newspaper ad also. There are still many people without computers or the internet!
Remember, Never Give Up! Re-energize and jump start the search for your missing dog. Your dog is depending on you to bring him home.
Our tips, ideas and articles are based on information gathered from thousands of successful lost dog recoveries. Any advice or suggestions made by Lost Dogs of Wisconsin/Lost Dogs Illinois is not paid-for professional advice and should be taken at owner’s discretion.
1/22/2021
Are rewards a good idea? Many lost dog articles in print and on the internet recommend offering a reward to increase the chance of getting your dog back. We don’t agree. We have based our opinion on thousands of successful recoveries. In this article we would like to explain our reasoning based on the three possible scenarios for your missing dog:
1.If your dog is shy; offering a reward does exactly what we DON’T want people to do. It encourages people to chase your dog in order to get the reward. We have an eyewitness account of a woman chasing an extremely shy dog across a corn field with a ham sandwich because she wanted the reward money. It could easily have had tragic consequences because she was chasing him directly towards a busy highway. Luckily the dog was recovered safely, but it took two more weeks and the dog had gone an additional twenty miles. This added extra expense and stress for the already stressed-out owners.
Your strategy with a shy dog should be to encourage the dog to “settle” into an area and relax. Regular meals at a feeding station will allow the dog to return to a more domesticated state of mind and will give you the best opportunity to capture him.
2. If your lost dog has been picked up by a Good Samaritan, their motive will be to return the dog to a loving home. Even if they have already kept or rehomed your dog, they will feel guilty or be afraid they will be “ratted out” by their neighbors. You can always offer them a small token of your appreciation for their time and trouble after you have your dog back safely.
Your strategy should be to file a police report immediately so that you have started the paper trail that may be necessary if your dog has been kept or rehomed. You will also need to flyer very heavily and use intersection signs. Put a sign in front of your own house also! Keep checking your local shelters. Remember, the Good Samaritan is motivated to return your dog by seeing how much you miss him.
3. If your dog has been trulystolen (somebody broke into your car, residence or business with the intent of stealing your dog and/or other possessions) and you feel that their motive is greed; you still don’t need to put a reward on the flyer. The thieves will be watching for your flyers and ads and will contact you to ask for a reward. Make sure you have contacted the police and have them accompany you when you arrange to meet the thieves.
Offering a reward for a missing dog has these other detrimental effects:
1. It encourages scammers to contact you, who do not have your dog and may never even have seen your dog. But they have seen your flyers and ads offering a reward. They might email you pictures that look like your dog; these may be photo shopped, or taken from your Facebook page. The scammers will want to meet you at a location to exchange cash for your dog. Call the police immediately if you are approached by somebody that says they have your dog but you must give them money to get your dog back. Otherwise you will have no money and no dog.
2. It makes it harder for the next person who loses their dog, especially if they can’t afford to offer a reward. Rewards encourage scammers, thieves and dognapping.
3. It “legitimizes” dognapping and encourages people to hold out for a reward, perhaps even Good Samaritans. Stealing a dog or keeping a dog that you have found is illegal. Extortion is illegal. We need to keep emphasizing this in order for it to be taken seriously by law enforcement and the public.
The buck stops with you! Please don’t publicize a reward for your missing dog on your flyers and ads. Let’s all work together to help more lost dogs get home safely.
Our tips, ideas and articles are based on information gathered from thousands of successful lost dog recoveries. Any advice or suggestions made by Lost Dogs of Wisconsin/Lost Dogs Illinois is not paid-for professional advice and should be taken at owner’s discretion.
Lost Dogs Illinois was designed to help individual owners and finders of dogs who are keeping them in their homes while looking for the dog’s owner. We provide postings, a website, tips and suggestions to help happy reunions happen. We are thrilled that the idea has taken off and has become so successful. We are often asked if we can post pictures of “strays” in shelters, veterinarian clinics, police departments or other animal control or stray holding facilities. We would love to accommodate them all; but unfortunately this would defeat our purpose. When we “overpost” Facebook has a sneaky way of hiding our posts in our fan’s newsfeeds. This would also overwhelm our volunteers who generously give of their time to help lost dogs.
Instead, we encourage every shelter, vet clinic, police department or other agency that holds “strays” to develop their own Facebook page to help lost pets in their community. We will gladly share the link to the page and feature it on our website. We truly believe that with today’s technology and social media availability that it is the ethical responsibility of every animal control and stray holding facility in America to make sure that they are using all of the tools available to get lost pets back to their owners. Reuniting lost pets frees up kennel space for the truly needy animals and saves lives.
Facebook is great! It has helped us to connect and share our posts with over 32,000 Facebook fans in Illinois. Many of those fans re-share our posts and many lost dogs have been reunited with their owners. But not everybody is on Facebook. That is why we have branched out to include other social media sites in our toolbox. Pinterest is a hot new social media site that we are on. Or, if you like your messages short, sweet and easily searchable; you can “follow” us on Twitter.
For efficiency, we have linked our Facebook account to our Twitter account so that our Facebook postings automatically are “tweeted”. But Twitter requires that we keep our “tweets” to only 140 characters. So, we try to get all of the important information out about lost or found dogs in the briefest way possible. Then, if somebody sees a tweeted lost or found dog from their area, they can click on the link for more information. Or, if the dog isn’t from their area, they can ignore it. Twitter also gives the account user the ability to “retweet” the posting to their followers. One retweet from an influential user (think celebrity or a media outlet like a newspaper or radio station) can result in our tweet going to thousands of people.
Did you know that you can search Twitter via hashtags? A hashtag is a word or phrase prefixed with the symbol #. For instance if you want to see all of the dogs missing from the Springfield area – you can simply type #Springfield into the search box. You will get our missing or found dogs but will also get all of the other news and information about Springfield. Be aware, that there are other cities in America named Springfield, so you might get search results from those also. If you want to see all of our missing and found dogs, regardless of location, you can follow our Twitterfeed at @LostDogsIL.
A note about hashtags: They must be all one word to work. Buffalo Grove must be typed #BuffaloGrove. Capitalization isn’t important. #buffalogrove would get you the same results in the Twitter search. So, when you see our Facebook posts without spaces between the words and the # symbol in front, it isn’t because we can’t spell! It’s because we are trying to maximize our exposure so that more lost dogs get home!
Thank you for “sharing”, “pinning” and “retweeting” our postings. You are saving lives!