Pet owners whose four-legged friends go missing are turning to some pricey new tools to find Fido.
Chris Rausten of Riverside, Calif., was so desperate to recover her two beloved Shih Tzus she spent hundreds of dollars on a neighborhood telephone alert and a bloodhound search.
“I love those dogs so much, they’re my babies,” said Rausten, 41, who got the pets as puppies three years ago after her other Shih Tzu was lost. “They make me so happy when I come home and they’re there to greet me.”
Her dogs, Aniken and Rosie, were found four days after they escaped through an open gate.
After the disappearance, Rausten and her family scoured their neighborhood and placed a notice on Craigslist.org. They also posted more than 200 fliers, but most of them were torn down within a day, she said.
So she turned to professionals.
Searching the Internet for help, Rausten discovered FindToto.com, a service that places up to 5,000 automated calls to neighbors with a description of a missing dog or cat and a contact number.
Rausten paid $195 for a 30-second message that reached 2,500 neighbors. The calls are made using a database of telephone numbers cross-checked against addresses, according to the company’s Web site.
The next day, she called in a team of pet detectives and their bloodhounds to follow the pups’ scent. After the trail dead-ended, the trackers mapped out where Rausten should post her signs.
Trackers Landa Coldiron of Lost Pet Detection near Burbank, Calif., and Annalisa Berns of Pet Search and Rescue in San Diego, who work as a team, advised her to use big neon poster boards with 8-by-10-inch color photos and to put them near freeway ramps and on chain-link fences instead of utility poles, Rausten said.
A day later, a man called from Colton, Calif., and said he had Aniken and Rosie. He said he was a gardener who picked up the dogs while working in the neighborhood. He refused the $1,000 reward.
Among the other services available to find lost pets: pre-addressed and professionally made postcards for neighbors through www.PetFind-USA.com and www.AmberAlertforPets.com, an Internet association of pet owners who help search for other members’ lost pets.
“There’s a definite need for the service,” said Kat Albrecht, a former police officer and bloodhound handler turned pet detective.
Albrecht tracked missing persons until her dog disappeared in 1996 and she couldn’t get any help finding him, even through her police sources. She finally called on a friend with a golden retriever, which she had trained and used on some police cases, and they found her dog in 20 minutes.
So she started her own company using many of the same theories and techniques used in police work. Since 2005, Albrecht has trained 130 dogs and their handlers to find missing pets through her company, Pet Hunters International.
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