Lost dog found…

Today host Laura Reeves visits with Allison Foley of Leading Edge Dog Show Academy about some of the important steps to quickly and successfully find a lost dog.

The following is a partial reprint of Laura’s As the Wheels Turn column originally published in September 2015 for the online magazine Best in Show Daily. Many of us have lived this nightmare. Here are tips on how you can be prepared in case of emergency.

Lost Dog Story

Ours is a story to which every single dog lover can relate. Either you have lost a dog or you live in perpetual fear of the day it happens to you.

TiMI, the light of my life and last year’s #1 GWP, had gone to visit my friend and Spinone client in Carson City, NV in early August to get ready for the fall hunt tests. Since her husband had run TiMI for the first two legs of his JH this spring, it made perfect sense for him to go back there to finish up his title while I was busy running around the country showing dogs.

Stacey took TiMI out every weekend to refresh his training and ran him off the quad four miles a day to get him in condition for the hunt tests and the coming GWP national. I talked to Stacey Friday night and she was pumped. They were ready for the big double-double hunt test the next morning (two tests a day for two days).

Saturday morning, before the crack of dawn, in the excitement and confusion of getting ready for a weeklong elk hunting trip, Stacy’s husband let their young Spinone, Adele, and TiMI out and forgot to put on their invisible fence collars.

What WERE they thinking?

We can only guess from there, but I would assume the doggie conversation went something like this:

Adele: Hey, TiMI, guess what, the Mister spaced our zippy collars…..

TiMI: Dude, how ‘bout we go check out that bad rabbit down at the end of the driveway. I bet we can catch him today…

Adele: Right on big guy… Let’s hustle before they holler at us…

(Trot, trot, trot…. ZING off goes the bunny, but today, instead of jigging right, he jigs left… Two hunting dogs in hot pursuit in the wee dark hours of the pre-dawn, skirting yards and sleeping barns, off to the northeast…)

Pant, pant, pant….

Adele: Whoa, that bunny was sure fast this morning….

TiMI: Wait, what’s that? Hmmm…. Something smells good up here… Let’s go check it out for a minute.

Adele: Well… OK, but we’re going to get in trouble…

TiMI: Yeah, yeah, this smells like a foxy lady just waiting for some company…

Adele: You are such a BOY…. (doggie sigh)

(Trot, trot, trot… OOOOOOPS! Out of the gloom rise a half-dozen scraggly, doggy looking animals…. Coyotes, including a female ready to breed, and her mate…)

TiMI: Adele, we are in big trouble. You stay behind me and I’ll try to scare them away…

Adele: whimper….

TiMI: (Standing as big and tough as he can) RAWR…

(Coyotes charge.)

TiMI: Discretion is the better part of valor, girl! RUN!!!

(Dogs run, coyotes chase into the mists…)

That sinking feeling

Meanwhile, Stacy steps outside to load the dogs at 5:30 a.m. and finds nothing. She calls and calls. Then comes that sinking feeling in your stomach that leaves your ears ringing and bile at the back of your throat.

Stacey searched for several hours Saturday morning by herself, driving and calling and whistling. She contacted me in Oregon once it became obvious that the dogs were not going to reappear.

Critical first steps

From that point forward, the machine went into overdrive. Since I was a six hour drive away, I was the communication center, media center and public information center. I threw together a lost dog flyer from an existing template in my word processing program and emailed it to Stacey, who had it printed and posted around the neighborhood within an hour. As the deputy emergency manager of her county,