As I was leaving my house tonight to have dinner with friends, I noticed a dog wandering on my street. I started to drive away since I was already a few minutes late, but I changed my mind and called the dog over to me. He had tags, but nothing that indicated where he belonged.
(Incidentally, what is up with that? We get dogs roaming our neighborhood all the time, and none of them ever have a tag with their address or phone number on it. What is wrong with people?)
He did have a tag noting that he was chipped, with a 1-800 number. I took him home -- he followed quite willingly -- and called the people. They tracked him down and called the owners; no answer. They left a message saying I had their dog and to call me. I left this dog in our backyard while I went to dinner.
I should've remembered Mare's warning. He was a beautiful husky mix, just so handsome. He also apparently had the husky's digging fetish. I got home from dinner and he was gone, leaving me with a major hole under the fence. Now I know how he disappeared from his owner's house.
I hope he's OK and found his way home.
I'm kind of sad; Charlie wanted to keep him.
Strange! This just happened to me too! On Monday night, driving home from work, my husband and I saw a dog running across a busy street.
Being dog owners ourselves, we couldn't just drive on. We had to pull over and chase the dog down.
He was an adorable black beagle mix with no collar and looked well fed. We knew he was a pet, not a stray, despite not having a collar. We also have a beagle ourselves who has a knack for racing out the backyard fence when untrained human friends and family members accidentally let our dog out (much to our dog's delight and our dismay).
A beagle, if folks don't know, are escape artists and tend to wander. They don't deliberately escape their homes to be malicious or mischievous, but their breed has such a finely developed sense of smell (even more than most dogs) that they're constantly on the "scent" and will follow a scent trail until they become utterly lost. It isn't something that you can "train" out of them either, despite what people try to tell us.
We immediately took the dog to the vet to get scanned with a microchip ( no chip was found) and then brought him home.
We kept him separated from our dogs just in case he had rabies, fleas, or some other kind of communicable disease (you just never know!). Then we made posters and put them up all over the neighborhood.
While we always put the safety of our own dogs first, and wouldn't dream of "keeping" a lost dog just because we found it (imagine if someone did that to your dog, how you'd feel!)... by the same token, we also couldn't imagine handing it over to the pound just yet. From experience, it can be a traumatizing experience(not to mention a health hazard; kennel cough anyone?) for dogs. At least we had a warm house to offer, soft blankets, a friendly hand for scratching bellies, as well as food and water.
In the end, the dog's owner called us the next morning after spotting one of our fliers near her home. He had been missing for two days and the kids had been crying for non-stop. Aw. Strange thing is, their dog got out just the way ours does- a visitor had accidentally left the front yard gate ajar.
Hope your "lost" dog finds its way home! I think every dog owner should microchip their dog- it's the responsible thing to do.
Crys -- The sad thing is that today the microchip company called me back and asked me for an update. I said that the dog had escaped, and they said that they still haven't been able to contact the owners. How sad...
Posted by: Sarah at March 27, 2008 04:53 PMThat IS odd. I hope he isn't one of those poor dogs whose owners just leave when they move or who were in the process of moving & he escaped. So strange to me that if their dog had a microchip they wouldn't be looking for him non-stop.
Even if he were in rescue & microchipped there, the rescue's information should have been on the account.
Very strange. Hope his owners are okay too!
Posted by: Guard Wife at March 28, 2008 08:56 AMHope he finds his way home. The only way to truly keep a dog in a yard is to counter sink the fence in a foot of cement and electrify the top.
Posted by: Mare at March 28, 2008 09:40 AM