How to search for a missing dog

If your dog has gone missing, the first hours matter more than anything else you will do. None of what follows requires hiring anybody, and all of it works whether or not you ever speak to us.

Do these first

Do not chase, and do not call out from a distance

A frightened dog in flight mode runs from everyone, including the people it loves. Pursuit is the single most common way a recoverable case becomes a long one. If you see your dog, do not walk at them and do not call out.

Turn away from them — side-on at the very least — and slowly get down to the ground: take a knee, then sit. Better still, if you can manage it, lie on your back with your head toward the dog and your feet away. Every one of those makes you smaller, lower and less like something advancing on them, and it is what gets a dog in flight mode to close the distance itself.

Go back to where they were last seen, and stay there

Lost dogs frequently circle back to the point of escape. Somebody should be at that spot, quiet and still, for as long as you can manage it.

Put your scent at that spot — and only that

An unwashed shirt, a worn pillowcase, something that smells strongly of you. Not their own bed or crate blanket. Anything carrying your dog's scent draws predators as readily as it draws your dog, while human scent lays the same trail home and tends to keep coyotes at a distance.

And no food. It brings in coyotes, raccoons and everything else in the area, and if this ends up needing a trap, an animal that has been fed every night has no reason to walk into one. They will not starve overnight.

Write down the exact time and place last seen

This sets the realistic search radius, and it is the first thing anybody helping you will ask. It gets fuzzy fast — write it down now.

Update the microchip, and report the dog missing on it

If your dog is chipped, check the contact details on the registration are current and tell the chip company the dog is lost. A chip nobody can trace back to a working phone number does nothing, and a shelter that scans it should reach you on the first try.

Post on the lost-pet platforms

Petfinder, PawBoost, Nextdoor and your local Craigslist section. Many people who find a dog post there before they think to call anybody.

Post on social media and in local groups

Facebook, Instagram, Nextdoor and any neighbourhood or county lost-and-found group. You have one set of eyes. A post that circulates locally brings hundreds.

Make a flyer

A recent photograph, the dog's name, your phone number, and any distinguishing marks. Bright backgrounds get looked at — reds and greens work well. Our flyer builder is free, does not ask you for anything, and will lay one out for you in a couple of minutes.

Tell the shelters, rescues and vets

Call and visit the ones nearest to you. Leave a photograph and your number at minimum; hand them a flyer if you have one.

Tell the delivery drivers

FedEx, UPS and Amazon drivers are already covering every street in your neighbourhood several times a week. If you can safely flag one down, explain and hand over a flyer.

Walk and drive the area

Especially around the point of loss, and without leaving that spot unattended if you have anybody to spare. Take a leash. Stop and speak to people rather than driving past them, hand out flyers, and ask neighbours to check their yards, sheds, garages and camera footage — a garage somebody closed at dusk is a routine place to find a dog two days later.

The scams that will find you

Once your phone number is public, you will be contacted by people who have not found your dog. These are the common ones.

The verification-code scam

You get a call or text from somebody claiming to be animal control, a shelter or the police, saying they have your dog but need to "verify" you first. They send a six-digit code and ask you to read it back.

That code is Google opening a Google Voice number against your phone number. Reading it out hands them a phone line in your name, which they then use on the next owner. No shelter, no police department and no animal control office will ever ask you for a code.

The "I have your dog" scam

Somebody contacts you claiming to have the dog and asks for money up front — gas money, a vet bill, a fee to hold him. They will not send a photograph, or will send one that is not your dog, and they will not answer a question only somebody with the dog could answer. Once money moves, they stop replying.

Ask for a photograph of the dog with something specific in it, taken now. Ask about a mark that is not in your flyer. Anybody who has your dog can do both in under a minute.

The fake search company

The most damaging one, because it consumes the hours when real help would have worked. A stranger appears in the comments of your post recommending a search service by name, warmly and specifically, often with other accounts agreeing. The page they point you at asks for a deposit by Zelle, Cash App, Venmo or gift card.

A real operator has a home town on their page, because this work is done with boots on the ground. The fake ones will not say where they are based and will ask you where you lost the dog before telling you they are "local". Large follower counts are not reassurance: those accounts are frequently hijacked, scrubbed of the original owner's posts and refilled with rescue content.

We keep a fuller account of how that operation runs, and what to do if you have already paid, on our trust page.

The "global tracking" claim

Somebody offers to track your dog's microchip, or your Bluetooth tag, from a satellite. This is not a service that exists, and it is worth understanding why, because the confidence with which it is claimed is the whole trick.

A microchip has no battery. It is a passive NFC tag, the same technology as the chip in a credit card: the scanner briefly powers the chip so that it can answer, which is why a chip has to be read from a few centimetres away. There is nothing in a microchip capable of transmitting anywhere, let alone to orbit.

A Bluetooth tag has a battery but a very short radio. An AirTag reaches roughly thirty feet in good conditions, a Samsung SmartTag a few hundred. They find things by borrowing other people's passing phones, not by talking to satellites.

A GPS collar does not talk to satellites either. GPS is one-way: the satellites broadcast, and the collar listens and works out where it is. To tell you where it is, the collar then uses the cellular network. If the collar is working, use its own app; if it is not, there is no service anywhere that can reach it.

And a drone search needs a pilot standing in your neighbourhood. FAA rules require the aircraft to be flown within visual line of sight of its operator, and commercial drone radios are good for a couple of kilometres at best. Nobody in another state is flying a search over your street. If somebody offers to, they are not going to.

When to bring in help, and what kind

That is your call, and plenty of dogs are found by their owners and their neighbours without any of this. What is worth knowing is that the options get weaker with time, because the area a dog could be in grows in every direction at once — so the search that is one evening's work this week may not be flyable at all in a fortnight.

Aerial thermal is at its best over ground people cannot cover: open fields, woodland, greenbelt, creek beds, pasture. It is at its worst in dense urban blocks and apartment complexes, where flyers and local posts genuinely do more than we can. If your dog is under a deck or inside a culvert, no camera above it will help.

A scent dog answers a different question, and which of the two you want depends on how long it has been. Early on, your dog has probably not gone far and you already have an area worth searching; later, the area is gone and what you need first is a direction of travel, which is the thing only scent can supply. The full comparison is here.

And if you have reached the point of considering a pet psychic or an animal communicator — a lot of owners do, and usually after a fortnight of everything else — we have written about that too, plainly and without the contempt the question usually attracts.

What decides an aerial search, more than the aircraft, is the hour it is flown in and the equipment on it. Both are covered properly elsewhere: what makes an aerial search work for the thermal, zoom and lighting side, and our equipment for what we carry and what none of it can do.

We are happy to give you our honest read on whether a search fits your case. We do not take every case that comes to us, and when our equipment is not the right answer for your situation, we will say so.