Make a lost pet flyer

Free, about two minutes, and print-ready. It carries a QR code so anyone who spots your animal can send you exactly where and when — which is the part a phone number alone tends to lose.

The flyer has no advertising on it. It should read as your lost animal, not as ours.

Their name *

What are they? *

The flyer warns people not to chase — it needs to say the right animal.

Male or female? *

Breed

Age

Roughly is fine, and you can leave it blank if you do not know.

Weight (lbs)

Prints on the flyer, and tells a stranger whether the animal they are looking at is the right size.

Color and markings

A few words. This prints under the breed and has to read from across a street.

When did they go missing?

Where did they go missing? *

Cross streets if you can. People need to know where to look, and “East Austin” covers more ground than anyone can search.

Photo *

Pick the clearest one, not the best one. A stranger glancing across a road has a second to decide whether the animal they just saw is yours, and they can only match what the photo actually shows — so a plain, well-lit picture of your animal standing there beats a lovely one at a costume party or asleep in a ball. Daylight, side-on, nothing in the way, and the original from your camera roll rather than a screenshot or a photo of a screen.

Phone for the flyer *

This is the number strangers will call.

Your email *

Where the flyer and any sightings go. Not printed.

Your name

Free, and we will not put you on a list. If a drone search would help we will say so — and we will say so just as plainly when it would not.

Before you print

My dog is friendly — why does the flyer say skittish?

Because a lost dog is not the dog you know. Fear changes them, and a dog who has never met a stranger it did not like will bolt from one on day two of being out.

That line is not a description of your dog. It is an instruction to whoever reads the flyer, and the instruction is do not chase.

Work through both ways it can go. If your dog really is still friendly, someone opens a car door and it hops in, this is over by lunchtime, and the wording cost you nothing. If your dog has gone into survival mode — which is the common case — then that line is what stops a well-meaning stranger running at it and putting it across a main road or two miles further out.

One of those outcomes is free to be wrong about. The other is not, so the flyer assumes the one that is expensive.

What if I want to add other details?

Almost always, don’t. The flyer has one job — to make someone who has seen your animal pick up the phone — and it has a couple of seconds of a passer-by’s attention to do it in. Every extra line competes with the photo, the number, and the instruction not to chase.

There is a second reason, and it matters more than people expect. The details you leave off are how you check a sighting is real. When someone rings, you can ask whether the dog had a collar and what color it was. If they say blue and it was yellow, you have learned something. If the collar is printed on the flyer, they will simply read it back to you and you have learned nothing.

That is also your defence against the people who ring claiming to have your animal when they do not. They can only tell you what is on the paper. Hold a few things back and you have questions with answers only a real sighting could produce.

There is a way it actively costs you, too. Say the flyer mentions a red collar. Somebody sees your dog three days later with no collar on — because it caught on a fence, or was slipped, or came off in water — checks the flyer, and decides it must be a different dog. They do not ring. You never hear about the one sighting that would have told you where to look.

And the explanations are not needed either. If there is no collar because they had just been bathed, nobody reading a flyer on a pole needs that — it is a line that helps no one and pushes your phone number further down the page.

All of that said, it is your flyer. You are free to add or take away whatever you like before you print it.

I don’t want my phone number on a poster.

Understandable, and the QR code does part of the work here. Anyone who scans it can tell you where and when they saw your animal, and send a photo with it, without ever needing to ring you. For the people who use it that is the better report anyway — it collects the things we would otherwise have to ask for.

But not everyone will scan it. Plenty of people who spot a dog will not, and every extra step between seeing your animal and telling you about it loses some of them. Friction is the enemy here. That is why the number is still the biggest thing on the page, and why we would keep it there.

If it is your own number that is the problem, the answer is usually a second number rather than no number. A Google Voice line is free, takes a few minutes, rings your phone like any other call, and can be silenced or abandoned the day this is over. A cheap prepaid SIM does the same job.

The trade is straightforward: the easier you are to reach, the more likely somebody makes the effort. We would rather they scanned the code. We also know it will not always go that way.

As with everything else here, it is your flyer — add or remove whatever you like before you print it.

Should I offer a reward?

We would say no — at least not now, and not on a flyer you are about to put up all over a neighborhood.

A reward changes how strangers behave around a frightened animal. It turns passers-by into people who want to catch your dog, and chasing is the single most reliable way to push a lost animal further out and undo days of work. The people most likely to try are the ones least likely to know how.

It also creates a reason to keep an animal rather than report one. A dog that is worth money is a dog somebody might hold on to and wait with, particularly if they think the figure will go up.

There are cases where a reward is the right call, but they depend on how the search is going, who is involved, and what has already been tried — and getting that wrong is expensive in exactly the situation you cannot afford it. If you want to talk it through, call us.

If you decide to offer one anyway, that is your call to make — the flyer is yours, and you are free to add it before you print.