Looking for a Lost Pet Search Service?

No, none of those. We are a paid search service: you have lost your own animal and we go and look for it, usually with a thermal drone at night. We do not house animals, take them in, rehome them, or hold strays, and we have nothing to adopt. If you are trying to surrender or adopt an animal, or you have found a stray, your city or county animal services is where to start — and they are who to call if the animal needs help now. If the pet you are looking for is your own, that is exactly what we do.

Typically same day — but the right time of day matters more than raw speed, and we pick that window rather than simply turning up. Thermal reads the contrast between a warm animal and cool ground, and in Texas the ground is still holding the day's heat at sunset; it is coldest, and the contrast best, around sunrise. Size counts as much as timing. A Great Dane is findable at 9pm even a day into the search, where an eight-pound dog in the same situation is not — that one waits for first light, and flying it at sunset would waste your money and our night. Urgency overrides all of it: if your dog was hit by a car at 10pm, we are on site by 11 if we can sort the logistics quickly.

Central Texas, worked outward from Austin. Anything inside roughly 150 miles is a local search. Past that it becomes a regional deployment, which carries travel, fuel and often an overnight, and costs accordingly — you will hear that before you commit to anything. Distance is not the only question, though. Dense urban ground is a poor fit whatever the mileage, and open country three hours out can be an excellent one. Send your location with the details and you will get a straight answer on both.

No two of these cases are close enough together to average. A case we take within hours of the animal going missing is a different problem from one we take five days later. An eighteen-year-old chihuahua is not going far; a two-year-old German Shepherd can be a county over by the next morning. A dog that somebody picked up before or during the flight was never going to show up on a camera. A dog on a course of steroids is ravenous, and will bee-line for a dropped french fry six fields away. Package all of that into one number and it describes none of them — least of all yours, which is the only case you actually care about.

Which is why such a number would say more about which cases a company takes than about how well it works. We could raise ours tomorrow by accepting only large dogs lost within the hour on open ground, and turning away the small one three days into the woods — and that second animal is the one that most needs somebody doing this properly. We could also count every case that ended happily, whether or not the search is what did it. We aren't willing to do either, which is why there is no figure here to give you.

There's also the question of what such a number would even be about. A drone doesn't replace searching, it multiplies it — in how much ground gets covered, and in how well that ground gets looked at. Asking its success rate on its own is a little like asking a flashlight's, or a helicopter's, or a search dog's. On some cases the right move is a trap rather than a flight. And we are sometimes hired specifically to rule an area out — to settle whether the animal is in the greenbelt behind the house, so the search can move elsewhere. On that job, finding nothing is precisely what was bought.

The comparison you're reaching for is a professional search against doing it yourself. That one is real, and it turns on ground covered and on seeing what eyes walk past — not on a percentage anyone can quote you.

Underneath all of it: nobody can sell you a found animal. Not us, not anyone. What you're hiring is the search run properly, and the judgement about which tool your case actually needs.

Tell us as soon as you know and we will stand down. The terms of service set the policy that governs: for local searches, 75% refundable more than five hours out, 50% between two and five hours, and non-refundable inside two hours or once we have started traveling. In practice we are usually more forgiving than that, often returning everything but the card fees — around 6%, because the processor charges once to take the payment and again to send it back. Where the policy does get applied is when your booking cost another family a slot, when we are already on the road, or on a regional mission where lodging, kennelling for our own dogs and a vehicle are already paid for.

Probably not, and it is worth saying so plainly. If you already know roughly where your dog is, a flight mostly confirms what you know. What that case wants is a trapping plan run with patience over days or weeks — feeding station, camera, then a trap once the routine is established — and that is the province of an organization that traps full time rather than of us. Chasing or calling at that stage is the single quickest way to undo two weeks of progress.

Far more than a person on foot, and that is the real argument for it. A methodical thermal sweep covers acreage in an evening that a ground team would need days to walk — and it sees into brush and treelines that a ground team walks straight past.

A thermal camera does not use light. It reads heat, so darkness makes no difference to it at all — this is not a camera straining to see in the dark, it is an instrument that never needed light in the first place. What matters is not the light but the sun. While the sun is up it loads energy into rock, road, soil and brush, and those surfaces then read hotter than the animal you are looking for, which is why we do not fly in daylight in any season. Once the ground has given that heat back, a warm animal stands out clearly against it, and the best conditions are usually the hours before sunrise.

No — and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. Thermal does not see through matter: a leaf or a branch stops it exactly as it stops your eyes. That is where most explanations stop, which is why people assume tree cover defeats the whole idea. It does not, for three reasons. First, we do not need to see the whole animal. A gap in the canopy the size of a dinner plate is enough for a heat signature underneath it to register — we are not looking for a dog-shaped outline, we are looking for warmth where the ground should be cool, and a fragment of that is enough to know something living is down there. Second, we are working in three dimensions: altitude and angle are both ours to choose, and moving either opens an entirely different set of sightlines through the same canopy. In close to every case some combination of the two finds a clear line to the heat source. Third, once we have a signature we confirm it rather than guess — the spotlights go on and the zoom camera comes up, close enough to read a book held in your hand from a hundred feet away, and we identify the animal. Together that gives near-total ground coverage even under heavy cover, which is why heavily wooded ground is not a marginal case for us. It is one of the most useful things we do.

Because the call goes better afterward. A useful conversation needs the last known location, the terrain around it, your pet's temperament and what has already been tried — twenty minutes to collect by voice, five to ten typed. If you send it first, we read it before we ring you and we start from what matters.

Local searches start at $625 plus mileage. Full detail is on the pricing page — and if a drone is the wrong tool for your situation, we will say so before it costs you anything.