Lost Dogs In Chicago: Another Volunteer Experience

No Comments | February 11th, 2007 | Trackback

I ended up volunteering with the Lost and Found program at my local humane society by default. I’m a dog person, but as there was no dog-walking section (and working with the dogs mostly meant working with the general public who came to adopt the dogs, which I was definitely not keen on), I chose Lost and Found.

Volunteers would each spend a couple hours a week taking digital pictures of stray animals that came in and then posting the pictures and descriptions on a national website. We had to make sure that the cage bars were in the picture so people could not just crop the picture online, bring in the picture, and claim an animal that wasn’t really theirs to get out of paying the $90 fee and get a “free pet”.

We would also compare online posts of lost animals to those in the shelter, and tried to match reports of missing animals – filled out by owners who’d taken the initiative to come to the shelter and look but couldn’t come every day - to online posts, or to reports people had filled out about animals they’d found and were keeping with them for the moment.

I remember specifically three animals that I matched: one was a woman’s golden retriever named “Money.” I called the young man who had found the dog (and still had it) and asked him to call the dog by the name Money, he did, and the dog started wagging his tail. It was him.

I also helped two families locate missing pets – one cat and one dog – who turned up missing again. I had a long conversation with the man who found the dog, for the second time, wandering in the street. He said the kids had been so happy to see the dog when he’d brought it back the first time, but here it was lost again. Should he keep it? Should he bring it to the shelter? Should he return it and hope the dog wasn’t let out again to be hit by a car or confiscated by people who would involve it in dog fights? I couldn’t really give him an answer except to express frustration with him that these adults kept losing the dog.

Plenty of people consider shelters to be sad places. In a sense, well, they do make you think about homeless animals. But here, I had a chance to actually use my skills (talking on the phone! Being “diplomatic” and helping the right people connect, posting things online) to sometimes help lost animals find their way home. And even when it didn’t work out like that, people who had lost pets knew that there was a team of volunteers helping them.