Congratulations to Zoom and Laura for a safe return home.
Special thanks to our newest DFD tracking team, Clementine and her K9 Scipio, and to senior DFD tracking team Christine and K9 Keelah.
From Laura, Zoom’s owner:
Recently, our dog, Zoom, got loose in our community. She is a Basenji, and they are known for escaping. They are also small, fast and very agile. Zoom is much worse because she is also petrified of vehicles after having been hit by a car last year. The community looks like a huge place when your small dog is loose. We looked and looked near where she had been seen, and there was no finding her. At that point we didn’t even know if she was still in the area.
At the suggestion of a friend, we called Dogs Finding Dogs, a local non-profit. They gave us an action plan immediately at no charge. We put out feeding stations in the nearby woods and set a smell trail for her to find the food, in addition to following several other instructions, Zoom found the food and ate from the three feeding stations we set out for her. We also set a time for Christine and Clementine to bring their dogs and track Zoom. We let them smell her blanket, and they went to work near the feeding stations. Both dogs were obviously smelling her, and they followed her scent all around the community. This gave us a strong sense of where she was staying, Since we couldn’t get to her in the brush of the woods, we had to get her to come to us, and Dogs Finding Dogs told us what to do to make that happen.
Ultimately, someone in the community saw her, and reported. I went to that place, and called her name. She came to me, but that was five days after the day she got out. The Dogs Finding Dogs people gave us confidence that Zoom was still local, that she was staying away from roads, and that she was the one eating our food. They also educated us on how to bring her back. It was an invaluable resource for us, and I would highly recommend them to anyone in our situation. Instead of being fearful and at a loss for what to do next, we had confidence and an action plan, and because of their help, we have our dog back.