I\'ve called the animal SAR team to have them come and see if they can find out what happened to my cat.Has anyone ever used them?
I think it will be interesting to see them work in this urban environment and I really hope they can give me some insight on my cat.
I am sounding more and more like a crazy cat lady even to myself.Heh.
I\'ll post about my experience with SAR in case anyone ever does a search here and wants to know about this service.I know people here are not too interested in pet topics.
We had the search and rescue person come today to track our cat. He brought his two wonderful dogs.These same dogs have been all over the world doing searches in disaster situations.They are so fabulous!
They sniffed an item that had the cats hair on it and off they went. They went out the back gate and a couple houses down the alley, following my cats last trip.They went though a neighbors yard and back though it again. Down the alley and around the corner back to practically in front of our home. Then across the steet and there is where the dogs signaled that our cat had been \"picked up\" and taken away in a vehicle.
So, our baby was stolen..ooops..\"picked up\" from right by his home and taken away.He was only outside for a few minutes. I hope he is able to come back home. He could be anywhere in West Seattle,or really anywhere. Please ,if you read this look, in the lost pets section and if you see Auggie anywhere we would appreciate you letting us know.
I would positively recommend this service to anyone. It took about 15 minutes and we knew for sure what happened to our beloved pet.I am not sure it will help us find him but if he had been injured or stuck somewhere it certainly would have helped.Ours is just a more difficult situation.
B-squared
Member Profile
Sorry to hear that Auggie is missing. i have never heard of the search and rescue service before, but nice to know they are out there. Best of luck finding him!
oddreality...
wow! that is something i never would have thought of and i am about as dog lady as they get.
if i lose a pet.. i will certainly think of them.
does it help to know that your kitty was picked up and had not suffered an accident.. or is it worse? I don\'t know which it would be for me.
We will keep hoping that Auggie is somehow able to find his way home..
I forgot to put the website of the SAR.No one would not know who to contact if they wanted to without it.
http://www.k9sardog.com/
Thanks Bsquared, I really hope he makes it home.You have no idea how badly I want him home.
JoB, I am also a pet lady, having both cats and dogs.:)I did not know about this service until Auggie disappeared and then several people recommended it to me that had used it.It is a real SAR team that does this when there is not a big emergency somewhere else, you will get bumped if a person needs to be looked for or it there is major disaster. They fly all over the world.
As to the other, I have not decided which is worse. I would hate to think that he had been hit by a car and then even with all our searching he had laid somewhere in agony without being found for days.... but... now I have all the horrid things people are capable of doing to cats going through my head.Hoping someone took him that will love him and not someone that wanted to hurt him. Even if it is someone that thought he was pretty and took him would never be as good to him as we were. They do not care enough about an animal to not take it from its home, to distress it and its people in such a way. I cannot think they would be such nice people.They are not the ones that have raised him since he was 3 months old and had him for 6 years.
I feel sick so maybe this is worse..
We will never quit looking for him.I can\'t believe someone would take him.
oddeality..
it is possible the person who took him did so because they believe it is unsafe for cats to be outdoors...
when people feel righteous.. they often forget that theirs is not the only truth... that an animal who looks well fed and well cared for has an owner who cares.
I once had a stray cat come in, who a client had found in their neighborhood. Through a microchip we traced her back to Tacoma and a very happy and worried mom. (She was found in West Seattle) We think she jumped in the back of someone\'s pickup for a little nap and when she woke up was no where near home. If you haven\'t checked with animal control agencies outside of Seattle, I would, just in case she did end up in the back of someone\'s truck. I hope you are able to locate her.
There are so many cats wandering around, that it seems difficult to believe someone just goes around picking them up, unless they are potentially pricey purebreds, and while Auggie is certainly gorgeous - you can see a pic by scrolling down the lost/found pets section
http://westseattleblog.com/blog/?page_id=4996#lf
doesn\'t look like a purebred? So therefore I wonder, do you suppose the vehicle could have been (a) animal control or (b) maybe Auggie (heaven forbid) got hit by a car or was otherwise injured/sick and might have been taken to a veterinary hospital?
Just hoping you\'ve checked all the shelters and hospitals too, since that would sound like the more likely vehicular option ... TR
Last year my sister\'s boyfriend (now husband) lost his cat for close to 6 months. After a several month hunt all hope had been lost of finding the cat.
Randomly, long after the cat had disappeared they went to the Seattle Animal Shelter to adopt a cat and lo and behold...guess who they found!!
Don\'t give up hope!
I wish I\'d known about this when our cat went missing. It\'s been almost 10 years but reading this still brought tears in remembering. The not knowing is awful.
What is the cost to use this service?
acemotel
Member Profile
I don\'t understand how the dogs can signal that someone in a car has picked up an animal, as opposed to, say, a coyote. Or a human picking the cat up and walking away with it. How can the dogs divine that? It\'s great they could follow your cat\'s path so carefully.
You never forget do you Jerald?It stays fresh for you when you think of it for the rest of your life. I am sorry you lost your cat. It cost us $250. Most of it was travel time to here from Longview.Would have been $50 if we were close.Reasonable enough to me for what they do.
It is possible that Auggie got into the back of a car or truck.Unlikely due to his nature. I have notified both UPS and Fedex just in case the drivers saw anything at all if they were even on our street that day..the people who live close have had a lot of deliveries lately so they could have been.
Acemotel, The dogs can sniff the scent for up to a year or even more. Really they are so good.It was amazing to watch them at work.The handler told us that if it were a person carrying the cat off the scent would still trail behind since we and animals lose 10,000 pieces of scent a minute[or was it a second...can\'t remember].The dogs can tell you the animal went in a closed vehicle because the scent just stops.They can tell you if the animal was injured and if is stressed.Mine was stressed but not injured.They can tell you if a predator got them.They have done this thousands of times and know what they are doing/smelling.
The handler told me that if it was an animal control vehicle then the dogs follow the scent trail down the middle of the street because the scent falls out of the vents. Weird I know but what the dogs find is admissable in court cases.They are just not wrong.
So yes, there is the small possibility that he could have been accidently taken off but if you\'d seen the path he took and knew he was only out a few minutes, not even long enough to take a nap then you would think like I do that someone took him on purpose. I could be wrong ,I\'ve certainly been wrong before.:)I\'d like to be wrong.
I would hope ,JoB, that people would not be so cruel to others as to take their beloved pet for some stupid activist reason. The cat would be upset at being taken and the owners are devastated. I do know some people really are that cruel and ignorant. I suppose my cat should not have ever gone outside. But he did for a few hours most days. He liked to watch the fish in the pond and he loved to play with the grasses outside. I am home all day and if I left I would get him in. The neighbors all knew him.I did worry but he really loved to go out and it was hard to deny him since if you opened the door he would try to scoot out.I never let him out till after rush hour and always got him in way before the evening rush.I did try to be cautious.If he ever comes back he will be an indoor only cat. I will never go through this again no matter how miserable he would be...now that seems cruel too but that\'s what will happen.If I could undo it now I surely would and he would not have been outside at all ever.
Lenamegan and Thriftwaygirl ..[a little OT side trip here for Thriftwaygirl..forgive me..why won\'t Thriftway put up my lost poster?I\'ve left two of them and always they say they will put it up but it is not there? Any ideas?]We do check the shelters every day through the phone lists but cannot go to the Kent and Bellevue shelters too often.I look at all the photos online for the shelters local and even not so local. We go to the Seattle shelter every two or three days.Going in a few minutes as a matter of fact! I hate to go I always want to bring them all home with me. We will not give up hope and we will keep looking for him.
Lowmanbeach, I should have let you know when they were coming. It would have made an interesting article for your blog I think. Seeing search and rescue dogs in action in an urban setting was fascinating.
Auggie is not a purebred but many people think he is Maine Coon. He talks like a Maine Coon,little tiny voice, and he is huge like they are and has other of their attributes.So someone may have thought he was purebred. I\'ll likely never know but I wish they would bring him back .He did not deserve to be taken and we do not deserve this anguish of not knowing where he is.
Oddreality,
I don\'t know why they haven\'t put up your poster, I saw your poster at the customer service desk last week and assumed they would have put it up. They are usually pretty good about that...my apologies. :(
I\'ll ask about it on Monday when I go in, or better yet, email me the file and I will personally print it out and make sure it gets posted.
Thank you Thriftwaygirl, I really appreciate it.
Ugh, I hope you eventually find Auggie.
I thought of training a pet dog for tracking a couple years ago. I thought it\'d be a great side business at the least. It\'s great to see that someone actually does this!
I wonder how much training would be involved to take an average dog - of the proper breed or mix I assume - and get them to the point where they could be useful for tracking pets/people.
Hi Jenny, I hope we find him too. He is a wonderful cat , we miss him so much. no one has seen any sign of him at all.We have had a few calls but it so far has been a different cat not our Auggie.
Here is an organization that is training people to be pet detectives. They are working on getting pet detectives here in the Seattle area .You might be interested in reading about it.
http://www.lostapet.org/
The other group at lostapet.org is another Petdetective group that does things a totally different way than what we had done last Friday. They have in the past gone after the one we used that says the cat is \"picked up\" and found the cat. They think his methods do not work as good on cats. They are training people to do the work and are having a seminar this week and needed a lost cat to look for so they will be here tomorrow morning to see what they find.
I will post results after. It will be interesting as they do real detective work not using just dogs.
Update
Petdetectives arrived and searched and searched and found no trace of Auggie. Still at square one.
3 weeks tomorrow but we will keep looking for him.
We do think he may have gotten into a UPS truck and that truck goes to Gatewood and down by Lincoln Park via Graham and down the big hill. So if anyone sees a cat like him let us know!
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