When your dog goes missing or is lost, who are you going to call?
For a year now, a dedicated group of volunteer dog-searchers under the banner of Find Lost and Escaped Dogs (FLED) has reunited 133 Vancouver Island dogs with their grateful owners.
They even found a foreign canine — Vicki, a Boston terrier on holiday from Japan — after she was on the lam for 10 days in Central Saanich.
They use social media to share the missing dog’s image, detailed description and direction of travel with the public. Any or all of FLED’s 130-plus volunteer searchers can respond to tips, using motion-detector cameras to confirm sightings, an intuitive sense of dog behaviour to track down pets and food to lure them into a live trap.
It can be challenging work, especially with emotional owners hovering nearby, but FLED co-ordinator Jill Oakley, 62, has good success with a proven system and dedicated volunteers.
“In the beginning, when a dog gets loose, he books it out and it’s an adventure,” Oakley said.
“He’s got all these sniffs and he’s doing his thing, then eventually he realizes he’s out there all by himself. It’s very easy to humanize our dogs and think that they’re going to be cold, scared.
“They go into dog mode, survival mode, and they survive.”
Dogs who are in unfamiliar places will find food, whether that means they have to steal cat food from a back porch or kill and eat mice.
“We know they are eating,” Oakley said. “It shows up in their fecal samples.”
If there is a sighting of a suspected lost dog, searchers will go to check out the area. It doesn’t help to call the pet’s name, Oakley said, because lost dogs don’t respond like a lost human would.
Volunteers put out a feeding station and a live trap with its door shut so the dog gets used to seeing it. Motion cameras can verify whether the target dog is visiting the feeding station. If it is, the food is put inside the trap and the trap is set.
Then the waiting begins, with a FLED volunteer staying close by.
As soon as the dog is trapped, it’s rescued and reunited with its owners.
Things went a little differently for Kirby, an eight-year-old bichon cross that ran away from its dog walker in Thetis park earlier this month. The dog was dragging a four-metre-long lead when it took off.
Volunteers and the dog’s owners, Deb and Jay Marks, were out searching every day. Among the searchers was the sister of the owner of Vicki the Boston terrier, paying it forward.
“Everybody gets how horrible it is, they say to the owners, ‘I get what you’re going through — don’t worry,’ ” said volunteer Susan Orrick.
At 5 a.m., two days after the dog went missing, Oakley’s husband, Gary Shade, went out to see if he could hear the dog in the bush. Nothing.
On the fourth night Kirby was missing, Oakley, Shade and Orrick went out with a heat-sensitive infrared instrument and a powerful spotlight.
They saw two sets of eyes reflected in the light and debated where it was an owl, a deer or a cougar.
“I knew it wasn’t a cougar because it wasn’t coming up behind us,” Oakley said.
“It gets really scary. A lot of us aren’t in that great physical condition anymore.”
Orrick set up a motion camera and the three left, planning to check again in the morning.
The next morning, Dec. 15 — Orrick’s birthday — she and her partner, Hess Oerlemans, resumed the search for Kirby on Highland Road near the Craigflower River bridge.
It was about 500 metres from where Kirby went missing.
“We always try to think like a dog,” Orrick said. “He could quite possibly be anywhere. My partner wanted to go uphill but I wanted to go down.
“I stood there in the road and thought I saw something red [indicating heat] in the infrared camera.”
She put the instrument down and couldn’t see anything with her eyes, so she climbed up through the bush. She had to be guided by Oerlemans, who used the infrared camera to nail down the hot spot.
Orrick walked farther and there was Kirby, the long lead impossibly entangled in the underbrush.
“He wasn’t going anywhere in the salal,” she said. “He didn’t make a peep. I felt like crying. I picked him up and he wasn’t shivering until I carried him out.”
When the good news was relayed to the Marks by phone, Deb Marks said “my heart just jumped.”
They arrived within 20 minutes and the reunion was joyous and tearful.
“He’s our Christmas miracle,” she said.
Other than being tired and thirsty, Kirby survived his ordeal unscathed.
The FLED volunteers “are a hugely dedicated group of people and I can’t thank them enough,” Marks said.
Each rescue has its challenges, Oakley said. A pair of great danes that live in the Humpback Road area got lost up a mountain near their home. One dog made it home on his own, but the other, hampered by a bad hip, had to be carried out by volunteers.
Oakley is well-versed in search and rescue, after spending 25 years as a search-and-rescue volunteer. She used her tracking dogs in 1991 in a futile search for four-year-old Michael Dunahee, who was believed to be abducted from a Victoria playground.
She and her brother, Doug Oakley, a retired Saanich police staff sergeant, were raised believing it’s only right to help people in need.
It took a search for a dog named PJ, who went missing in Colwood in January 2013, to make Oakley realize there was a need for a dog-search organization.
“I never in my wildest dreams thought it would take off to the degree it has,” she said.
She is applying for charitable status for her group, even though grateful dog owners and supporters are currently funding the organization without taxable benefits.
“We don’t expect anything, ever,” Oakley said of payment. “We’ll hit the dirt for any dog without asking for anything.”
Owners who recover their lost pets “are incredibly grateful,” she said.
Vicki’s owners bought FLED two new motion cameras and gave a $500 donation as thanks for finding her.
“Eventually, I hope to have a small motorhome as a base unit,” Oakley said.
Anyone who picks up a dog can also use FLED to get it back to its rightful home.
FLED’s web page is at fledsearch.wordpress.com. It also has a Facebook page.
