The Wicks family were stunned when while watching the Mike Larkan’s Melbourne ‘Give a Dog A Home’ segment on the Channel 10 News, they saw the their beloved whippet, Flash, who had been missing for nine months.
“It was one of those things that, if one moment was different, it wouldn’t have ever happened.
Flash had likely been kept by whomever found him (an unfortunate trend of locations with high-kill rates; people try to find owners themselves, rather than drop pets off, afraid they might simply become another statistic), and after many months, the Wicks family had understandably given up looking.
A well-run lost and found service – including photographs posted online and an ‘alerts’ for different breeds – would make this kind of long-lost reunion an every day occurrence at The Lost Dogs Home North Melbourne. Dogs often take time to ‘show up’ in pounds – long after their owners have stopped visiting the pound in person looking for their dogs.
But the Lost Dogs Home would rather make these kinds of reunions more of a lottery, than a community service. For a pet owner to have been watching the right channel at the right time, on same the week their dog happened to show up for adoption, and then see and recognise their dog on a short segment after the news is an almost imaginable stroke of luck. And certainly other dog owners can not expect to be so lucky.
How many dogs and cats have remained unclaimed, who have had owners who were looking for them? How many dogs and cats have been rehomed to new owners, when their old owners would have gladly claimed their pets? And how many dogs and cats have been killed, even as broken hearted pet owners gave up hope of ever finding them again?
Local councils are paying the Lost Dogs Home hundreds of thousands of dollars every year to process their lost pets. At the very minimum that money should be buying pet owners a strategic tool which allows them to continue to check the pound for their pets, after those first ‘two weeks’ we know they spend looking intensively, and after they simply have to return to normal life duties, like work. A system which takes some of the lottery odds out of finding lost pets.
Yes, but so what. Some dogs and cats aren’t. This gives no organisation the right to put up obstacles to owners claiming their pets, and not offering even a basic online lost and found in 2013, is a major obstacle.
And as in the case of Flash – the dog was young when he went missing. Likely younger than the 6-9 month desexing deadline most people would give a small breed dog, and many, many owners arrange their desexing and microchipping in the one vet visit.
In short, there are valid reasons why dogs and cats, sometimes aren’t chipped. And any reputable organisation would be wanting to do all it can to help those pets find their families too.
If you’re in Melbourne, email the Lost Dogs Home and ask them why they don’t care enough about reuniting pets and owners to offer photograph-based, online lost and found.
Dogs should be microchipped. Yep. But as my mum knows, even a dog having a microchip with correct and up to date details, and a collar with council tag on it, again with up to date and correct details, and people looking for him and calling the LDH multiple times a day – he STILL almost never made it out of there.
We were told numerous times on the phone that no dog matching his microchip or registration details or description had come in. It’s only when we went in to look after 7 days of searching, that we found him there.
So really, what hope does an un-microchipped dog have? Zero.