I lost my dog, Bogie,\u00a0on Sunday night while taking her for a walk in a residential neighborhood about a mile from our home—shortly after sunset, with temperatures in the 20s and falling fast.<\/p>\n
It was trash day the next day on the street where we were walking.\u00a0When\u00a0she brushed up against a trash bag filled with empty glass bottles, it tipped over, spooked her, and she bolted.<\/p>\n
The\u00a0retractable leash that flew out of my hand went\u00a0bump-bump-bumping against the pavement behind her, making our 10-month old German Short-haired Pointer think somebody was chasing her. To make matters\u00a0worse, the metal hook at the end of the leash was hitting the pavement and creating huge sparks as she bolted down the street.\u00a0<\/p>\n
My commands to “heel” were useless. She just kept running.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Frantic, I\u00a0called Bill. He called the\u00a0police department, and then drove to the neighborhood to help find her. In\u00a0separate cars,\u00a0we drove up and down all the streets for more than two hours.<\/p>\n
That got me thinking. How the heck do you find a lost dog at night?<\/p>\n
Plan A: Ditch the car and hoof it through the neighborhood all night, calling her name and whistling twice through my fingers, the code she knows means\u00a0“get back here right now.” That’s what I do when I walk her off leash at the park in a safe rural area. She\u00a0always comes back to me when she hears me whistle.<\/p>\n
Plan B: Call the vet. I called our vet’s emergency phone number and asked her how to find a lost dog at night. She told me to call the police and to notify people in the neighborhood the next day. She reassured me that dogs have a surprising ability to stay warm even in cold wather. Her own dog disappeared for three weeks in January in Wisconsin’s sub-zero temperatures and somehow managed to find its way home unharmed.<\/p>\n
About an hour after I called the vet, as we were searching, I\u00a0devised Plan C:<\/p>\n
Canvass the neighborhood the next day with bright yellow “Lost Dog” flyers. Include her photo.\u00a0Post the flyers all over town. Then place a classified ad in the local weekly newspaper and on Craigslist. (See my article “Craigslist: A valuable publicity tool.”)<\/a><\/p>\n I don’t ever remember seeing a list of tips anywhere on how to find a lost dog, or how to walk a dog so it doesn’t\u00a0run away while I’m walking it.\u00a0 Vets, humane societies, pet supply stores and anybody whose business or organization deals with pets should be offering these kinds of tips to the media, in articles and in blog posts.<\/p>\n Other Publicity Hounds can generate coverage by piggybacking onto the\u00a0“how to find a lost (fill in the blank)” theme.<\/p>\n —Telecommunications companies:<\/strong>\u00a0What should\u00a0people do if they lose their cell phones?<\/p>\n —Accountants:<\/strong> What if\u00a0people\u00a0lose the file where they’ve been stashing papers to hand over to you at tax time?<\/p>\n —Police departments and mall management companies,<\/strong> how can people find lost cars at the mall? What about lost children?<\/p>\n Most of you can think of an idea along these lines. When you do, consider writing a tip sheet on “9 ways to find a lost (fill in the blank).” See “Special Report #16: How to Write Tip sheets That Catch the Media’s Attention.”<\/a>) \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n So here I am on a cold Sunday night, trying to devise Plan D when\u00a0the cell phone rings. It’s\u00a0the sheriff’s department, telling us\u00a0that a pastor at a nearby church found Bogie\u00a0“chained” to his garbage dumpster.\u00a0But he didn’t know if she’d bite, and he wouldn’t get\u00a0close enough to her to see that she wasn’t chained.\u00a0Rather, her\u00a0leash got caught on the bottom of the dumpster. All she\u00a0could do was jump up and down and bark.<\/p>\n On the two-minute drive to the church, I was sobbing, promising myself to never be so stupid again.<\/p>\n We brought her home, put her in the bathtub to wash the blood off her feet\u00a0and dried her with warm towels. She\u00a0pranced off to bed, right into her kennel, where she slept the entire night and most of yesterday.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n I’m still puzzled.\u00a0What should I have done differently? How do you walk a dog so it can’t get away from you?\u00a0The retractable leash doesn’t seem to solve the problem. And how do you find a lost dog or cat in the dark?<\/p>\n Tips, anyone?\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I lost my dog, Bogie,\u00a0on Sunday night while taking her for a walk in a residential neighborhood about a mile from our home—shortly after sunset, with temperatures in the 20s and falling fast. It was trash day the next day on the street where we were walking.\u00a0When\u00a0she brushed up against a trash bag filled with\u2026 Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","iawp_total_views":5,"wds_primary_category":1,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[634,611,604],"class_list":{"0":"post-41354","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-marketing","7":"tag-craigslist","8":"tag-press-release-topics","9":"tag-writing-articles","10":"entry"},"featured_image_src":null,"featured_image_src_square":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Joan Stewart","author_link":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/author\/jstewart\/"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41354"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41354\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41602,"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41354\/revisions\/41602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}