A Lost Dog in Election Season

Let's search for an escaped pet together.

I apologize for posting this OTGC late. As you can read below, a lot of my life has been derailed this last couple of weeks.

It is 30 days until the Presidential Election but for the last 12 days I have thought very little about it. I am thinking about the dog that has been lost for 12 days.

it is 6 am. I am bundled up in the back of my rig on my car camping mattress. Down the road is a live trap with a plate of chicken in it. Katie had dribbled chicken broth in radial lines out from the entrance. We hung a cloth soaked in broth from the tree branch above the trap. Trail cameras are pointed at the wire cage. If they sense motion, I will get a notification and the image on my phone.

I have been here almost 12 hours. No ding. All night. The lost dog is still lost. 12 days. Two nights of stakeout in my car now, with the traps and cameras. No ding.

This scene is in the front drive of a house holding two people and three dogs. I met them in person two days ago.

They have an old hound dog that knew the cooler with the warmed chicken was worth her attention. They gave Katie and I bags of homemade granola.

I came out here, a twenty minute drive from my girlfriend's house in midtown Bend (Oregon) with Katie. Katie is a tracker and trapper of lost pets. Many communities have someone like her experienced in finding lost pets, I discovered. She is well known and deeply appreciated here in Deschutes County.

Katie reached out to us when we started posting to lost pet Facebook groups.

Betsy is a very skittish 10-month-old border collie I am fostering. She jumped a six foot fence by doing a parkour move off of a storage chest pushed against it. Probably powered by the fear of some loud city sound, she somehow cleared the fence and headed off.

Katie helped us format our social media posts (Nextdoor, Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit). She designed posters that she knows are effective. She taught us to emphasize DO NOT CHASE.

We put up signs in the area. We walked and ran where we thought she would be, handing out quarter sheet lost dog handouts to most anyone we came across.

Afeared of solicitation or religion in pamphlet form, people are hesitant to take a piece of paper from someone. I learned to hold it up to show the LOST DOG headline and say "We lost a dog, can you help us?" then offer the paper.

Everyone accepted the paper, without exception. And they wanted to help. I have never experienced such an outpouring of kindness and helpfulness. And stories. Stories of lost pets, stories of recovered pets.

"My mom lost my dog on a hike, looked for her until darkness. She came home and had to tell me. But that girl got home. Crossed the highway to Sparks Lake and was brought back to town by some canoe campers."

"My house sitter lost one of our dogs while we were away. She eventually asked our other dog to "Find Annie" and Agnes sniffed through the neighborhood until they found her."

Stories. And over and over again: the most sincere, heartholding "I am so sorry."

People want to help, but they are not expert at helping lost dogs get home. I wasn’t 12 days ago. People would sight the dog and try to coax it to them or catch it. Whenever they did that, Betsy ran farther, crossing more roads.

People want to find the dog, and they are happy to call in reports. They are not as good at recognizing the dog. They don’t catch details about hair length or size. We got a lot of false reports. Different dogs. I learned to ask them to view several more pictures before we counted a sighting as legitimate. I learned to ask if they saw a collar and tag. What color?

She is not going to come to anyone, so what we need is sightings. We needed to emphasize "DO NOT CALL, DO NOT CHASE." We did not put her name on the third iteration of the sign so people wouldn’t cry out to her and scare her further.

Melissa's neighbor Sierra posted to social media that her security cameras caught a black and white dog.

Couldn't be Betsy, I thought. Too far away. So many highways and country roads to cross to get there.

I watched the video. It was her. Tears welled up in my eyes. Betsy had on the tag I put on her collar. She had a slight limp. A few days later she was on Melissa’s camera. Melissa spread kibble on her drive and the skinny girl vacuumed it up then disappeared again.

Sierra, Melissa, and their families have been so accommodating. So kind. I have met their delightful dogs. They have showed me around their property. They let me hover all night in their drive so I can be there when Betsy gets trapped.

I will be back tonight, sleeping with my phone against my body in hopes of a ding.

I want that dog back safe. There are predators bigger than her out here, and food is hard to come by. It is getting colder. I scraped my windows yesterday morning.

When this is over, I hope we can all celebrate her; Sierra, Katie, Mellissa, Sara, and everyone else who has put in time, effort, and thought.

It is election season. A critical moment for us all. But in our closer crisis I have barely thought of voting and polls.

At some point in this terrible time, I noted the consistency of kindness we have exchanged over this lost dog.

In truth, most people are kind most of the time, despite what news and social media suggest. I think that if you reflect on your experience with the world, your encounters with people are largely exchanges of kindness and caring.

But lost dog or cat caring is next level. Curled up in the back of my rig against the cold, I am thinking:

What if America had a single lost dog to look for? We all wanted to see her back safe. How would we treat each other? How would the news cover us?