How to Find a Lost Dog

My friend and I had quite the adventure this weekend, and because of the way it ended, I felt the need to share it. Basically, Facebook found my friend's lost dog, and for some reason, the randomness of that fact is really amusing to me.

So...On Saturday, my friend Mrs. B over at Musings of a Mama, and I joined forces to have a garage sale. We started the sale on Friday, and ended it on Saturday. She had to leave to be somewhere at 11:30 on Saturday, so I stayed behind at her house to get in a few more garage sale hours. She had left her dog outside in their backyard, and I wasn't sure if she wanted the dog in or out when I left. I don't have a dog, and I know that a lot of my friends leave their dogs outside or crated when they aren't home, so I sent her a text message to ask her what she wanted me to do with Roxy (the dog) when I left. Unfortunately, she got the text message too late, because I had already left and opted to leave Roxy outside.

Once she finally got back to me, she told me that Roxy can jump her fence, and they do usually leave her inside. OK, no problem. I offered to go back, make sure Roxy was still in her yard, and put her in the house if their back door was unlocked. I went back, Roxy was still there, but of course, her back door was locked and Mrs. B wasn't going to be home for 6 more hours or so.

So I took Roxy back to my house, thinking that this would be the ideal solution. She can't come in our house because of the cats (the cats WILL attack her as proven by the one other dog that I ever let into my house), but my fence is about 6 feet high, almost twice as high as Mrs. B's fence, so both of us figured that the likelihood of Roxy jumping over my fence was pretty unlikely.

Mr. V and I went to a movie that night. I had told Mrs. B that we would probably go out for a couple hours, and we both thought that Roxy would be ok. Of course, bad luck seems to follow me around.

Mr. V and I went to see Inception, and when we came back, we checked on Roxy, only to find her missing. Gone. She wasn't in our backyard anymore. Regardless of the fact that she wasn't there, we still spent a few minutes looking around the fence line wondering "Did she dig out? There's no possible way that she jumped this fence!" (Roxy is a boxer, and several people that I talked to yesterday insisted that there was no possible way for a boxer to jump a 6 foot fence - clearly they were wrong.) There were no holes dug underneath the fence, and the gate was closed and locked, so even if she had managed to unlock the gate, it wouldn't have relocked behind her after she went out of it. So jumping was the only logical answer as to what happened.

At the exact same time that we were racing to get into the car to search the neighborhood for her, Mrs. B texted us telling us that they were on their way home and were coming to pick up Roxy. So now Mr. V and I were slightly panicked and we had to call Mrs. B to tell her the bad news that her dog wasn't in our yard anymore and we had no idea where she was. We had already talked to the neighbors that share a fence line with us, and none of them had seen her. So we started searching. I don't even know how long we drove around for, but at some point, Mr. and Mrs. B arrived back in town and also went out searching. Once it got too dark (and this is Washington, so that didn't really happen until after 10:00), my eyes were pretty much useless so Mr. V dropped me back off at home, so I could print up some "Missing Dog" fliers, and he continued driving around. When we all realized that driving around looking for her, was getting us nowhere, and it was way to late to start knocking on people's doors to ask about her, we went around taping the fliers to the neighborhood mailboxes (Our neighborhood has large mailboxes that have 10 or so mailboxes in them so they are all centrally located amongst the houses), and shoving one under the door of the closed animal shelter, in case someone brought her in the next day.

Then we went to sleep. I felt horrible. I had taken Roxy to my house thinking that she would be safer in my backyard than in Mrs. B's backyard, and she still managed to get out. Not only did I feel awful because I lost my friend's dog, but I have also been through the process of losing an animal, when my cat Moses ran out the door and into the swamps of Jacksonville 2 years ago. He was missing for 3 months, and I had given up all hope of finding him, when a man called me to tell me that he had found him! So I know how upset someone feels when the lose their beloved pet like that. Losing Moses devastated me, but it also taught me to never give up looking!

The next morning I woke up still full of guilt, but motivated and driven to find this dog! I printed up smaller fliers and started going door to door asking people if they had seen her. I worked my way in a circle around my house to cover every direction, and ended up getting fliers out to 100 houses, talking to about 50 people in the process. No one had seen her.

My friend was home, and upset. She hadn't slept well the night before, so I told her to sleep, and that I'd keep searching the neighborhood. At some point in the afternoon she got a phone call from a guy who had read one of the mailbox fliers. He thought he had seen Roxy near his house. I had also run into a kid, about 6 years old, that morning who swore that he saw a boxer in the same area that this man said he saw her. I have to admit that I didn't really believe the kid because he parents even told me that he had no idea what a boxer looked like. I figured that he had just seen a dog, and since there are a lot of dogs in this neighborhood, I didn't think much of it.

So at some point in the afternoon, my friend and her husband joined me in going door to door. I had stopped after 100 houses because I thought that I had made a pretty large circle, and at that point, Roxy could have been anywhere, so other than calling shelters and posting fliers in central locations, I didn't know what else to do. However, the man that had called Mrs. B lived on the street directly behind where I stopped my circle of 100 houses. We had fliers on the mailboxes in that area, but not on every house. So we started canvassing that area with door to door fliers, talking to everyone we could.

By this point, I don't even know how many hours had gone by, but I did know that I was getting a pretty good workout! I had walked all over my neighborhood for hours, and had talked to anyone that I could. I have to admit that I was still confident that Roxy would be found, but I wasn't confident that we were going to find her in my neighborhood. After talking to so many people, I was thinking that if none of them had seen her, then she might be long gone at this point.

Then enter the lady in the green house on the street that intersects with mine. Again, I had stopped my circle at the very end of my street, and hadn't worked my way onto the next street (the streets in this neighborhood wind and twist all kinds of ways) because I was trying to make my circle pretty even in all directions.

Mr. and Mrs. B were going door to door on the opposite side of the street from me, when I knocked on the door to the green house. A friendly lady answered the door. I asked her if she had happened to have seen a dog roaming around the neighborhood. I was so used to people saying "no" at this point, so I was about to hand her a flier and ask her to keep an eye out, when she got all excited and said "A boxer? Are you looking for a boxer?" Since I hadn't told her what type of dog I was looking for yet, I got excited! I thought for sure she had Roxy in her backyard or that she had at least seen her!

Here's the odd/amusing/amazing part. She proceeded to tell me that her son's friend had found a boxer the night before. And how did she know this? She was playing Farmville on Facebook. She needed some kind of gift from someone, but none of her friends were online for her to ask for it. So she logged into her son's Facebook account so that he could send her what she needed. When she logged in, one of the status updates that popped up in her son's news feed was a guy who had posted "Has anyone lost a boxer?" followed by a whole conversation about this boxer he had found and that they had her at his house, were wondering if she belonged to someone, and if she didn't, they'd hold onto her. I was excited, but still doubtful. So this woman got incredibly excited, started looking up this guy's phone number (which she couldn't find), and then her son came home. He called the guy, described what Roxy looked like, and it appeared that the dog this guy had was a match! At this point I literally ran down the street to find Mrs. B, and we all ended up back at this woman's house. She armed them with a phone number, address, and map and sent them off to get their dog! It looked like this guy had found Roxy in our neighborhood the night before, didn't know where she came from, so he took her home with him to a neighborhood a few miles down the road. The next day he posted his "Anyone lose a boxer?" Facebook status.

The good news is that the dog he had was definitely Roxy and she is now home safe and sound with her family!

The day was crazy in itself because I was so determined to find this dog, and was so upset about losing her in the first place (and so thankful that my friend didn't hate me for this)! I guess I just never expected Facebook to be what found her dog. When you really stop to think about it, the whole story is so random. This woman said that she hardly ever logs into her son's account, but she did, and the first thing she read was that this guy had a lost boxer at his house! About an hour after she read the status, I knocked on her door asking if she had seen a missing dog.

I almost didn't go to this woman's house! She was outside of the original circle, so I guess first, our mailbox fliers helped, and then Facebook and Farmville saved the day in the end. The flier led to some guy reading it, calling Mrs. B, and directing her to his area of the neighborhood. From there going door to door led us to this woman's house, and amazingly she had just read a random Facebook status from her son's friend, and that's how Roxy was found! I honestly think the whole story was just incredible, and I don't know if we would have found her so easily if it hadn't been for Facebook in the end. I'm hopeful that eventually this guy would have called the animal shelter or put out fliers of his own, but we'll never know.

So Roxy is fine! She spent the night at a barbeque and slept in this guy's garage! I don't know if this story even sounds exciting to anyone else, but if you've ever lost a pet, then you know what that feels like. Anf if you've ever found a lost pet, you know how amazing that feels too! The way everything worked out in the end was just so random, yet perfect! Mrs. B's husband apparently mocks Facebook and doesn't really like it. She told him that he can't talk down about social networking sites anymore now!

I'm happy to say that the B family and Roxy got a very happy ending! :-)