Whistling while hollering “Daisy, here Daisy…here girl.” Posting homemade flyers onto every tree, utility pole, and fence in your neighborhood. These are the tried and true methods used by dog owners to locate their missing pooches.
Now, thanks to a tag-team effort from a pair of Internet titans, Facebook and Craigslist, dog owners across the country can, and should, add social media to their retrieving repertoire.
On May 25, Lucy, a golden retriever, went missing from her Alden, Minnesota home. A dog-loving truck driver, who was en route from Washington to Rochester, Minnesota, found the homesick pooch on the side of the road at a local truck stop. Thing is, he couldn’t figure out who Lucy belonged to—the lettering on her tags was worn down and faded. With no other option, he let her ride shotgun all the way to Nashville, Indiana. That’s 630 miles from her home.
While Lucy was on her joyride, her owner, Amber Yaw, created a page on Facebook: Help Lucy Find Her Way Home. Within an hour, a post appeared on the page indicating that a Craigslist ad had been created (by the truck driver) for a missing dog named Lucy. Just like that, the missing pooch went from lost to found. Her owners traveled to Indiana and retrieved their wandering canine.
"Had we not had the internet, had Amber not done what she did, had the person who took her not put it on Craigslist... all of these different things had to work together,” said Patti Yaw, Amber’s mother, to the Associated Press.
For every Lucy story that ends with a tail-wagging pooch leaping into the arms of a smiling owner, thousands of other lost dogs never find their way home. What’s worse, some are intentionally abandoned by owners who no longer want them. If you’re in the market for pet, head on over to Petfinder—they’ve got an expansive list of 130,000 dogs and cats in the U.S. and Canada who are in need of a loving home.
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