A Good Sam found Darwin about half a mile away from home two weeks after he went missing. The Good Sam already had five cats and wisely took him to a vet to be tested for common infectious diseases. The tests came out negative but the vet did not scan the stray cat for a microchip and they did not suggest checking the Pet FBI database.
Three more weeks passed and a friend of the Good Sam suggested she check the Pet FBI database. And there he was! He is pictured here with his best friend Amelia who was thrilled to have him back. Object Lesson: Possibly the vet thought it was the client’s intention to keep the cat, but knowing it was a stray, they should have checked it for a microchip. In fact, Darwin did have a microchip and would have been home three weeks sooner – which would have spared a lot of grief and worry! We strongly recommend microchipping and ID tags BUT they are not a guarantee of recovery.If your pet goes missing, you must use other resources as well!
Pet FBI was founded in Ohio in 1998 and has a very high success rate in Ohio because it is so well known and widely used. We averaged 145 reunions a month for the last three months within a 200 mile radius of Columbus. We went national only a little over a year ago, in May of 2014, but already the Pet FBI database is the largest national lost and found pet database. Please help promote more happy reunions by referring your vet, your groomer, your local pet supply place and shelters to petfbi.org. It’s completely non-commercial and all services are free!
Some of our our Facebook friends have alerted us that they are being contacted by a man with a heavy accent posing as a representative of Pet FBI and offering to help locate their missing pet for a fee. He is calling from 213 221 1099, which is a land line in Los Angeles. We have reported it to the Ohio Attorney General (because he is contacting people in Ohio).
Unfortunately, if there is a way to abuse a good thing, someone will try to take advantage. We have chosen to enable Pet FBI users to contact each other directly. We feel that immediate contact can be critical in recovering a lost pet and we trust your judgement to decide on the legitimacy of those who contact you through information on Pet FBI.
A few years ago someone was going door to door wearing a Pet FBI t-shirt and asking for donations! Please take note: Pet FBI is strictly non-commercial, we do not SELL any services; we do not solicit door-to-door. We are not associated with any pet detectives and we warn people to be very cautious about paying for any service that offers to “track” your pet or make contacts for you. There are a few that are truly helpful but many are just out to exploit people in distress.
Please be sure to read reviews of any lost pet service you are thinking of engaging before you pay for anything.
Our interview with Animal Radio aired July 3 and 4th on their 150 syndicated stations all around the country. Here is how you can listen to it:
Click this Animal Radio link. In the upper right hand corner of the Animal Radio home page there is a black box. Our segment runs from about minutes 27:30 through about 34:00. Click the play arrow and scroll to our segment.
It will be on the home page the whole week of July 4 and after that it will be archived as show #813.
The show has a very lively format, a mix of the serious, the comic and the unusual, including a segment on a two year old tabby that survived for two months trapped in a futon that was being shipped from Texas to Alaska for some military family. They had postponed their own departure for three days to look for the cat! You can always listen to their programs by using the archive.
Thanks and kudos to our volunteer Facebook administrator, Char Riedinger! Her absolute, unwavering dedication has resulted in an average of 50 reunions per month just in Ohio. Char has set very high standards resulting in a very high success rate. By insisting on full, actionable information for posts to our timeline she has helped reunite lost pets with their families quickly and efficiently.
The full information on our Facebook posts also enables our followers to cross check other sources and find matching lost and found reports. We thank those devoted followers for being part of this great success.
Char also messages posters directly with specific advice and compassionate encouragement. Such personal attention is rare among the numerous well-intentioned but often ill-conceived lost and found pet sites. Thanks to Char and the thousands of Facebook friends she has inspired, many more pets are back home with their families.
On May 21 Candice Lee of Columbus Ohio’s NBC4 did a segment on our organization
and how we helped a Dublin Ohio family recover their cat, Leonardo diCatrio. Leo wandered off when the husband let him out at night – contrary to habit – while his wife was in Naples Florida for a few days. We were thrilled with the story and the exposure because the more people who know and use the Pet FBI lost and found pet database (which is national) and the Pet FBI Facebook page (which is for Ohio) – the better the chances of losers and finders connecting with each other and the more happy reunions.
We were delighted when other NBC stations in Mobile, Alabama, Texas, Chicago, New York and Florida, picked up the Pet FBI segment and ran it locally. Since we only went national about a year ago, we need to achieve a critical mass of users outside of Ohio to achieve a similar high level of success. More users = more recoveries. Unfortunately, at some point one of the stations confused the facts and started referring to our founder who was interviewed as “Florida’s Ace Ventura”! (Actually we are based in Columbus, Ohio and Leo went missing in Columbus while his Mom was away in Florida!)
But there is another impression we need to correct. We have been striving since 1998 to make the Pet FBI web site the most comprehensive source of information about lost and found pets. If a search of the lost and found reports at PetFBI.org doesn’t yield a match, you must not stop there! We offer a step-by-step action plan; we inform people about how to identify important contacts like shelters and animal control, We give tips on how to lure a cat back home, or how to approach a stray dog, we provide a template for an effective flyer, and
we stress that you have to pursue all sources of information,
including other web sites, Craigslist, newspaper classifieds, and various lost and found Facebook pages, including our own.
We are fortunate in having a truly dedicated Ohio Facebook administrator who has won a following of about 19,000 friends. It is true that there is an unofficial network of Pet FBI Ohio Facebook followers who try to help posters by “connecting the dots” (looking at all the various sources of information) but we do not want to give the impression that all you have to do if you lose a pet is post on PetFBI.org or Facebook/PetFBI Ohio and then sit back and wait. Pet FBI strives to provide all the necessary tools for people who lose a pet or find a stray, but it is up to those people to make use of the tools.
We often discover that people will post a lost dog report, for example, but then they neglect to search the found dog reports. Or they stop there and don’t follow the action plan. Sometimes people send us a message “Let me know when you find my cat”! Sorry, it doesn’t work that way! Please, if you have lost or found a pet, take advantage of all the tools we offer and most important, do not give up too soon! Keep checking the database, keep going back to the shelters, renew the flyers and seek out all sources of information.
We are happy to report that in Ohio – where we are best known – the reported recovery rate for cats so far this year (May, 2015) is 54% and for dogs 33%. And it is probable that the rate is even higher because people forget to update their reports once they achieve a happy reunion. SO DO NOT GIVE UP!
A Good Sam found Darwin about half a mile away from home two weeks after he went missing. The Good Sam already had five cats and wisely took him to a vet to be tested for common infectious diseases. The tests came out negative but the vet did not scan the stray cat for a microchip and they did not suggest checking the Pet FBI database. 