Lost Your Dog? How to Find and Never Lose Your Best Friend Again

The dog wandered off, and despite your best efforts to find her, she's seemingly gone forever. What do you do? Who can you call to help?

It happened to Billy Kelly in the Westmoreland-area recently when he took his dogs for an evening walk. One of them, Milo, wandered off couldn't find his way back home. After searching for a few hours that night, the family became very worried.

They woke early the next morning to begin their search, he said.

"It was raining pretty hard that day, but we scoured cornfields and woods from dawn until dusk. It was exhausting..." he said, adding that they also stuffed flyers in all the neighbor's mailboxes to let them know the dog was missing and asking permission to walk their properties to continue the search. They all agreed, he said.

Kelly decided to reach out to someone with a deer hunting dog. His first contact said his dog was great at finding deer but hadn't been too successful with missing pets, but recommended Pauline Eggers from Liverpool who offers a dog tracking service.

It was the best call he could have made, he said.

Pauline brought two German wire haired dachshund's - Braylee and Bruno.

Braylee, who is 12-years-old, was presented with a dog bed and blanket that Milo often used. "In less that 5 seconds she picked up the scent", and off they all went.

The dachshund tracked the scent across an area of Route 5, over a mile away from the house, in area Kelly hadn't searched because he didn't believe the dog had wandered in that direction and across the roadway.

Ultimately, Braylee lost the scent, but Kelly and his wife had new hope and decided to expand their search area. After making more flyers, they expanded their search area and drove through neighborhoods to place those flyers in mailboxes. It didn't take long for the couple to see Milo racing across an open field!

They found her in area they never would have searched without the guidance of the dachshund, Kelly said.

Lesson Learned

Since the lost and found incident, the family invested in a GPS tracking collar, Kelly said. The one they opted to use may be a bit pricey for some, as Kelly said it was an investment of couple hundred dollars. But worth it, he said.

He described their two-day search for Milo as 'extreme wandering' through woods and fields in the pouring rain.

"The piece of mind that we know where Milo is and knowing we'll never have to go through that again, it's worth it," he told WIBX 950.