Your pet is missing tonight

The first hour

Start where you are, not where you imagine they went. The house itself and the gardens either side of it are what shelter and rescue people tell you to search first, and they are the part people skip.

Search your home as though you were looking for a set of keys someone hid from you. Under and inside the bed, inside the sofa base, behind and under every wardrobe, inside drawers and cupboards that were open earlier, behind the washing machine and the fridge, in the tumble dryer, the airing cupboard, the loft, the cellar, behind the bath panel, inside a suitcase, in a box in the garage. A frightened cat will squeeze into a gap you would swear was solid, and will stay silent in it, including when you call.

Do not only call and listen. Look, with a light, into every space at floor level. Then stop moving, sit down somewhere quiet, and stay still for a few minutes. Noise and hurried footsteps keep a scared animal pinned where it is. Silence brings it out.

Then go outside and do the same within a small radius. Under every parked car, along fence lines, under decking and sheds, in hedges, in open garages, behind bins, in the recycling, up trees, on flat roofs and in the gaps between buildings. Knock on the doors either side and opposite and ask people to physically open their shed, garage and greenhouse and look inside. People say yes to this. Cats get shut in and no one hears them for days.

Before you leave the house, prop a door open if you safely can, or leave the cat flap open both ways, and put something of yours on the doorstep. Animals come back to a door that smells right, often at the hour everything goes quiet.

Cats and dogs go missing differently

This changes what you should do with the next few hours, so it is worth knowing which search you are running.

Cats, especially indoor cats, usually do not travel far. A cat that has been startled outdoors tends to go to ground within a few houses of home and stay put, silent, sometimes for days, until hunger or quiet moves it. That is why the useful search for a cat is small, slow, low to the ground and repeated: the same gardens, again, with a torch, at the quietest hour. Do not widen the circle early. Search the near ground properly first.

Dogs cover distance, and they keep going. A loose dog can be several miles away within the hour, often travelling in one direction along a road, a path or a river. So a dog needs the opposite approach: tell people fast and tell people wide. Shelters, vets, animal control, the local groups, the road authority in case of a collision report, and anyone driving the roads out of your area.

If you see your own frightened dog, do not run at it and do not chase it. A dog in flight mode will run from anyone, including you, and chasing pushes it further out. Crouch or sit down, turn side on, avoid staring at it, and toss food on the ground. Sound calm and bored. Let the dog choose to come to you. The same goes for anyone who calls to say they can see it: ask them to stop following it, stay where they are, and tell you exactly where they are standing.

Scent and familiar things

Put familiar smells where you want the animal to arrive. Bedding they sleep on, unwashed. Your worn t-shirt from the laundry basket. The litter tray, used, on the doorstep or at the back door. Do not wash any of it first. The point is the smell of home, and clean bedding does not smell of anything.

Set food out at dusk and check it at first light. Be aware that food will bring foxes, other people's cats and whatever else lives nearby, so if you can, put a cheap camera or an old phone on it, or make the food only reachable through a carrier or a crate with bedding in the back of it.

For a dog, go back to the exact place it got out or slipped the lead, and leave a blanket, something of yours, and water there. Then keep going back. Dogs often return to the point they were last with you, and will circle that spot after dark when the road is quiet.

People also swear by walking the route with a bag of the food that makes the noise your pet knows: the treat tin, the shaken box, the electric tin opener sound. It costs nothing to try. None of this is science, and I am not going to pretend it is. It is what people who have found their animals say they did.

The microchip

A microchip does nothing on its own. It is a number that points at a database record, and that record has to say your pet is missing and carry a phone number that still works.

• Find the chip number. It is on the paperwork from the vet or the rescue, or on your vet's file, and they will read it out over the phone.
• Look the number up to find out which registry it belongs to. In the United States the AAHA Universal Pet Microchip Lookup does this. In the United Kingdom and much of Europe there are equivalent check-a-chip lookups. These tools do not show your details, only which company holds the record.
• Then phone that registry, not just the vet. Ask them to flag the record as lost or missing, and confirm the contact number and email on it are current. A record still listing a phone you had two houses ago turns a successful scan into a dead end.
• If your pet was rehomed or came from a rescue, the rescue may still be the registered keeper. Call them too, and ask them to flag it.

Any vet, shelter or animal control officer can scan an animal in seconds, and most will scan anything brought in. The flag on the record is what turns that scan into a phone call to you.

Phone the shelters, do not just read their websites

This is the step people skip, and it matters more than anything you will do online. A shelter's found-animal page is updated by a human when that human has time. The animal is in the building days before the photo is on the site, and sometimes it never gets there at all.

• Call every shelter, rescue, pound, animal control office and municipal dog warden in your area and the areas next to yours. For a dog, go wider than feels sensible.
• Give a description and leave your number, and ask them to add it to their lost log. Ask specifically whether they also keep a separate log of animals people have found but kept.
• Go and look yourself, in person, at whichever ones let you. Descriptions get written down wrong constantly. A tabby is logged as brown, a chocolate lab as black, an ear tuft goes unmentioned. Your eyes on the actual animals is not the same as their staff comparing your description to their notes.
• Call back every day or two. Holding periods are short in a lot of places, and a call that came up empty on Tuesday is a different call on Thursday.
• Call the vets too, including the emergency out-of-hours practice. Somebody who finds an injured animal takes it to a vet, not a shelter.
• Ask the local authority whether anything matching has been picked up from the roads. It is a horrible call to make. Make it anyway, because not knowing is worse and it is often the one place with a record nobody else sees.

Where posting actually works

Not every channel is worth your time at this hour. The ones that reliably reach people who are physically near your street:

• The local community group for your town or suburb on Facebook, and the dedicated lost and found pet groups for your county, state or region. Post in both. Ask a member with a big following to share it.
• Nextdoor, or whichever neighbourhood app people actually use where you live, because it is geographic by design.
• Your street or building WhatsApp group, and the school gate group if there is one. These are small and they are read.
• The local subreddit, and the local news page or radio station's Facebook page if it takes community posts.
• The shelter's own found page and any regional lost pet register, so that your listing exists where someone searching from the other side will look.

Then tell the people who cover more ground than you do: the postal carrier, the delivery drivers, the bin crew, the corner shop, the dog walkers who are out at six in the morning, the person who runs the same loop every evening. Give them a photo on their phone rather than a description. Dog walkers in particular are worth more than any post, because they are looking at the ground in the places a lost animal hides.

Flyers that people read

A flyer is read from a moving car, in bad light, by someone not looking for it. So it needs to be readable at a glance and almost empty.

• One word at the top, as large as the paper allows: LOST, or LOST CAT.
• One photo, big, in colour.
• The street or the junction it went missing near, and the date.
• Your phone number, large. Nothing else. No paragraph, no life story, no list of medical details.

Print on bright paper so the eye catches it, put each one in a clear plastic sleeve or laminate it so the first rain does not end your campaign, and fix them at head height at junctions, crossings, bus stops, the school gate, the park entrances and anywhere people stop and stand still. Ask before you put one up in a shop, a vet, a groomer or a cafe, because a flyer taped up without asking comes down within the hour.

Do the letterboxes too. A smaller flyer through the doors of the streets around you is what makes somebody go and check their own garage, and that is where cats are found.

If you are offering a reward, you can say so on the flyer. Think carefully before printing the amount, and leave off the one identifying detail you are keeping back. Everything on a flyer is something a stranger can repeat to you on the phone.

Which photograph to use

Use the photo that looks like the animal a stranger will see, not the one you love. That usually means:

• Daylight, side on, the whole animal in the frame, standing.
• No filter, no flash-eye, nothing artistic. A stranger has to match a colour and a shape from across a road.
• A second photo of any distinguishing mark: a white bib, a bent ear tip, a scar, an odd tail, the pattern on one leg.
• Something in the frame for scale if you have it, so people know whether they are looking for something the size of a cat or the size of a spaniel.

Remember that a pet who has been out for days looks different. Thinner, dirtier, wet, matted, frightened, and often much less friendly than they are with you. Say that in the post. People walk past lost animals because the animal in front of them does not look like the glossy photo.

Keep one detail out of every photo and every post. A scar under the chin, a missing claw, a tattoo in the ear, an unusual collar tag, a marking on the belly that does not show in the pictures. You are going to need it.

Searching at night

Late night and very early morning are the best hours to search, and it is the reason you are reading this at the hour you are. The streets are quiet, other dogs and cars are gone, and an animal that has been hiding all day starts moving.

• Take a bright torch or flashlight and sweep it low: along fence lines, under every car, into hedge bottoms, under decking and sheds. Eyes reflect the beam from a long way off, and that reflection is usually what finds a cat, not a sound.
• Go slowly and stop often. Call in your ordinary voice, the one you use at home, and then stay completely silent for a minute and listen. A weak or trapped animal makes a very quiet sound, once.
• Take the food tin or the treat bag and make the noise they know.
• Do not expect a response. A terrified cat will sit and watch you walk past without moving a muscle. Look with your eyes and your torch, and go back to the same spot again another night.
• Take someone with you or tell someone where you are going, take your phone, wear something visible to drivers, and do not climb into gardens or yards without asking the person who owns them. Knock in daylight and ask to come back.

When somebody says they have your pet

Most people who contact you are kind and genuine. A few are not, and there is one pattern in particular you should know before you see it.

The pattern is this. Someone contacts you saying they have your animal, and then asks for money before you can see it. The money is always for something plausible: transport, a courier, a vet bill they have already paid, a fee to release it, a driver in another city. There is urgency, and there is a reason they cannot send a photo. Sometimes it is the crueller version, a call saying your pet is badly hurt and needs treatment paid for right now. It is worth knowing that this happens so that it does not land on you cold at two in the morning.

What to ask for, every time:

• A photograph taken now. Not a photo of your pet, which they can copy from your own post, but a new one. Ask for the animal on the floor of the room they are standing in, or in their arms with their free hand visible in the frame.
• The detail you kept back. Ask an open question rather than a leading one: say "tell me about her ears" rather than "does she have a nick in her left ear". Someone genuinely looking at your pet answers immediately and casually. Someone guessing goes quiet, gets vague, or gets angry.
• Where they found it, and when. Genuine finders are specific about the street and the time without being asked twice.

And the rules that do not bend:

• Never send money before your pet is physically in your hands. Not a deposit, not a transport fee, not a vet bill, not a courier. Nothing. Pay the reward at the handover, in person, when you have your animal.
• Never send a gift card, a crypto payment or a transfer to a stranger who says the payment is what releases your pet.
• Do not give out your home address in the first message. Meet in a public place with people around, or in daylight, and take someone with you.
• Do not click links people send you, and never enter card details or a login to "verify" that you own the animal. There is no service that works that way.
• If a call comes from far away and the caller knows nothing about the area you lost your pet in, treat it as noise. Scammers work from public lost pet posts, which is also a reason to be careful how much detail you publish.
• Report it to whichever platform they contacted you on, and to the police if any money changed hands. You are not the first person it happened to.

None of this is a reason to be cold with someone who calls you. Almost everyone who picks up the phone to a stranger about a lost animal is doing it out of kindness. Ask for the photo and the detail anyway. A real finder will not mind, and will usually say they were about to offer.

Keeping it going

Animals turn up long after the point where everyone stops asking about it, weeks later, three streets over, in a garage that got opened for the first time since spring. So keep the posts up and repost them, because groups move fast and a post from last week is invisible. Keep phoning the shelters. Keep going out at the quiet hour. Replace the flyers when they fade.

And when your pet is home: take the flyers down, tell the groups and the shelters and the vets so they can close the file, and phone the microchip registry to clear the missing flag. Then get some sleep.

Everything on this page is a summary of what rescue and shelter people, and owners who have been through this, recommend doing. I have deliberately not put numbers on any of it. There are figures going around about how many pets come home and how far they travel, and I cannot stand behind them, so they are not here.

About Bounty Go

I am building an app for exactly this situation. It is a live map of lost pets and missing things: you publish a listing with a photo, the area it went missing in, and a reward you are offering, and people already out walking near you see it on their map. If somebody spots your cat, they report a sighting on the pin, and the handover is arranged in the app with a one time code so you both know you have the right person.

The reward is an offer from you to whoever brings your pet back, agreed and paid directly between the two of you, in person. Bounty Go never holds that money and never takes a percentage of it. That cuts both ways: because it never touches the reward, it cannot guarantee anyone gets paid either, and it will always say so.

It is out. Bounty Go is on the App Store, with Google Play to follow, and a listing takes a few minutes to post: photos, the area it went missing, and the reward you would pay in person. Posting it is free. This page stays advice first, because the app is one of the things to do tonight and not the only one.

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Bounty Go is not an emergency service. If an animal or a person is in immediate danger, call the people whose job that is, first.

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