This tale with a happy ending is about technology, community and Shadow, who got out.
It happens, as anyone who loves animals knows. One minute they’re here, the next minute they’re off in pursuit of the Great Unknown (unknown to you, that is; they generally are filled with towering purpose).
Anyway, about a year ago Santana Kelly had taken her 3-year-old pit bull/labrador mix, Shadow, out to do his business and just like that, he was off.
“He just started running,” Kelly recalled.
She looked all around her Riverside neighborhood, calling for him and hoping to entice him home. No dice. So, she did what has become the most effective thing a person can do around here: She posted Shadow’s photo on the Mesa County Lost and Found Pets Facebook page.
Within an hour — an hour of his running away, that is — Kelly was contacted via Facebook by a woman who had seen him near Starbucks on 25 Road. The woman told Kelly she had enticed Shadow into her car because she was afraid he would run away again, and that he was being very friendly and playful.
Kelly immediately went to get her wayward dog, who gave his rescuer several kisses of gratitude, and what could have ended in tears and the impossible ache of never knowing ended in a reunited family.
Tales such as this are not uncommon on what has become THE hub for lost and found pets in Mesa County. Started by Crystal Meyer on April 30, 2013, the Mesa County Lost and Found Pets Facebook group has more than 8,100 members, which means a veritable army of animal lovers who constantly have an eye out for pets that have gotten away.
“It’s not just about lost and found animals,” Meyer explained. “It’s actually about getting the community together. We’re like a family.”
Meyer started the group after her daughter’s dog went missing for six days and “we could not figure out how to get him home,” she said. “There just weren’t a lot of places to get fliers out. After he got home, I kept thinking about all these people who had lost their pets, what they were feeling.”
So, she established the page on Facebook and advertised it via business cards on bulletin boards, bumper stickers and word of mouth. And the group grew and grew. Now there are 16 page administrators in addition to Meyer.
People lost animals and posted photos. People found animals and posted photos. People who didn’t know the pet owner or the missing pet went out and searched for the animal that had gone astray.
Tammy Bedford said that her “granddog,” Heidi, went missing from her home at the end of 33 Road last August and that people from the group came out to help search the desert for her. The situation was especially fraught because Heidi is blind.
After two days of searching, rescuers discovered that she’d fallen into an old water trough in a ravine and couldn’t get out. She was injured, very weak and dehydrated, but alive, and has since made a full recovery.
“One of the people from the Mesa County Lost and Found Pets, who had been following the story, called my kids the day after Heidi was found and had purchased a GPS tracking collar for Heidi,” Bedford wrote. “It is the most amazing group of people in our valley.”
The stories don’t always have happy endings. Sometimes lost pets aren’t found, or aren’t alive when they are found, but even then the group can help, Meyer said.
She has gone to people’s homes — people she knows only through Facebook interactions — to give them the bad news “because that’s not something you should hear over the phone,” she explained. Group members comfort each other in their grief when pets are lost.
They also encourage each other to be safe when encountering wandering animals. Meyer said she figures most group members now keep treats, a slip lead and an extra leash in their cars, but they remind each other that often the best thing to do is call Mesa County Animal Services.
“The last thing I want is for somebody to get hurt,” Meyer said.
She added that the Mesa County Lost and Found Pets Facebook page is strictly for lost and found pets, not for judging people who “let” their pets get out, not for bad-mouthing animal services, not for anything that will get in the way of reuniting animals and people. There is a Beyond Lost and Found group page for questions, concerns or commentary.
And it’s for all animals, not just dogs: “We used the pet group to find our parrot after it got scared and flew away in a wind storm,” Adam Cochran wrote. “It took three days to find him. He was hiding behind a neighbor’s grill about four blocks away. A friend of the people who found the parrot saw our post in the lost and found pets group.”
Meyer estimated that about half of the pets that go missing are reunited with their people, and that a significant portion go to Mesa County Animal Services, resulting in some good re-homing stories.
And speaking of stories, there are some legendary ones within the group. Most notable, perhaps, is that of Uch (rhymes with “pooch”), a dog that ran off in a Grand Junction Wal-Mart parking lot on a road trip from Texas to Utah.
Uch’s owners immediately found the Mesa County Lost and Found Pets page and posted his picture, but eventually had to go back home to Texas because they couldn’t find him. They flew back once to look for him because people kept reporting sightings of Uch, but he was extremely skittish.
Finally, Meyer said, almost a month after he went missing and enticed by McDonald’s hamburgers, group members aided Mesa County Animal Services in catching Uch. Meyer posted the news on the Facebook page and within two hours enough money had been raised to buy Uch a harness, a crate and a plane ticket home.
Uch was checked out by a local veterinarian and then group members picked him up and took him to the airport, where his overjoyed owners were waiting for him.
“It’s so amazing to have people you don’t even know helping you,” Tommie Lowdermilk said.
And she should know. In January, at about 10 on a rainy, freezing night, her St. Bernard, Sako, got out and Lowdermilk couldn’t find him. She posted on the page and by 7 a.m. someone reported seeing him.
A day later, they were reunited and Lowdermilk said she still hears from neighbors who saw on Facebook that he was missing and went out looking for him.
“With this group,” she said, “it feels like I’m not the only one who loves my dog.”
