G is very friendly with all people and animals. He is 8 years old, in perfect health, 65 pounds, not neutered, with a collar but no tags, and with a microchip. He wandered away from his home at 2nd Ave South and about 135th in the middle of the day. He often wanders a few houses away, but this time he didn't come back. I advised his owners that a search dog was probably not necessary because he was most likely with someone, based on his very friendly personality. A couple of days later, the owner learned that G was seen playing with a black pit bull and its owner in the street on the afternoon that he disappeared. Based on new information, I agreed to bring Kelsy out to work the scent trail, even though it was a little over two days old at that point. Kelsy started at their house, and worked north along 2nd, dipping into yards and down a couple of dead end streets. I still thought it was going to be a short trail, leading to a point where G was picked up. I didn't even start recording the trail on GPS because I thought it was unlikely to go on very far. After a mile, I started the GPS recording. Kelsy followed a path into someone's yard, with permission, where G had checked out the smell of dozens of oyster shells in the yard. She followed G's trail through an empty field at an abandoned church.
At a house with a couple of dogs chained in the yard, Kelsy thought the scent was very strong. My guess is that G spent some time visiting with these dogs, so his scent collected there, stronger than the trail leading up or leading away. I thought the trail might have ended there, but Kelsy picked it up again, leading south. At a field where a school used to be, Kelsy got distracted by the scents of wild animals. I asked the owner to present the scent article to Kelsy again so that she could get back on track. Kelsy followed the scent down next to the freeway, down the off ramp, to 146th. At the car dealer on 146th, a salesman said he had seen G running around the area for at least a couple of days. We're not sure if this reported sighting was actually G, or a similar dog that had been turned in to animal control. We followed the scent to a dead end behind a grocery store. At that point, Kelsy was tired, and the scent trail was still two days old, not a fresh scent. If we had kept going, we could just continue to be two days behind forever. I decided to stop the search for the night, and pick it up again if we had a sighting.
G's owners did get a sighting two days later, two miles east of where I stopped Kelsy. They went there and found G. It was surprising to me that he did not get picked up sooner because G was described as the friendliest of dogs, who would happily jump into anyone's car. In hindsight, we probably would have found G if we had started searching sooner. I gave the advice not to use the search dog at first based on the described personality of the dog. The odds were greatly in favor of G being picked up the first day. Probabilities are not certainties, though, and sometimes dogs defy the odds.
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