Nelly O’Neill holds her cat, Zenna, outside her home in Redmond. O’Neill founded the Lost and Found Pets in Deschutes County Facebook group in 2016, inspired by her experience finding Zenna.  

In 2016, Nelly O’Neill’s friend lost a cat. She was heartbroken, and O’Neill, of Redmond, searched high and low to find the cat, Zenna.

Thanks to a tip from a local Facebook group, she was located in a shelter in Modesto, California. When her friend was unable to officially adopt the cat, O’Neill drove to Modesto herself to rescue her.

That could have been the end of that story, but the Facebook group that helped O’Neill find Zenna had a lasting effect on her.

“I realized what a good resource it was to have groups like this. Then I noticed that we didn’t really have one here, and I thought it would be a great thing to start, especially with how many missing pets I was seeing locally,” O’Neill said.

That year O’Neill founded the Lost and Found Pets in Deschutes County, a Facebook group with a vision of creating a centralized hub for lost and found pet posts. The group has grown beyond what O’Neill ever expected, with nearly 15,000 members who work together to reunite hundreds of lost pets every year with their owners, using tactics including watching trail cameras, creating search grids and even traipsing about at night with thermal scopes.

How they find pets

Finding lost pets is a group effort, but Katie Albright, one of the group’s moderators, is key to making the group’s efforts successful. This week, she stayed up all night watching trail cameras for a skittish lost cat, and was able to reunite the “little stinker” with its family early Wednesday morning after a week of being lost.

“When it comes to finding a lost pet, there’s so many variables. It depends on the circumstances, the location, the temperament of the dog or cat, so having a one-size-fits-all plan just doesn’t really work,” Albright said. “One of the biggest challenges for me is trying to get people to realize that their dog, their own dog, may not come to them, and it’s only until that dog runs from them that they get it.”

Once the ground game — creating a search grid and laying out flyers — begins, recovery time for dogs and cats can range anywhere between an hour to several months, Albright said. Even if a dog is gone for several weeks, hope is not lost. Albright recalled one border collie, Betsy, who was gone for a month before she was returned to her foster caretaker.

“She was trapped after 30 days being out, and she was very elusive. She went from midtown, then to Pilot Butte, and then out onto Old Bend-Redmond Highway by Tumalo, then over by Awbrey Butte, on the east side, then across to Shevlin and back to Awbrey Butte. The sightings were very sparse and few and far in between. It was just perseverance and creating a good search plan. Those stories keep me going because there’s always hope,” Albright said.

Finders aren’t keepers

O’Neill said a challenge administrators often face is monitoring the Facebook group for comments and posts accusing owners of neglecting their lost pets. Sometimes, they even have issues with finders trying to keep the animal instead of returning it to the owner. Finders aren’t keepers, she said.

“An animal being missing for even a few days can cause them to look very neglected, but it doesn’t mean that the owner … is neglectful,” O’Neill said. “We do get a lot of comments from people saying ‘oh, you lost your pet, that means you’re a bad owner,’ or somewhere along those lines … Part of the challenge is trying to tell people that they cannot keep the found pet or that the pet is not automatically abandoned.”

Tawnya Wallace McPhetridge, another one of the Facebook group’s administrators, said it’s important to remember that most of the time it’s a complete accident that someone loses a pet.

“You know, they jump out of a car or they dig under a fence. They get lost when they’re hiking with their owners. There’s so many different circumstances and all are different. We should never ever bash anybody for their pet being lost,” Wallace McPhetridge said.

With such a large group, it can be challenging to maintain decorum, Albright said, especially when a public group like the Lost and Found Pets in Deschutes County is a place ripe for scammers. These niche scammers are often foreign accounts that pose as “animal location specialists,” and they take money from distressed owners who think they are paying for this person to locate their pet.

“It’s quite disheartening. It’s hard enough having a lost pet without being scammed. It’s really important your phone number stays in a post so people can contact you directly with sightings, but the scammers are also contacting people by text,” Albright said. “I’m really proud of the work we do, because our group is pretty scam-free.”

Being a good finder

Bailey Thompson has helped two dogs reunite with their owners by posting on the Facebook page. The first was a puppy who was “the sweetest most well-behaved stray.” Thompson did exactly what Albright and O’Neill would have wanted, which is to take the dog to the Humane Society of Central Oregon. When they said the puppy wasn’t chipped, she took to the lost and found pets page.

“A few hours went by, and I got a message on Facebook that the owner was on their way to the humane society to pick him up! It was the best news, and I was happy he found his owners,” Thompson said.

Albright and O’Neill said the best practice for when someone finds a lost pet is to start by filing a report with all the local animal shelters and animal control because owners are likely to start looking there. The next step is to go to the shelter, like Thompson did, to check if the animal is microchipped. This, they said, is why it’s so important to keep microchip information up to date.

If you see a lost dog, do not chase it. This, Albright said, will drive the animal farther away. Instead, remain calm, sit down, avoid eye contact and allow the animal to approach on its own. After that, being a good finder is mostly about giving the animal a place to rest and recover while the owners are located.

“What most people will probably tell you is how people come together to help someone find their loved pet,” Wallace McPhetridge said. “More (than anything) I would like to say how important community is at helping others find their pets and reaching out to give support to those that have lost a pet.”