How to find a lost dog

Before you plan anything, be honest about which of these describes your dog on a bad day, not on a good one.

• Confident and social. Approaches strangers, follows roads and trails, may be picked up quickly by someone who assumes it is friendly. Search wide, and check shelters and social posts in neighbouring municipalities early.
• Shy, anxious or newly adopted. Goes to ground fast, usually within a short distance, and hides in dense cover. Avoids everyone, including you. Search close, quietly, and expect this to take days rather than hours.
• Injured, panicked or chased. Behaves like a shy dog regardless of its normal personality. Treat it as a fearful dog until proven otherwise.

A recently adopted dog is the highest risk case on this list. It has no bond with you yet and no map of the area, so it behaves like a frightened stray even if it seemed settled at home.

This is the part almost everyone gets wrong, and it is the part that matters most. A dog in flight mode reads a person running toward it as a threat, even a person it loves.

1. Stop moving the instant you see them. Do not close the distance.
2. Sit or lie down on the ground and turn side on. Avoid direct eye contact.
3. Act uninterested. Yawn, look away, talk quietly to yourself rather than to the dog.
4. Toss high value food to the side, not at the dog. Roast chicken, cheese, anything strong smelling.
5. Wait. This can take a long time. Let the dog choose to close the gap.
6. Only reach for a slip lead once the dog is calm, eating, and staying near you.

If there are several of you, one person does this and everyone else stays back and out of sight. A semicircle of people closing in will send the dog straight through the gap behind it.

Once posts go up you will start getting calls. Resist the urge to drive to each one. Log them instead.

• Time of the sighting, as precisely as the caller can manage
• Exact location, including which side of the road
• Direction of travel
• What the dog was doing, and how the person reacted

After a day or two the reports will usually cluster around a small area with a food or water source. That cluster is your search zone. Individual sightings scattered across a city are usually a mix of look alike dogs and honest mistakes, and chasing them wastes the hours you need.

When the sightings cluster, put food, water and something that smells of home at the centre of it, and point a camera at the spot.

Then do the counterintuitive thing: stop actively searching that area. Ask volunteers and neighbours to stop too. A dog that keeps being flushed by well meaning searchers will never settle long enough to be caught, and every flush pushes it into new territory.

Once the camera shows your dog returning at a predictable time, you can plan a calm capture, or work with a local rescue that has a humane trap large enough for a dog.

A travelling dog tends to follow the path of least resistance: roads, trails, greenways, rail lines and river banks. Your posters should follow the same lines.

• Major intersections near the escape point and near the sighting cluster
• Trailheads, park entrances and off leash areas
• Vet clinics, pet stores, corner stores and community boards
• Drive through routes where a car slows anyway

The poster has to work at driving speed, which means one enormous word, one photo and a phone number. Everything else is decoration.