*Theme Music and Barking*
Hi I'm Adam Woodland
and Chirangee Tissera and we are host of GPB's dog show Unleashed: a dog's life.
Most pet owners will tell you that losing a pet can be a devastating experience.
And that's the case with our next piece. It's a story
about a woman who spent a month getting her skittish dog ready to come home with
her only to have it run off in just a couple of days.
So on her second night, my husband got up in the middle of the night. He, as humans do, make this
assumption oh my goodness what if she has to go to the bathroom? and my wife's
exhausted, I'm gonna help her out having never walked her or handled her in any way.
He opened the door a crack and held her
leash and then she really got spooked, she went behind the table. He went tried to
chase her around the table so she saw that open door and out she went and she
ran hard. So that was at 4 a.m. on a rainy, foggy, dark, Sunday morning.
30 hours
So if you do happen to lose your pet, the first thing that you're going to want to
do is check out your local county animal control facility. In the state of Georgia,
it is not legal for anybody except your animal control facility to take on the
custody of a lost or stray dog.
People were so positive and searching and driving around, um,
documenting sightings. You know sending me
German Shepherds from Maryland and California and I thought I think she's
there yet but you never do know.
I was devastated.
I mean really I, I was.
You go from that panic mode of searching in the morning and then
literally all I could do was come home and lie in the bed and I feel completely
helpless. All these people were out there searching and I thought I can't even, I
can't even get out, She's not coming back
You want to put up posters in your, in your
neighborhood. Go on nextdoor.com which is the
neighborhood website and let them know that your animal is missing. You're also
going to want to contact your microchip company and let them know that your pet
has gone missing that way if somebody does find your pet and have that
microchip scan and call your microchip company then they will know that that
pet has gone missing.
Yeah, I made a promise to her yeah you know if you just stick with me,
I'll keep you safe and um...
So all of that, you know, you're, you're angry, you're wondering how can I forgive
that, how do I stand up and I, I think like anybody that's had the rug pulled
out from under them for any reason, you maybe just have that moment where you
just sit on the ground for a little bit. And I will say the next morning I was
really on a mission. It was a whole different kind of energy and there were
so many people holding me up, people that almost hit her ,that wanted to drive with
me. There was a gentleman that we had a sighting for of her at 10:00 p.m. We
went over there, he was sitting in the freezing cold on his front steps with a
salmon dinner in hopes that she would come back.
So Animal Control does a lot
of different stuff. They typically will go out and they'll pick up stray and
lost pets, and sometimes these pets may be completely unsocialized, they may be
feral, they may not be pets. They may just be a dog that's never had human
interaction at all but you know it's always good to get these guys off the
street and Fulton County will be able to hold them as a stray for a period of
time, and if they're not claimed, they'll be able to actually place that animal up
for adoption.
Alera called me from angels among us, and she said you know,
this is a really smart dog. She's gonna remember the last kindness. And I thought
well, that's the most positive thing I've heard in three days. So I put my winter
stuff on, it was really cold, and I grabbed two hot dogs and I flicked on
the backlight and she's sitting there like nothing ever happened.
She said do you have hot dogs? I do! I have hot dogs. She came in, I threw the hot dogs
in the dish with all these treats. I threw every treat on the counter in
her dish, and um he's joking she she ate a meal that would choke a pig, and just,
it was such an amazing. It could not have had a better outcome.
For more information on what to do and who to contact if you lose your pet,
visit our website that's GPB.org/unleashed