Good Deed for the Day

Out walking the dogs when a young dog ran over to see us. No sign of an owner.

Dog was medium-sized, part-AmStaff and part something else, and wanted to play. Had a collar and tags.

A woman came out of the house we were in front of and said she'd seen the dog running around in her back yard, but she didn't know who he belonged to.

I would have started knocking on doors, but since the dog could have come from anywhere, I figured it would be better to get home and have my hands free when I started trying to track the owner down.

So, off the belt and looped around the collar, and home, my dogs carrying on because they didn't want to share their owner/home/water/air ...

Got mine inside, the stray in the front yard, and found both an Avid number and WA country rabies tag, phone numbers for each. Avid is a tracking/recovery service, and they sell microchip implants, so the dog was chipped and I figured that was the fastest way to find out who owned him.

After waiting on the phone tree for a time, I got through. Sure enough, he had an implant, but the owner hadn't gotten around to filling in the information on it, so all they had was was the WA county shelter number where the chip was put in.

So I called the pound, gave them the tag number, and got the dog's name -- Dietrich -- and the owner's name -- George -- and an address, which happened to be across the street and down six or so houses. Leashed Dietrich up and walked him down there. The owner, an older man with somewhat limited mobility, had missed the dog, who apparently slipped out the back gate into the park behind the house and vanished.

(As it happened, the dog lived next door to the woman who said she didn't know whose it was. Interesting.)

I turned the pup over to George, and all's well that ends well.

I had seen this guy with a dog before, but it was an older one, so Dietrich must be new. If you get your dog chipped, best to fill out that information ASAP -- if s/he gets loose without a collar, it's going to be harder to track you down.

And from a public records/security aspect, if somebody finds your tagged dog running loose and bothers, they can get the dog's name, your name, your phone number and address, if they just ask ...