At the Sepulveda off-leash dog park in Van Nuys, Steve Martinez is hanging out with his dog Allie, a chihuahua mix. Like many dog owners, he’s concerned about the upcoming Fourth of July holiday.
“My dog shakes like crazy and usually I drive her a good 100 miles away to get her away from it. It takes that much distance,” Martinez said.
That’s been his tradition for the past nine years, driving to either the desert or the mountains. He wishes law enforcement would do more to crack down on illegal fireworks, especially those set off in neighborhoods.
“It’s real bad,” he said. “I’d hope they’d get on it a little more and maybe issuing citations.”
While he keeps Allie close by, not all pets will be so lucky. It’s one reason 20 Los Angeles-area animal shelters have teamed up with Petco Love, Petco’s nonprofit foundation to reunite lost and found pets — a first-of-its-kind collaboration known as the LA Lost Pet Coalition.
“With our shelters in Los Angeles and really all over the country being super full already, it’s incredibly important that we all do our part to keep our pets out of the shelter, keep our pets from getting lost,” said Abbie Moore, Chief Operating Officer, Petco Love.
That partnership is focused on a search tool called Petco Love Lost. If someone loses a pet, they can go to the website, enter the location where it went missing, and upload a photo of their animal.
“And then our image recognition technology, which is patented, takes that photo and instantly compares it to photos of all the pets in all of the shelters in your area as well as pets that have been reported found,” Moore said.
“If you lose a pet, it can be so stressful and so disorienting that it’s hard to know what to do next. ‘What’s the first thing I do?’ So, we thought it was really great to have this one, centralized database,” said Leah Cohen, communications director for LA County Department of Animal Care and Control.
Petco Love says 1 in 3 pets will go missing in their lifetime and too many end up in shelters, instead of loving homes.
“If we can reduce the pet inventory in shelters, by 20, 30, 40%, it’s really life changing,” Moore said.
In the past two years, the nonprofit says it has reunited more than 23,000 pets with grateful owners thanks to its database.
Like many pet parents, Martinez would do almost anything for Allie.
“She’s very important to me and to see her in that kind of fear, it’s very uncomfortable. It’s terrible,” he said.
Because if all else fails, this “lost and found for pets” gives their families added peace of mind that what’s missing isn’t lost.