01/09/2025
Very important advice if your dog ever goes missing ❤️🩹
Why do we say if your dog goes missing stay at the point last seen?
The advice from DogLost Cornwall includes - 'If your dog went missing on a walk, go back to place last seen & wait, as they will generally return there, or to car park if you arrived in a car.'
A lot of the time a dog goes missing on a walk it will return to the point it last saw you and will often follow it’s own trail back to that point – that’s why we say it is important to stay at that point – and it is very hard to do.
You will be worrying and wondering where your dog is and the main issue is the direction you saw it go in may not be the direction they kept going in.
In order to help with understanding this visually, Annie, one of our Trustees & Instructors once demonstrated this with Search Dog Lexi (sadly no longer with us) and her tracker to show how they will often return back.
You can see on the picture below where they started from and Lexi’s original direction of travel to which she soon turned right, you can then see where Annie recalled her and although coming back in a straight line makes sense to us, she followed back along the route she had gone and back to where we were. If Annie had continued moving in the direction she’d seen her go she would be off the path of return and you can end up following each others tails, so to speak.
I hope this post goes a little way to show why we say, stay at the point you last saw your dog, it can be very hard and those first moments of worry set in, if there is more than one of you then you can keep someone at the point while others go looking in the area.
For more information about what to do if your dog goes missing please go to the DogLost Cornwall page.
