A man who collects lost pet posters | Hacker News Reader

A man who collects lost pet posters

ameliatait.substack.com

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I’ve been seeing a lot of lost pet posters lately. One of the things that has struck me is that they seem pretty ineffective. Most of them have really small writing and when you’re driving past them in the suburbs all you really see is that there is some lost dog or cat and you probably pass the sign too quickly to get much information or write down the phone number. I was pretty sure that there had to be at least 10 different websites trying to help solve this problem and a quick web search confirmed my suspicion. I have a feeling the websites aren’t much help. The only thing that seems like it probably works is the chip database, but I’d be interested to see if anybody has done research on the most effective ways to find and reunite lost pets.

Facebook community groups and things like Nextdoor do seem to help reunite pet owners with their pets.

I am bothered each and every time I see a lost pet poster that does not include either the date when the pet went missing or when the poster was put up. My internal voice shouts "Help us to help YOU!"

what difference does the date make? you are seeing a picture of the dog who was last seen/lived in that neighborhood, have you seen it? if you care to, bear it in mind over the next hours while you are in that neighborhood. I don't think a lost pet poster is supposed to accomplish more than that, you don't need to draw a circle on a map based on how many days it's been

> what difference does the date make?

I'm not following your argument in the least. My point is about time management. I am a habitual dog walker/hiker and need to know whether I can offer a quick search as close as possible to the time the pet went missing, or whether I should carry on as usual knowing that my dogs seem to notice all living and recently demised earthbound things in our travels. If a tropical bird has been lost, the minutes and hours are critical, while the days and weeks missing are just plain sad.

EDIT: I also live in a wintery climate, so yes, posting the date gone missing is critical information.

I think it's a safe assumption that by the time someone got around to putting up a sign, you're at least hours if not days after the fact. The "everybody go out and search" stage happens well before the "I guess we should put up posters" stage. If you're seeing a poster and not a search party, it's been at least a day.

The post you're replying to covered it. They're meant to ask you you to keep your eyes open in the area, not stop and search. They're not asking you to interrupt what you're doing, just pay a little extra attention while you're doing it.

> by the time someone got around to putting up a sign, you're at least hours if not days after the fact

Not a safe assumption at all, and your term ''got around to'' seems to imply that those who have lost a pet might be lackadaisical i.e. I finally 'got around to' taking out the garbage.

Everyone needs to put the date-gone-missing on their missing pet posters.

"Got around to" means "did alllllll the other things they thought might find a pet more quickly." There's nothing lackadaisical about it. It's just well down the list of things you try immediately after a pet is lost.

I have never seen a date on such a poster and it would never have occurred to me to expect one or put one if I lost my own pet. You seem to be the outlier with this expectation.

I wish your pets long, happy lives safely at home.

Common courtesy would have one remove the posters once either the animal is recovered or hope is abandoned. That's a pain in the ass though and you likely won't remember everywhere you posted bills while distraught.

The next best thing is putting a timestamp or expiration date on it so you don't waste the time of the samaritans willing to dragnet for you.

I do get where you're coming from though. Dates don't really matter to me since I habitually check corners and undercarriages at night looking for lost anything (I know where all the rabbit warrens are and have found two dogs, many cats and an unconscious human), but if I know there's a current/recent APB, I'll focus my attention while I'm out and about.

it's a piece of paper tacked up outside... rely on the wind/weather/humidity/sun to curl/yellow the page and take it down when it looks old.

Same for garage sale signs.

My assumption is there’s a kid involved, and the parents know it’s unlikely to be found, but putting in an effort to find it by putting up posters helps to not feel as guilty about losing it.

Or maybe that’s the pessimist in me.

everything is necessary, and nothing is enough. seems plausible posters are put up when a loved friend is lost

> The only thing that seems like it probably works is the chip database

Indeed, ear tattoos can lose their legibility over time, as seen in this sad case:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-farmer-lo...

I don't feel like they need to be effective. Lots of pedestrian pet lovers will stop to check out poster on their own volition, especially people from the neighbourhood. They have internal interest to look for random pets, and being walking speed, have much better chance and probably already acquainted neighboorhood regulars vs strange outdoor pets.

Now what does actually seem ineffective is color posters with different shot of same animal, and their fur looks different colour in every shot, because that's how fur behaves, but to human mind it's a bunch of different cats.

What seems supremely ineffective are lost bird posters.

I've seen the same lost cuckadoo posters in different neighbour hoods in my city... over multiple years. SOmeone was very attached.

Lost pet signs don't need to be terribly legible for passing cars. If you found a lost pet, then you would walk around with the pet to see if it will lead you home (dogs often will), and check signs while you're walking.

If that doesn't turn up anything, then you take the animal to a vet to check for a chip and figure out what to do after that.

The reason none of these measures are very effective has little to do with the method.

Most of the time if a pet goes missing, it's dead by the time such measures are taken or very soon after.

Taking measures to avoid the disappearance in the first place can be more effective.

If you have a cat that goes outside, making sure it's neutered massively decreases the areas they cover and risk of run-ins with other cats or predators. Having a cat flap is a huge help because the cat won't get stuck outside and go looking for shelter. Avoid collars because they get stuck on branches(even the ones that are designed to come undone easily can)

And for fuck sake, the number of people who don't realise their short haired cats can't handle winter conditions... I see a lot of missing notices for shorthairs in the winter. Often with days or even weeks since they disappeared. All dead, almost guaranteed. And this goes for longhairs too, if less so.

I have a Norwegian forest cat, who is better suited for cold weather even than most longhairs, and he barely goes outside at temps below -10C, and only very briefly. Longhairs still easily get frostbite on their ears, nose, and paws at those temps. If you're letting your cat outside at all in these conditions, you better have a flap or otherwise let them in immediately when they ask for it. Yes, even when you just let them out 5 minutes ago.

> Most of the time if a pet goes missing, it's dead by the time such measures are taken or very soon after.

> Avoid collars…

This is bad information. Please don’t spread it.

Lost dogs are recovered at about a 90% rate, and lost cats at about 75%. Collars are very helpful. Use a safety collar.

If your pet is lost, get help from people who know how to find them. If possible call a local group. This directory is a great place to start in the US https://www.missinganimalresponse.com/mar-directory/

"Safety" collars still get stuck. Sometimes the mechanism can get wet and freeze stuck.

And I call bullshit on your 75% number for cats. That has to include false alarms where cats are just out for a really long time which is rare, but it happens. In those cases, the cat will just show up at some point completely unharmed all on its own. Usually it's owners freaking out because it hasn't happened before. Another common thing is some asshole in the neighbourhood takes it upon themselves to feed your cat, and it starts hanging out there for days at a time.

most people don't live in -20C conditions. this comment seems painfully obtuse

Does that make my advice wrong? Lots of people do. I could talk all day about summer conditions too, if you want me to. But I guess winter is on mind right now.

It makes it wrong for places where a wet collar won't freeze.

Generalising from your experience to the entire globe can be unhelpful sometimes.

Fair enough, I should have been clearer about that and specified that water only freezes in cold temperatures, lest someone misunderstood that subtle point.

Your original advice was:

>Avoid collars because they get stuck on branches(even the ones that are designed to come undone easily can)

That doesn't mention the problem of freezing. Again, I'm just pointing out that your personal experience might not be a solid basis to provide advice to pet owners all over the world, and in fact, could be detrimental.

What if a pet owner lives in a place where a wet collar won't freeze because they don't get "real" winters. What if a collar would help return a lost pet to its family?

Your experience is not universal and people are just pointing that out to you.

Fine. Still, it's an extremely minor nitpick, and that's what annoys me about it. With all of my tips combined, + living in a location well suited for cats(real nature like a forest nearby, low speed limit, picking a cat built for the local environment), your free-roaming cat simply won't get lost without something so bad happening to it it's very likely dead. Or it left for greener pastures because you treated it like shit.

Some people don't understand how loyal cats can be, and how well they navigate and map out their environment(did you know cats have a detailed 3D mental map of their surroundings at all times? It's all in the hearing). That's how you get a lot of false alarms where normal cat behaviour is misconstrued as a disappearance.

Other people think their cats are invincible and will do cruel things like forcing them to stay outside all night with no way to get inside. And yeah, if you do that, your cat will go hide in a garage and end up stuck there. But that's the owner's fault and they could have easily avoided it.

So yeah, maybe a collar helped you find your cat. But the only reason it got lost is likely because you fucked up somehow. And you may have been lucky the collar didn't kill your cat.

Having a cat is easy and a joy if you just know the first thing about what the fuck you're doing. And the extent to which people don't pisses me off so much I can sometimes go off the rails about it. Sorry about that.

Joys of hacker news

He’s citing a study. No need to debate we can just tear the study apart. :)

Here is the source.

https://www.luckypet.com/blogs/news/the-odds-of-finding-your....

you are speaking out of your behind, about cats and wintery conditions which is a minority. dogs regularly are found, captured and returned at very high rates through these techniques

Yes, I'm talking about cats. Because that's what I know about. I never claimed to be talking about dogs, did I? And I'm not talking out of my ass, but a wealth of experience owning cats, studying their behaviour and learning about their biology.

The fact that some people don't get real winters doesn't invalidate my advice. Nor does it invalidate the fact that I see basic knowledge like this absent from cat owners on a regular basis.

Not always a fan of tech solutions for every problem, but I don't see why there isn't more widespread adoption of an implanted GPS tracking chips, and maybe coupled with them and app that lets you know if your pet has gone outside of a certain area. This could solve a vast majority of missing pet cases for those who use such a solution.

> I have a feeling the websites aren’t much help

Doesn’t surprise me. Who would periodically go to a website to check whether there are any pets missing in the neighborhood?

A targeted RSS feed or email service would IMO work better, but likely still not good.

Back to the pet posters: a large reason for them is to console the owner or their kids.

Yeah, unless there's a bounty most people on lost pet sites are only there because they too have lost one. It's more like a memorial page in practice.

Nextdoor works better for this since people go there for other reasons.

Pet posters aren't as useful as they should be. If you find an animal, call the Humane Society and let them handle custody. Owners checking in with local shelters is step 1 in every "I lost my pet" procedure.

I think it depends on where you live. I live in Bend, Oregon, and lost pets are regularly found via Reddit posts. But this is a super-outdoorsy and dog friendly community, so people are outside a lot and like looking out for our furry friends.

It depends on your neighborhood. There are a ton of walkers in mine so I expect the signs are more effective. That being said there are also near wolf-sized coyotes I also see on the sidewalks on these morning walks…

Chips are good when someone finds your pet (and takes it somewhere with a chip reader). But many lost pets are scared and skittish and won’t come anywhere close enough to strangers to be caught.

The main purpose of posters is to make people aware.

E.g., a lost dog will usually find an area they feel safe and start hanging around. People near there will see it, and if they know a dog is lost may call it in (getting the number from the poster or social media). Once people looking for the dog know where it is hanging out, they can trap it (maybe first using a drone to narrow down where the dog is).

you say things that are imagined, but in the affirmative. pretty sure I've never seen or heard of drones tracking down dogs although it is a great idea.

Try searching it?

I don’t know why anyone would argue a matter of fact from a position of ignorance, especially when it’s a trivial effort to relieve.

Are there no pedestrians in suburbs? The likelihood that someone who walks a neighborhood would be able to help with a missing pet seems a lot higher than the likelihood that some random driver from probably miles away could. But maybe for the latter case online platforms work for some people... if they weren't so fractioned. A couple of years ago I'd have suggested facebook groups, today, not sure.

It's not like anyone can put up huge billboards on the streets so that car drivers were able to recognize a pet photo...

I knew a guy who collected roadside crosses from car accidents. Had a shrine in the corner of his elderly parents’ basement. Said he used the energy from them to “harmonize”. Weird dude, if that wasn’t obvious. He had hundreds from all over California and Nevada.

Lost: my lost dog poster, last seen here. White and covered with black patches of Calibri

I knew somebody who did this in NYC in the 1980s. The "funniest" poster he found failed to mention whether the animal was a cat or dog, and sadly you couldn't tell what it was from the terrible sketch.

I’m reminded of the Stephen King novel / Anthony Hopkins movie Hearts in Atlantis where missing pet posters going up were a sign that the government men were hot on his heels.

Great movie, by the way.

And an even better book! If you thought it was impossible for an author to write hundreds of riveting pages about kids playing Hearts (the card game) in college, you are in for a surprise!

As an aside, is there anyone using AirTags in the collar to keep track of pets? Seems like it would be a fairly easy and cheap way to track.

I've thought about it, but my dogs are large and might gnaw or mangle AirTags in an instant while wrestling. Maybe if the AirTags were in a skin tight pouch of ballistic material attached to their collars...

Searching "airtag pets found" shows a bunch of success stories. Anyone expecting a GPS-like pet tracking experience will be disappointed, and WSJ warns (https://archive.is/Qw4O2) that a poorly-secured AirTags might be eaten. I've been thinking about using the Elevation Lab TagVault myself.

Yes, but of limited use.

They're not GPS so you need to have neighbors wealthy enough to create a neighborhood iPhone mesh. Rural/blue-collar coverage is spotty.

The batteries are also prone to dying halfway through the search due to shitty luck. One of ours escaped while we were replacing the batteries.

You want to be sure your pet won’t chew/eat it.

I use a case that slides on to a tag collar like a belt loop. Like these: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BGQGZLP6/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...

Also, while air tags will help in some situations, they are useless in many others. I use them because I don’t think it will hurt, but I wouldn’t count on them. (I also have a Fi collar for my risky hound, which is a GPS collar. GPS collars also don’t always work.)

Awesome. Don looks like a dog himself, maybe an Afghan Hound haha (I mean this in the most endearing way possible).

I would “collect” them by taking photos.

It does seem unethical to remove them unless they are obviously super old.

I once put up lost pet posters but didn't expect anything... it was only for my kids.

When I lived in CA, I noticed that a few nights after you start hearing coyote packs howling, your start seeing a lot of missing pet posters, mostly those little ineffective yapper type dogs.

After a week the pack would move on, it seems.

One fun aspect of living on/near a military base is when coyotes make homes for themselves on the plains of the artillery range. Once the monthly shelling starts, they flee into the surrounding human communities. Then waves of missing-pet posters go up.

Ruskie and Ukie troops are both dealing with rat infestations for the same reason. Their natural predators are driven away by combat, so rodents are breeding like crazy and harassing both sides.

`Although he admits it’s “morally questionable”, he began taking the posters'

This is ostensibly a fun read, but for the duration I couldn't get past the thought that someone hand drew and coloured a poster for beloved missing dog -- not a print out or photocopy -- and someone just took it because they wanted to collect them. It gives the whole piece a really discomforting overtone.

Yeah it’s hard to look past that. Ugly behaviour.

I can’t find it now but I’ve seen this guy on TikTok who takes photos of posters like this, usually people offering services like house cleaning, and he professionally redesigns them then prints some off and posts them. Interesting how the same moment can fork in two starkly different directions.

> Yeah it’s hard to look past that. Ugly behaviour.

From the article:

"... but he notes he only took a poster if there was more than one pinned up in the neighbourhood"

That doesn’t mean anything. If you have two drunken lawn gnomes can I take one?

Same, I kept reading to see if they would answer this…

Did the article say he took originals? I thought it said he only took one if another was still nearby, implying multiple copies.

> but he notes he only took a poster if there was more than one pinned up in the neighbourhood

Not a quote from Bolles but from the article.

This was in the 70s. There were, for most people, only originals. The article clarifies this even: "He was touched by the “folk art” of missing posters – the hand-drawn dogs and the poetic pleas meticulously crafted in a time before computers and printers were household goods."

And this article, which is extensively advertising for this guys products and bands, is helping make him money for this behavior.

> someone hand drew and coloured a poster for beloved missing dog -- not a print out or photocopy -- and someone just took it because they wanted to collect them

I do think this is problematic, but I imagine that the owners would usually not retrieve/keep the posters anyway, so I'm not sure the issue is necessarily with the fact that an original is being taken like there might be with some other artistic creation (I'm not sure the owner would object to not getting the original back; the posters will probably just be discarded anyway).

My concern is more that if someone put a lot of effort into making these posters for the purpose of attracting people's attention in order to get their pet back, it seems problematic to take it without knowing for sure that the pet has already been found even if there are multiple posters in a neighborhood.

It's not problematic, its just plain wrong.

Also, the phone number is right there on the flier so its not like the fliers owner can't be contacted after seeing a flier to see if the animal has been found and if the flier can be removed. Doing the right thing sometimes takes a bit of work.

No wonder they never called me about my Fluffy.

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