Texas Pet Detectives Association

04/15/2025

HOME AFTER 8 MONTHS! Wanda called me last summer when her cat Panther went missing. Unfortunately, I was in the mountains of Arizona for the summer and could not do a physical search, so we settled on an in depth phone CONSULTATION. Wanda tried everything but could not find Panther. Then, last week, comes an email from her saying that she was out for a walk in her neighborhood and Panther came casually walking up the street. Wanda said he didn't recognize her right at first but she remembered my advice to get on the ground and sit quietly if she saw him. So she did that and within 15 minutes she was able to pick him up and take him back to the house. He did not seem any the worse for wear and a trip to the vet confirmed that he was in fine shape. Where the heck was he? No idea! But he is the longest gone cat to get home in my personal experience. He could have been adopted by a neighbor who's kept him inside the whole time or he may have been accidentally transported a long way from home and had to use his special kitty brand of GPS to navigate back to Wanda. We will never know. Welcome home, Panther!

01/02/2025

Where's the kitty?! Tango found Jojo in less than a minute, only about 25 feet from the window he jumped out of last night. He was hiding behind a large water barrel when Tango surprised him by sticking her nose right into his hiding place. JoJo boiled out of his spot, climbed the fence in a Flash, and perched in this tree as if posing for his Christmas portrait. Luckily JoJo's dad is verrry tall and by the time I had rounded up a ladder from a neighbor's garage, he already had Jojo in his arms and safely in the house. Great job Tango and welcome home Jojo!!

12/17/2024

I know I've been terrible about posting recently, but we've had a pretty big week... With THREE kitties getting home. Welcome home Bow Tiger, Kovu, and Tito! Tito, the white ragdoll was gone the longest--3 weeks. The last photo is Tango alerting on the first place where she smelled the black Kitty Kovu. I believe he was actually hiding in the storm drain a few feet away. His mom Lillian said he came running as soon as she sat down to try to coax him out when darkness fell.

09/13/2024

If you ever find yourself in need of an Urgent Care Veterinarian, I can highly recommend Mid Cities. I had to help a friend her cat recently. Not only were they compassionate and kind from start to finish, they charged less than half of what other vets I had called that day would charge. It was Labor Day and they only charged $100 total. We were there for at least an hour, saying goodbye to my friend's cat. They are not open 24 hours but they are open on weekends and later hours than regular vets.

We are open on Thanksgiving Day! $60 Exam Fee everyday, even on Thanksgiving! No added emergency fee. The feel of a family vet, urgent care hours, and expertise of the ER..but without the ER pricing! If your pet needs veterinary care, call us or come directly to our hospital.

08/27/2024

***UPDATE**** I have added the answer to Tuesday's lost cat mystery at the BOTTOM of this post so as not to spoil it for anyone who is reading about Greta for the first time! NEW PHOTOS (including one of Greta in her silver bowl and her actual hiding place are in the comments below)

Another cat finding mystery... Brought to you by Texas Pet Detectives and Lost Pet Specialist: WHERE'S GRETA??

Here's the story: The search dogs and I have been on a month-long training/vacation trip in the mountains of Arizona. But that hasn't stopped cats from going missing in the DFW area. So I've been trying to help them get home... From a distance by coaching cat parents by phone and video chat.
Meet Greta, a Norwegian Forest Cat who has a full time job sitting in a sterling silver bowl on the counter of her mom Susan's jewelry store, greeting customers and being a generally cool cat. Susan and Greta carpool daily to the store. Susan was at the wheel in early August, making the turn shown on the map, marked by a purple dashed line, to go south in I-75 toward their farm in Kaufman. As shs is entering the interstate, she hears the back window (passenger side) start to roll down. She quickly hits the button to roll it back up and continues on her drive. When she arrives in Kaufman, she realizes that Greta is no longer in the car. Dread floods her body as she realizes that Greta exited the vehicle in one of the busiest commercial areas in Dallas... The Knox/Henderson business district. Naturally she drives back immediately to begin her search but is quickly overwhelmed by the daunting task of finding a five pound cat in the massive concrete jungle. More than one of our stalwart followers recommended me and my search dogs, but we were two states away in Arizona. Regular page followers will notice the distinct lack of normal hiding places in this scenarios: no sheds, no garages, no decks... Or any other of the places where we commonly find scared and displaced cats hiding. Care to put on your pet detective hats and take a guess where Susan found Greta hiding after she consulted with me on the 2nd day after Greta made her escape from the car? Go ahead and post your ideas in the comments. I'll post the answer on Thursday.
(The red dot was our best guess as to where the car was when Greta jumped or fell.)

****UPDATE**** Honestly, my heart sunk when I saw the scenario where Greta escaped from Susan's car. One of my worst nightmares, as a pet detective, is the problem with cats hiding in the engine compartments of vehicles...or even the bumpers or other places on the chassis of the vehicle. They will stay there, frozen, even when the car drives away. But I remember the first day of pet detective training where I received an excellent piece of advice: Look for the cat in the first available hiding place. If she's not there, look in the next closest...and so on. Cats, unlike dogs, don't tend to run very far when they are in danger. They much prefer to hide. And they are VERY GOOD at it. Like one of our "Greta guessers," I first thought she would dive into a storm drain at the curb because that would be the closest hiding place, but Susan told me there weren't any storm drains at that location. The next hiding place I saw was the skinny row of bushes dividing the sidewalk from the parking lot. My deepest fear was that she had bypassed the bushes, looking for something solid to hide under, and ended up in an engine compartment because the lot was packed with cars that day. And none of those cars would be there now.
But Greta parked herself in those bushes and didn't move for 2 days!
By popular demand, I asked Susan for some additional photos of Greta at "work" and I posted those in the comments section.
Thanks for playing "Where's Greta"!!

06/28/2024

We were thrilled to get the call about about Sassy because she lives right down the street from us! She been missing about 4 days but there had been a sighting just the evening before about four houses away so it seemed like a slam dunk. Unfortunately, as luck would have it, the one neighbor who would not give us permission to search, was exactly the one neighbor where Tango gave a full alert at the point where the kitty squeezed under the fence. We tried from every other angle but had no luck. Since Tango had also given a full alert at a driveway culvert nearby, I figured sassy had been using that culvert as shelter from predators while she worked up her nerve to go home. So Sassy's family came to my house and borrowed a trap and set it inside the culvert where sassy was trapped within an hour. Sassy has a big happy family and they all pitched in to get her home.

04/12/2024

Tango found Louie in less than a minute!
There was a lot going on in Louie's busy household today....Carpet layers, painters, house cleaners.
The most probable time for Louie to have escaped was when the carpet installer left the door open for a minute and 45 seconds according to the video doorbell. However, since the video doorbell didn't catch him leaving, I assumed that Louie was still in the house. Tango got Louie's scent off the back of the sofa where Louie normally hangs out and went to work immediately checking the kitchen cupboards. When she found the six-month-old kitty's scent under the dishwasher, her behavior and body language was unmistakable and I knew that Louis had to be hiding under there somehow. Once we removed a couple of screws from the kick plate of the dishwasher we saw Louis hiding in the far back corner. Good job Tango!

04/02/2024

Lost cat near Montfort and Spring Valley Rd in north Dallas. Solid black. Please share!

03/24/2024

Answer to yesterday's Lost Cat Quiz! See my post from Feb 23 if you want to guess before seeing the answer.
Piper's last known trajectory was taking her directly out into large pastures. Yes, there were some structures or sheds that she might have chosen but she would have needed to cross a lot of open area before she got there. In that open space is where cats run into predators on the ground and coming from the air above so most cats will avoid that if possible. So what would she do instead?
If you follow this page you might remember a case from a couple of months ago where an indoor only cat was last seen dashing across her own front yard, having escaped from an open window. His dad had chased him across three front yards and he was heading directly toward a busy street. Assuming that the cat would continue on its current trajectory, Dad decided to go back for his shoes in preparation for a longer trek. Of course, when he returned, the cat was nowhere to be seen and he could only assume that it had crossed the busy street and was now in a whole different neighborhood.
I started thinking about that case while I was trying to help Piper's mom and I suggested that the first place she look would be under any hiding space that Piper might have passed as she was running toward the pasture. Cats have an uncanny ability to catalog hiding spots on a special map in their brain for possible use later. My Hope and my assumption was that Piper would either double back or make a quick left back into the wooded area around her house. Her mom had told me about a couple of sheds but she also knew that Piper ran right by them toward the pasture. But when she looked under them carefully with a better flashlight, she saw Piper hiding deep underneath one of them. The rest was a matter of trapping and waiting patiently for Piper to make her move into the Trap. Happy ending!

03/24/2024

Where is Piper? I did a phone consultation on Friday with a woman in Maryland whose cat had been missing for 6 days. She had learned about me through a dear friend and longtime supporter of this page, Valerie Mann, who thought I might be able to help. I felt a little extra pressure to get it right for Valerie's sake.
Piper's mom Kat was dealing with a Veterinary emergency with one of her horses, when Piper accidentally slipped out the door at 9:00 p.m. The pink line shows Piper's trajectory when her mom Kat last saw Piper rounding offense post in this pasture and heading in the direction of the Pink Arrow. It's probably a good thing that Mom needed to run back to get her flashlight at that point, or it would have been a lot harder to predict what kitty was going to do. But since I recently had a case like this, I suspected I knew what happened and shared that with Piper's mom and a quick phone call before I had to run into a noon meeting. By the time I got out of the meeting, Kat had located Piper. Where do you think she found her?

02/08/2024

02/06/2024

Very high level dog training!! Wow. And very cute as well...

02/05/2024

Welcome home, Charlie!! Can you look at the map view and guess where he was? The red bubble is where he lives with his mom Eileen and some other pet friends. Post your reply in the comments (you can screenshot the map and edit it to show your guess.)
Charlie's mom Eileen reached out to me on Friday when Charlie had been missing less than 48 hrs after Charlie (an indoor cat) had accidentally ended up in the backyard. Apparently, he followed the dogs out for their late evening potty. When Eileen woke up during the night and realized what happened, she dashed outside to look for Charlie. He was right there on the patio and in his rush to get back into the house, he bashed into the glass door. Having ID'd the door as a Nasty Devil from Anti-Cat Land, he did the obvious maneuver and jumped the fence. Without shoes or glasses or possibly even pajamas (it sounded like nudity might have been involved), Eileen couldn't exactly run after him. By the time she gathered the necessities for pursuit, Charlie had vanished into thin air. Imagine how many times I've heard the phrase in my 18 years as a pet detective "vanished into...", but I digress.
Even though I had a bit of a backlog of cases, Eileen was willing to plunk down the deposit for a search in Houston. But Eileen didn't sit around waiting for me to get there two days hence. Since I couldn't get there right away, I also gave her lots of coaching in hopes that she would get him home quicker. With all of my tips and tricks deployed (in the pouring rain no less) Eileen got Charlie home and I got fired from yet another search for talking too much. That's twice in the last week!
So...where was Waldo? I mean Charlie of course.

02/02/2024

A little search dog humor, brought to you by our east coast pet detective friend Linda Shaw (and The New Yorker) at The Road Home Pet Tracking.
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=122100063410124618&id=61553738555259&mibextid=Nif5oz

02/01/2024

First, let me say that this page is strictly for reuniting people with their lost pets. Rehoming of animals is definitely against the rules and such posts will be deleted. So, if I were to post a picture of an adorable tortoiseshell kitten that my hairdresser found but cannot keep (5 months old...not yet spayed) it would absolutely not be for the purpose of trying to find her a new home. I would certainly not suggest that interested persons should DM or text me 314.369.2784 to be put in touch with the hairdresser because that would be violating the rules, which I myself made. I simply wanted to show you how cute she is. That's it. Seriously.

01/18/2024

We helped Sara find her cat Paul recently. Based on Paul's trajectory when they last saw him tearing across their lawn in hot pursuit of a little critter, the family feared that he he had crossed a very busy road that would prevent him from making his way home. But Paul had actually made a U-turn when "dad" turned his back to grab his shoes. Tango helped us sort it out and brought us to a garage where we found a lovely bit of evidence: two kitty poops and a puddle of p*e. Totally fixated on that evidence...we missed the cat himself for several long minutes! It's difficult to search garages: tiptoeing through the homeowners' precious stuff while they are breathing down your neck and wishing you would just go away is awkward at best, horribly uncomfortable or even dangerous at worst. Honestly, I was about to give up on it despite the evidence we'd seen but Tango went back for one more sniff and tiny little Paul made a break for it, skittering under some more precious stuff. We quickly asked the homeowner to shut the garage door to trap Paul inside. It's very rare for a cat to go potty while they are in hiding. I think it's only happened maybe 3 or 4 times in hundreds of recoveries but the evidence is an excellent clue. I believe that Paul was in that garage the entire four days he was gone. Of course the homeowners had no idea. Knowing how they hide makes it super aggravating when neighbors won't let us search a garage because they "already looked and there's no cat in there." They have no idea how stealth a cat can be. I don't even want to know how many cats we've missed because people were sure the cat wasn't there.

Here's what Paul's mom Sara had to say in her review. Yes, I'm blushing.

Bonnie Hale is our family’s hero. After 4 days of desperately searching for our 2-year-old cat Paul, we felt totally helpless. A couple of people on Next Door recommended Bonnie, and while I was a little skeptical at first, one chat with her and I knew our odds of finding Paul were about to improve significantly.

Bonnie is incredibly knowledgeable and her instructions were so thorough, I finally felt like I was back in control of the situation. I was blown away by how well Bonnie understands cat behavior, and was shocked to learn that many of the things we were doing to bring him home were not helpful at all!

Bonnie’s brilliant search dog Tango picked up Paul’s scent right away and traced Paul’s path through our neighbors’ yards. It was amazing to watch. About an hour later we found little Paul in our neighbor’s garage, hiding behind a bunch of stuff, just steps from our home. Bonnie was confident he hadn’t strayed too far away, but we still couldn’t believe how close he was the whole time!

Our entire family is forever grateful to Bonnie for bringing Paul back to us. Worth every penny.