Texas Pet Detectives Association

06/23/2025

Wow! Dog saved by a sausage drone!

05/05/2025

Woohoo! Yuki is home! Tango did an incredible job of air-scenting Yuki from nearly 100 feet away. If you watch the video you can see where we were standing when Tango picked up his scent. Getting to the spot where the cat was a whole other project. And I have to admit it was not the prettiest recovery. But we got Yuki home safe and sound.

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!