Who to call when your dog goes missing

Call in this order

A dog turns up through the people someone hands them to. So you call the places found dogs end up — in this order.

1. Your local council or town hall. In most of Europe, picking up stray dogs is a duty of the municipality, and it is the council that knows which pound or shelter it has a contract with. One call here replaces three searches.
2. The shelter or pound covering your area, and the one in the next district too. Dogs cross district boundaries in a night; shelters do not call each other.
3. The vets around you. Whoever finds a dog usually takes them to the nearest practice to have the chip read.
4. The police, if the dog is on a road, injured, or a danger to traffic. On a motorway do not get out of the car and do not try to catch them yourself: report it and let the patrol handle it.

112 works anywhere in the European Union, free, day and night. It is the right number when someone is in danger. It is the wrong number for reporting a dog that has wandered off.

What to say when they pick up

Every call is the same and takes a minute. Have it ready, because by the third one your voice will break.

• What the dog looks like. Size, colour, coat, whether they wear a collar and what colour it is. Mention the breed after that — the person on the other end may not know it.
• Their name, and whether they respond to it from a stranger.
• Where and when they went missing. The exact spot and hour, not “somewhere near the woods”.
• The chip number. Read out all fifteen digits.
• Your phone number, and whether they may call at night. They may.
• Their temperament. Whether they can be caught, whether they are afraid of men, whether they go to children. That decides how people approach them.
• Ask them to write it down. Your dog may only arrive tomorrow, and someone else will be on shift.

Finish with two questions: when should you call again, and can you send a photo by e-mail or messaging app. A photo on the phone of whoever is on duty beats a description in a notebook.

How to find your shelter

• Ask the council first. Most countries also keep an official register of licensed shelters, but the council knows which one your street belongs to — which is the part that matters at eight in the evening.
• Ask whether the shelter is shared. Smaller municipalities often share one facility, and it can sit in the next town. Your dog may be twenty kilometres away in a building you never thought to call.
• Go in person, and go again. A description over the phone is a poor way to recognise a dog. Trust your own eyes, every few days, for as long as the search lasts.

Check the chip registry — today

The chip transmits nothing. It starts working the moment someone catches the dog and has the number read — and that number has to lead somewhere.

• europetnet.org searches the databases of 26 European countries by chip number and tells you which registry holds your dog's record. Start there if you are not sure where your dog is registered.
• Not every national registry is in it. Several countries have more than one database, and some of them belong to other networks instead. If Europetnet finds nothing, that does not mean your dog has no record — ask your vet, who entered it.
• Check the phone number in the record, not just the record. In some countries you update it yourself online; in others only a vet can. Either way it takes minutes, and it is the single thing that decides whether a found dog gets home the same day.
• Ask whether your registry lets you flag a dog as missing. Some do, and the flag is what a shelter or a vet sees when they scan the chip.
• If you travel with your dog, this matters more, not less. A shelter abroad cannot search another country's national database — it will use an international network. A dog listed only at home can be invisible three hundred kilometres away.

The second day and after

• Call again, every day. In the morning they wrote down your loss; by the evening they may have taken in a dog someone only noticed after lunch. Shifts change and notes get lost.
• Widen the circle to neighbouring municipalities. Their council, their shelter, their vets. After two days a dog is routinely tens of kilometres away.
• Post on the national lost-and-found pet site your country has, and on the local social media group. The smaller local group is usually worth more than the national one: the people in it live where your dog is.
• Emergency vets. A dog that has been hit by a car or is exhausted ends up there, not at the shelter. Find out tonight which practice near you is open after hours — few countries have a national out-of-hours line.
• Hunters, farmers and forestry workers in the area. They walk the fields and woods daily and see more than anyone.

Found someone else's dog? You call the same places

• Report the find to the council. In most European countries that is a legal duty of the finder, not a courtesy, and it is what starts the clock in your favour as well as the owner's.
• Before you start calling, wait ten or twenty minutes where you are. Very often the owner comes running and the rest becomes unnecessary.
• Have the chip read. A vet, a shelter or the police has a scanner, and it costs nothing.
• The dog is not rehomed overnight. Every country sets a minimum period during which the owner can claim the dog — in practice from about two weeks to a few months. Ask what it is where you live, and note that it usually starts on the day the dog was picked up, not the day the owner noticed.
• Expect the owner to pay. Most shelters charge for the catching and the stay. That is normal, and worth knowing before you promise anyone anything.

What to save on your phone today

This is the whole point of the article. Looking up numbers while your dog is running down a road is the worst possible time.

• The chip number as a note on your phone, and a photo of the pet passport.
• The shelter for your area, and the one next door.
• Your council, and the local police number if your country has one besides 112.
• Your vet and the nearest out-of-hours practice.
• Two photos of your dog, side on and face on, in daylight, whole body. Not the ones where they look adorable — the ones where they are recognisable.

And one more thing, which takes a minute: look up your own dog's chip number and check the phone number attached to it. Shelters report the same thing after every New Year's Eve — the dog has a chip, but the record leads nowhere.

How this looks with Tifik

This list still holds with a GPS collar. What changes is how much of it you need — and whether you are calling to find your dog, or because you already know where they are.

• You start at a point on a map, not at the phone. You switch to live tracking and walk towards them. You start calling only when there is a fence or a river in the way.
• You call the shelter with a position, not a description. “At half past nine they were by the quarry” is something people can work with.
• The QR code on the case is for whoever finds them. They photograph it and a page opens with your dog's name and an “I found them” button — no chip scanner, no app. You get a message and you talk through us, without your number being published.
• The collar does not replace the chip, and it does not replace this list. The chip and the registry answer the question whose dog is this. The collar answers where is the dog — and that is the one we ask first.