Pet Amber Alert

My cat Caleb went missing for 36 hours in the cold. He had never stayed out overnight before and hates cold weather, so we were very worried. We had walked all over the neighborhood calling to him with no result. None of the pedestrians I spoke with remembered seeing him recently.Because of professional commitments I didn't have time to knock on doors. I wanted to get the word of a missing cat our as soon as possible. I went online looking for a "lost and found" pet site to post information about him. That's when www,petamberalert.com turned up. 

The will contact up to 5,000 homes within a radius of your house, with robocalls describing your missing animal. They contact every animal shelter and pet-related business (vets, groomers etc) for many miles around. And they make you a very nice poster with a picture of your animal that you can post around your neighborhood. You pay according to how wide your search radius is, and how many of these services you want,.

They also tell you up front that they don't refund your money for any reason.

I decided to go ahead and do this because, if I had been that worried because my cat was acting sick, I'd have paid twice as much to take him to the 24-hour vet. I chose the option to call 250 homes surrounding mine (if you read below, I now think this was far more than necessary).
 Like the couple that signs adoption papers and then gets pregmant, I had no sooner hit the "submit" button for my credit card, than my cat turned up at our back door. It was within 60 seconds. 
Even though they said there were no refunds, I figured that since there was no reason to start the search, I ought to be entitled. I immediately e-mailed them telling them it was unnecessary to start the search, and asking if I could get a refund. I didn't get a refund, and the search went ahead.

The good news is that my phone started ringing with calls from people who thought they might have seen my cat. It was never the right cat, but I was very pleased to know that people responded to this. About six weeks later I even got a call from a local vet asking if my cat had returned, so they could take his "wanted" poster down.  I didn't try to pursue a refund from PetAmberAlert.com because they had warned me that they didn't do them. I can understand the financial difficulties of running a business that's at the mercy of how stray animals wander. I felt they provided a service that a lot of people need. I would use them again in a similar situation, but perhaps in a more limited way.

I've since read a book called "Dog Detectives: How to train your dog to find missing pets."  It has a lot of information about the behavior of lost cats, and I highly recommend it to anyone who might ever have a cat go missing. You don't have to have any interest in training a search dog to benefit from the book.  According to the book, cats rarely stray more than a couple of blocks from home, and are often hiding silently nearby because something has scared them. Based on the information in the book I wouldn't have paid for calls to more than 50 to 100 of my neighbors, though I still would have chosen to notify the pet-related businesses.

I htink that PetAmberAlert.com provides a valuable service, but it's expensive so you need to be judicious in how you use it.