http://canningnovascotia.ca/gazette/gaz201201.pdf

The Canning Gazette: January 2012

Lost Dog? NSLDN can help

R ecently, you might have noticed a sign outside a home on the 358 to Scotts Bay. It announced that the owners were missing a couple of hus-kies from their home. What a huge relief it was when a local man, Greg MacLellan of Scotts Bay, found the dogs and was able to help reunite them with Lydia, their worried owner.

Although th e lost dog sign was help- ful in letting people know there were dogs missing from Lydia’s home, one of the tools that also helped bring the dogs home was the Nova Scotia Lost Dog Network.  This group of volunteers has been operating for just over a year, helping to find lost, stolen, or otherwise missing dogs and get them back to their owners. Equally importantly, they let people in the Network know when a dog has been found. How often do we see signs on bulletin boards, looking for a lost pet, and the sign has been up for months while the pet has since been found? It’s hard to know which to keep an eye out for.

The Nova Scotia Lost Dog Network harnesses the power of the Internet as a means of sharing information. As its founders, Ann and Heather Morrison and Janet Chernin, realized, the Internet is a great way to spread information, and to track missing animals.

The organization relies on Fa- cebook, Twitter, and its website at Ns.lostdogNetwork.coM, to share infor- mation about missing dogs around the province. And, as the successes that scroll through my Facebook Feed, and the experi- ences of the happy Husky owner can prove, the system works! Although per- sonally, I’m not a dog person, but as the owner of a number of beloved cats, I know how much any com- panion animal or pet means to those who love their animals. I can well imagine how upset Lydia was when her girls went missing, and I was so very glad to find out they were safely back home.

Even the most caring and responsible of owners can have escapees. Dogs can break leashes, gnaw their way out of kennels, jump over fences designed to keep them in, any number of other misadventures.

The NSLDN helps to spread the word about missing animals, keep their statuses updated, and ultimately sees many lost ani- mals reunited with their owners. In their first year of operation, they saw 470 dogs find their way home again. And that, dear friends, is a very good thing.