Op-Ed: When you find a stray dog, the best thing you can do for it is take it to a shelter

On April 2, Doobi, a homeless man’s little brown dog, took off from the tent they shared in a West Hollywood alley. As soon as her owner realized that she was gone, he grabbed his phone to post a blizzard of “Lost Dog” notices online.

Someone found the dog nearby, and up went a photo on the local Nextdoor. A neighbor responded with the information that a homeless man was looking for the animal, and that the finder should take it to the local shelter. That’s long been basic protocol for anyone who finds a stray, and the Los Angeles Municipal Code requires that anyone who picks up a stray notify the Department of Animal Services.

But then another Nextdoor poster chimed in. A homeless man? She’d take the dog herself. Within a day, it was put on a transport bound for a rescue in New York and theoretically “a better life.” Furious local activists tracked the animal to the East Coast and raised a stink, and a week of drama followed — emotional cross-country texts and Facebook rants; the dog’s owner filed a stolen-property police report.

Another over-the-top pet world story? Yes and no. Those in the rescue movement will tell you they regularly get calls from people looking to give them found animals rather than taking them to a shelter. It’s a growing trend — and a really bad idea.

Why decide to “rescue” a dog or cat that’s not yours? Sometimes because we’re too ready to see animals as the victims of bad humans. That skinny, dirty dog roaming the street surely was “dumped” there; its fear suggests that “it was abused.” No collar, tags or microchip? Living in a tent? Not even sterilized? Obviously, it had a terrible owner! Why help send it back?

There’s also an assumption that any shelter admission equals sure death. When someone on my own Nextdoor site recently posted that she’d found a dog without identifying tags, a neighbor immediately replied, “Please, don’t take this or any dog to a shelter … it will absolutely be put down.”

But even the dogs of “good” owners — who can include the homeless — sometimes get spooked and run or escape through doors mistakenly left open. The website Petfinder, one of the nation’s major adoption clearinghouses, says that 1 in 3 pets gets lost at some point in its life. Collars come off. The majority of all pet owners (sadly) don’t implant and register microchips. And after a few days on the street, even the most well-loved pet will act skittish and look like hell.

In California, the shelter doesn’t mean instant death and hasn’t for a long time. The Hayden Act, passed in 1999 requires public shelters to hold stray animals for at least four business days. In Los Angeles, which has committed to achieving “no kill” status, animals are often kept far longer than the required number of days. Some dogs have lived at the Chesterfield Square shelter in South L.A., one of the city’s busiest, for nearly a year (which is another issue and story). And leaving a found animal at the shelter doesn’t have to mean walking away from it. Any finder can put a “first right to adopt” hold on a stray animal; if an owner doesn’t materialize, the finder can claim it. Any finder can reach out to a rescue organization and make their case for taking the dog from the shelter.

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In fact, many reputable rescue groups don’t take animals that aren’t in the shelter system. “Even if there isn’t a microchip, it’s possible someone’s looking for it,” the head of one rescue, with decades in the business, told me. “You have to give owners a chance.” There may be a lot of 21st century ways to hunt online, but when a pet goes missing, the first place most owners look is the local shelter.

Doobi’s saga had a happy ending. The New York rescue group, whose president said she hadn’t known the full story, shipped her home. But the episode was costly in cash, time and grief (especially for the dog, which traveled 6,000 miles). Contrast her story with that of Nala, a 20-pound, honey-colored pooch, who went missing in West L.A. last September.

Nala’s owner, Maggie Davis, told me that she personally posted 800 “lost dog” signs, put notices on every website she could find, and for months responded to every reported sighting and lead. None went anywhere. Then in February, someone from Los Angeles Animal Services called to say that her contact information had turned up on a stray dog’s microchip. Nala was in the Valley, 25 miles away. Davis never learned how the dog got so far, but it was clear how and why she made it home: Someone found her and turned her in to the shelter.

Carol Mithers is a Los Angeles journalist and the coauthor, with Leymah Gbowee, of the memoir “Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War.”