Friday, March 20, 2009

http://www.lostandpound.com/pet.php?id=8520

The previous afternoon I received an email flyer from Lost and Pound regarding a lost cat in San Francisco. I had signed up to receive notices that get posted within the Bay Area. I sent the owner an email and told him about Dino and that I would come out for no charge to his area and help him look for his cat.

I got a phone call from him in a couple of hours and he said he was interested in me coming out with Dino to do a search. I said I could come out by 10 AM on Friday. I told him to put up as many flyers in his neighborhood around his block as possible and to have more flyer available for him to take with us as we walked around.

When I got there I saw the neighborhood. The front and the back are two totally different environments. The front was all concrete and very little vegetation. Very high vehicle traffic and high pedestrian traffic. The front doors opened directly out onto the sidewalks. The backyard was a mini jungle with high weeds and trees and lots of vegetation. The back fence was falling down. The two side fences were high and solid. We checked the backyard and garage for any cats or scent, but nothing. We went out to the front and I gave Dino scent from two spots in the apartment where, according to the person, Jamal, only Choco lays.

For over the next two and a half hours we walked all over the neighborhood that was very similar to Jamal's front. Only sidewalks, no or very little vegetation, high pedestrian and vehicle traffic. Also, all the buildings are right up next to each other with no spaces for cats to crawl into. Absolutely no crawl spaces under the buildings. Everything is closed up. We maybe saw two tiny holes where cats could get into and maybe two small spaces between buildings in the area of four to five blocks. There was a community garden that we walked through that had several hiding spots, but basically even that was open and kept clean and clear. Even the small green house was clean with an open door.

We walked up to GG Park, but even there was high pedestrian traffic with cleared out brush and bulldozer traffic. There were a couple of open homeless pads that Dino seemed interested in. In the entire area, there were no cats, no squirrels, and barely even a bird. Everybody we talked to had not seen a cat in the neighborhood. If there was a cat anywhere there, they would be in the backyards where they could travel safely from yard to yard.

On Sunday morning, I got a call from Jamal that Choco had been spotted by the tenant below him that lives behind the garage. He had seen the cat as it was traveling into or out of the garage which leads to the backyard. Jamal said he had noticed food was being eaten from the bowl of food he had left out just outside his back kitchen door on the second story. He also noticed cat paw prints in the garage in one of the storage areas. That would be almost one week that decides to come back to figures a way back. I said to get a trap just in case, but first try to put the food just inside the back door and see if she will run in. If she doesn't, then get a trap and see if that would work.