Some desk relocation issues here at work have kept me from posting this morning. So until I can sit down to the computer, here is a story from the Los Angeles Daily News on pet detectives who use dogs to search for dogs in the land of the celebutants.
(photo by Evan Yee. Landa Coldiron and Glory are on the right)

MISSING PETS HAVE A LOCAL CHAMPION

By Brandon Lowrey
c. 2008 Los Angeles Daily News

LOS ANGELES - Landa Coldiron and her crew showed up early at the suburban Glendale home in a pair of SUVs big enough to hold her two bloodhounds and three other search-and-rescue dogs.

They wanted to get there while the scent of the missing was still lingering in the crisp Saturday-morning air. Dressed in military-style camouflage with her red hair tucked under a matching cap, Coldiron pulled a restless hound from the back of one SUV while friends and family of the disappeared drew up "missing" posters on the front lawn.

A few minutes later, the hunt began with the seriousness and urgency befitting the search for a missing child. But Coldiron and her Valley team weren't looking for a toddler who'd wandered off in the wee morning hours.
They were looking for Chloe, a 2-pound teacup poodle.

In a region where puppy-philes spend as much money and attention on their pets as others do on their children, Coldiron has few clients balking at her $800-a-day fee.
The price was was well worth it to Chloe's owner, 23-year-old Catalina Gracia.

Gracia was on a European vacation with her boyfriend and left Chloe at home with her friends and family. But the adventurous Chloe, left alone in the backyard for just a few moments, squeezed through a tiny hole in the fence and ran off into the neighborhood.
When Gracia found out, she said her vacation was ruined. She just couldn't enjoy the streets of Paris or the canals of Venice while imagining Chloe being run over by a car or devoured by a coyote. The tiny dog slept in Gracia's bed, snuggling up along her shoulder.

She was more than a pet.
"She's like my child," Gracia said. "She's everything to me. She goes to work with me every day. She goes in the bathtub with me. Even the shower. We're as close as even two people could be."

So with Gracia an ocean away, her friends contacted Coldiron and Annalisa Berns, who are among the only pet detectives in Southern California to use search dogs to find missing pets and one of only 15 to 20 nationwide. A couple of days later, she and her hounds were on the case.

Kicking off the hunt that Saturday morning last month, Coldiron took Chloe's tiny pink Juicy Couture T-shirt out of a zipped plastic bag and let her bloodhound, Ellie Mae, have a whiff.
Coldiron commanded, "Search!"

The droopy dog bolted off, nose to the ground, dragging Coldiron through bushes and across front lawns. Some neighbors watched, bemused, from their porches - potential witnesses the pet detective would interview later, Coldiron noted.
Berns trailed behind, watching the ground for a collar, blood droplets or tufts of fur.

Ellie Mae circled the neighborhood twice, paused at a few homes, and then crossed a major street and abruptly stopped, sniffing a bit, then looking up expectantly for a treat - signaling that her searching work was done and that Chloe was probably picked up in a car by a well-meaning rescuer. Unfortunately, Chloe had no tag or other identification.
"It would be the equivalent to a woman losing a diamond ring on the sidewalk," Berns said.

Even with the inconclusive results, the prospects still seemed good with the pet detectives on the case.
Over the past month, Coldiron said her dogs found 15 out of 17 pets they searched for. The dogs led her and Berns directly to seven of the lost pets, though five were dead.

Even if the dogs don't lead directly to the pet, she calls all the nearby veterinarians and pet shops and teaches her clients the finer points of launching a flier-and-poster campaign - hundreds of fliers and bright, fluorescent posters that loudly promise generous rewards to whomever finds the lost pet.
But with coyotes prowling Glendale's busy streets, could tiny Chloe have possibly survived?

A rare breed
Coldiron, a former apartment manager who hated her old job, learned her skill from pet detective pioneer Kat Albrecht, executive director of the Seattle-based National Center for Missing Pets.

Albrecht came up with the idea to track lost pets with scent dogs when she was a police detective in Santa Cruz County. One of her trained search-and-rescue dogs got loose and went missing in the woods, so she used another scent-trailing dog to find it.
It worked, and she eventually went into business for herself.

She's written two books - a guide book and a memoir, titled "The Lost Pet Chronicles."
And Albrecht said she's had her share of odd requests: A documentarian asked her to use her dogs to find Bigfoot, and another man asked her to track down the dog who constantly defiled his lawn.
She turned them both down.

But now, she focuses her efforts on training other pet detectives. The intensive process takes months, and sometimes years.
"One of the problems is we don't have enough people trained up in this industry," Albrecht said. "So it's becoming a service that only people with enough money can afford."