What Do I Do If My Dog or Cat Goes Missing? The First Hour

In a national survey published in 2012, 14% of dog owners and 15% of cat owners had lost the animal at least once in five years. 93% of the dogs came back. 75% of the cats did. The difference is mostly what the owner did in the first day, so this page is in the order you should do things.

Right now, in this order

Search the house and the property first. Closets, under beds, behind appliances, the garage, the shed, under the deck, inside cars. Cats especially: a scared cat goes quiet and small.
A cat: search within a few houses, silently, at dusk and after dark. Indoor cats that get out are "typically found less than three houses away" (Humane World for Animals). In the largest published study, indoor-only cats were found a median 39 meters, about 130 feet, from the door, and three quarters of all cats within 500 meters. They hide under porches, cars and decks, and they do not answer. Take a flashlight and look for eyes.
A dog: do not chase, and do not call a panicked dog. Chasing drives a scared dog out of the area. Sit or lie down, look away, talk softly, put smelly food out. Friendly dogs are usually picked up close to home; frightened ones run far and avoid everyone, including you.
Call animal control and every shelter in reach. Then go in person, every day, with a photo. In the Ohio study of lost dogs, owners who called an animal agency were about twice as likely to recover the dog, and owners who visited one about 1.8 times as likely.
Flyers. A headline readable from a car, a big clear photo, two phone numbers, where and when. Post them where it was lost, and at vet clinics, pet stores and groomers.
Post online with a photo. Petco Love Lost is free and national; it matches photos of found pets against yours, and Nextdoor's lost-and-found posts feed into it. PawBoost sends free alerts to local groups (it also sells paid promotion; the alert is free). Post in the local Facebook lost-pet groups as well.
Check the chip. Type the number into the AAHA microchip lookup. It tells you which registry holds the chip, not the owner details. Call that registry and make sure the phone number on file is yours. In the study of 7,704 chipped animals reaching shelters, the most common reason an owner could not be found was a wrong or disconnected number.
Keep going for weeks. "It can take weeks before a lost cat lands at a shelter." Cats were still being found alive up to 90 days out.

What actually finds them

From the 2012 national survey (open access, CC BY): dogs were found by searching the neighborhood (49%), by coming home on their own (20%), through a tag or chip (15%), and through animal control (6%). Cats came home on their own (59%) or were found by searching (30%); a tag or chip found 2%. In the two Ohio studies, 71% of lost dogs were recovered, median 2 days; 53% of lost cats, median 5 days, and two thirds of the cats walked back in by themselves.

	Dogs	Cats
Lost at least once in 5 years	14%	15%
Recovered	93%	75%
Median time to recovery (Ohio)	2 days	5 days
Found by searching the neighborhood	49%	30%
Came home on their own	20%	59%
Found through a tag or chip	15%	2%

Read the cat numbers again. Most cats are not found by anyone; they come back, or they are sitting under something forty yards away. That is why the first day is a physical search, not a Facebook post.

The chip is only as good as the phone number

Among stray animals reaching 53 US shelters, chipped dogs went home 52.2% of the time against 21.9% for all stray dogs, and chipped cats 38.5% against 1.8%. But only 58.1% of the chips were registered when the shelter called, and where owners could not be reached, 35.4% of the time it was a wrong or disconnected number. Check yours today; the AVMA made August 15 "Check the Chip Day" for the purpose.

Before it happens

A collar tag with your phone number, on the cat too. In the Ohio cat study only 19% of lost cats had any identification.
A recent photo from the side and from the front, on your phone.
The chip number and the registry name where you can find them. My Pet keeps both, and prints a lost-pet flyer with the latest photo in one tap.
The days after July 4 are among the busiest of the year for stray-dog intake at US shelters, according to Shelter Animals Count; the day after Memorial Day has ranked higher some years. Fireworks nights: indoors, gates checked.

One myth

Putting the litter box outside does not bring a cat home. Missing Animal Response, who train lost-pet search teams, call it a "questionable cause fallacy": the cats that came back would have come back anyway, and the box encourages waiting instead of searching. Search.

Sources — 14 references