Search thoughts

The SOP for greyhound searches is plaster the areas with flyers. The thought is that searchers cannot cover the amount of ground necessary to keep up with a moving greyhound. Most greyhounds stay within a 2 mile area but that works out to be what? 12 square miles? Maybe more? Shoot, where is the actuary husband when you need some math done? In any event, it is a huge area.

When there is that much ground to cover, you need other people looking. And not so much that they are *actively* looking or searching but you want to plant the idea in people's minds that there is a lost dog in the area. So that if they happen, on their way into work or the grocery store 5 days later, to see a dog crossing the street, they think to themselves, "didn't I see a flyer a few days ago about a dog lost? Maybe that was the dog. When I get home, I will see if I can find the flyer and give those people a call".

In urban areas, this strategy has worked extremely well. We followed the same plan on the search for Mercedes but I really didn't know if it would work as well. We were in a very rural area with a fairly low population density. On some roads, there was easily a half mile or more between houses. There were lots of wooded tracts, farm fields and hunting trails crisscrossing hundreds of acres. There was a lot of area she could have been in that no one would have ever saw her. I didn't think we would be getting many calls or that many people would see her.

So what happened? We got calls. People were seeing her and they were calling. How was she found? A woman called, said she was looking at her in her backyard, right then and there. The family was able to get there within minutes and recover Mercedes.

Flyers do work - even in extremely rural areas. Nice bit of anecdotal validation there for the flyer theory :-)