Lost Pet Chronicles - 9781582343792

For millions of people, a pet is more than just an animal that shares a living space. These millions will do anything they can to recover a four-legged member of the family when it goes missing: unfortunately, most people just don't know where to look. Kat Albrecht is the person they call. Disillusioned by a police career where her brilliant search dogs and own dog-tracking techniques rarely got a chance to shine, Kat started training her retired weimaraner Rachel to search for lost animals-and found a whole new arena opening up. To the amusement of her skeptical colleagues, Kat decided to transform her newfound avocation into a business, becoming the only law-enforcement-based pet detective in the United States.

Using investigative techniques such as probability theory, behavioral profiling, and physical searches by trained dogs, Kat Albrecht has helped more than eighteen hundred pet owners locate their lost dogs, cats, snakes, turtles, parrots, and horses. Along the way, she has faced one-of-a-kind challenges in her work: technical issues like teaching her trained search dogs to pursue missing pets, unexpected roadblocks (how do you convince a forensics lab to conduct a DNA test on a cat's whisker?), and the surprising difficulties associated with living in the shadow of Ace Ventura. But these challenges are balanced by unique joys each time Kat helps reunite a missing pet with its owners.

The Lost Pet Chronicles tells the fascinating story of Kat's unlikely career path-and of how, along the way, doing the work she loved transformed her from a dissatisfied, disaffected cop into a woman who has found her true calling.