The holiday season was nipping at our collective nose as we chatted recently with pet detective Landa Coldiron (@thebloodhoundhandler), who helps Pasadena’s Nextdoor.com community, among others, locate missing pets.
Her most typical call: an indoor cat escapes during a residential move. She says she generally solves her cases in a few hours but is available for multi-day searches and overnight trapping.
First, Coldiron’s retail therapy. There’s no shortage of stuff for animal lovers to snap up this gifting season, like blinged compression vests, caviar-scented cat snacks, and so on. More interesting and unique: a copy of Coldiron’s page-turner, “The Bloodhound Handler: Book One, Adventures of a Real-Life Pet Detective.” Based upon her two decades of expertise in lost pet detection, the autobiographical true story is lightly fictionalized — she calls the genre “Faction” — with the action led by noir-ish protagonist Kalinda Dark.
On the subject of unsolved mysteries, do her searches ever turn up information leading to other crime investigations? “Well,” she says, “There was a time when we were searching underneath a house in Santa Monica. There was a lot of blood. I called the police.”
Coldiron says that she found herself in the pet detection field largely by accident after coming into contact with the California Rescue Dog Association (CARDA).
“Within three months, I wanted a bloodhound,” says Coldiron, who says she also loves cats. She currently works with Pepper Potts, an eight-year-old bloodhound, and Apple Mae, age five. A little white Jack Russell tags along as a search dog.
“Bloodhounds have been perfectly engineered to do their job, although just about any dog breed with the right temperament can be trained to do this work,” says Coldiron. “A bloodhound’s nose is a wonder of nature. It has 200 million scent receptors, which is more than a wolf! This is why dogs can ‘smell’ cancer.”
She describes the bloodhound’s droopy, dolorous appearance as part of the evolutionary magic.
“Their skin hangs down around their eyes, like blinders, so there are fewer distractions. Those long dragging ears stir up scent from the ground, and their dewlaps capture even more olfactory data.”
She describes the breed as stubborn and treat-driven and says that she invests about 100,000 hours of training per dog to bring a bloodhound into top detective form. She cooperates with local law enforcement search and rescue units and is occasionally contacted by various teams within police departments for help with bomb detection or other issues requiring her unique expertise.
Coldiron says, “The best time to use the search dogs is usually two-and-a-half to three days from the time the animal goes missing. I can give phone consultations years later.” She says some people call her immediately the moment they can’t find Fluffy. Others wait months. She says that her success rate is high, and she often locates the missing pet within a couple of hours.
Although Coldiron does not describe herself as a psychic, she does say, “I can look an area over and get an instinctual gut feeling about the scene. Maybe it’s just years of observing where animals tend to gravitate.”
The biggest obstacle in pet retrieval: “Denial,” says Coldiron. “Especially when the news is bad, meaning that the pet has been found deceased. Often, people don’t believe the bloodhounds. It’s kind of like they want to know but don’t really want to know because they feel guilty.”
Her business has grown exclusively by word-of-mouth because, she says, people seek closure. She cites a Humane Society statistic that 10 million pets will go missing in the USA each year, roughly one in three.
Coldiron says, “The main thing I would say to avoid a lost pet is always to have current ID on your pet, not tags as those easily come off or can be pulled off. I like embroidered neon collars with phone numbers that you can see at a distance. You can purchase this product on Amazon. They are washable and usually last years. Also, I always recommend GPS units.
If your dog goes missing, immediately sacrifice witness development for speed. In other words, if you go along a walking path with your dog, get in your car, grab some business cards, talk to people along the way, hand out your business cards and look for your dog in those areas.
For a cat, go door-to-door and search people’s yards, garages, bushes and open crawlspaces. The more people that know your pet is missing, the better. Most times when I go on a search, I find the next-door neighbor does not even know that their neighbor’s pet is missing!”
Of her fierce career choice, she says, “You have to live it. I look at my work as if I were finding a lost person. Sometimes, we’re up at 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning to catch the scent.”
More Than Donuts
Employers take note. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce reports that in 2022, more than 50 million Americans quit their jobs, following the 47.8 million who did so in 2021. In 2023, more than 44 million or so told the boss to can it during what’s being called “The Great Reshuffle,” which some economists will post as another “Great Resignation” by year’s end. USA Today stated in July that nearly 3 in 10 full-time employees – 28 percent of the 2024 workforce, especially Gen Z and Millennials – will quit their jobs by the end of December. Of the surveyed group, 44 percent said that their decision was dictated in part by the employee’s desire for better benefits.
Pets play an anecdotal role in the increasingly persnickety attitudes of many American workers. During COVID, many of us hunkered down with our pets. And many people who hadn’t really self-identified as doggie daddies or single cat ladies in the past were suddenly on board. For a brief time, many public shelters were basically picked clean, which is in contrast to today’s overflowing facilities.
And now that employers are requiring that more and more employees return to the physical office at least part of the work week, more and more of us are verklempft because we have to leave Fluffy or Snowball or Thor at home. With this in mind, employers can sweeten the pot by adding pet insurance to the usual roster of employee benefits as a perk to build loyalty.
Pet insurance is not new, but the all-digital claim filing process offered by SPOT Pet Insurance is an innovation worth looking into. The mere mention of words like “open enrollment” and “deductibles” makes our teeth hurt, but SPOT promises to make filing fast and painless. We chatted last week with Scott Taylor, President of SPOT, who revealed that he first became “super-intrigued” by pet insurance when his beloved Labrador Stone, a dog he describes as a “counter surfer,” devoured an unsupervised club sandwich, toothpicks and all. “That $10,000 surgery was an eye-opener,” he says. “Just as with any form of insurance, SPOT Pet Insurance prevents shocking surprises.”
Bank of California, East West Bank and the City of Riverside are among the 2,500 or so employers who now offer SPOT Pet Insurance to their employees as a voluntary benefit; employers are offered a discount on coverage. As we go to press, word on the street is that a major retailer is about to offer SPOT Pet Insurance to customers at a specially priced rate.
“Whether the coverage is offered by an employer to employees or a retailer to customers, it says ‘We care,’” says Taylor. “People are looking for a personal connection today more than ever, and a corporation offering pet insurance suggests an authentic emotional understanding of how people feel about their animals.”
Coverage consists of three main types of plans: accident-only, accident-and-illness, and preventive, the latter of which includes all-important spay or neuter. Taylor has some advice that’s especially salient this time of year, when animals may be given as holiday gifts. Giving an animal as a gift is not the best idea, in our opinion, but if you choose to do so, add insurance to the package.
“The best idea is to enroll when the animal is young,” he says, “because pre-existing conditions are usually not covered. Also, if a condition appears or an accident happens during a waiting period, it’s usually treated as a pre-existing condition, and your pet won’t be covered. The whole point is to get your policy in place before your pet needs expensive medical attention.”
This week’s pets in need of homes:
Click on photos to see larger images and captions.
