How Twitter helped to rescue my missing dog Maggie

HOW do you turn Twitter, into an engine of sympathy and genius? Simple: Just tell it your dog is missing.

HOW do you turn Twitter, which is universally acknowledged as a hateful time-wasting sewer with the collective IQ of dishwater and more trolls than an Icelandic bridge crossing, into an engine of sympathy and genius?

Simple: Just tell it your dog is missing.

During the school holidays I got the call every dog owner dreads: Maggie — our lively six-year-old Jack Russell-beagle cross whose loves include tug-of-war, naps, and cadging bits of steak — had disappeared.

Or, to put it more charitably, she had decided to take herself for a bit of a walk. In the midst of that fun school holiday activity known as “cleaning out the attic” someone left the front door open for a length of time not yet ­established but long enough that at least one of the children is seeking legal advice.

This was terrible news, made worse by the fact there was very little I could do. As much as I wanted to rush home and start a block by block grid search of the inner west, there was office work to be done.

So I did the only thing a take-charge 21st century man of action could do to solve a crisis: I tweeted about it. “MISSING DOG — PLEASE RT” went the message, along with a photo, her name, and our nearby streets.

I went back to work, figuring I would try and leave early to help with the search, put up signs, door-knock, and spend a sleepless night roaming the neighbourhood with a flashlight. But I kept an eye on Twitter just in case.

Until this tweet, it had ­always been my belief that if Twitter picks up and runs with something you have posted it is because you have managed to say the most awful, outrageous, worst thing ever.

Or at least the worst thing ever within the 15-minute window that constitutes the working memory of social media.

Yet within an hour my original message had been re-tweeted well over 100 times, by Twitter types with followings from a few hundred to 10,000 or more.

Friends who know and love Maggie took up the cause. Local businesses and restaurants put the word out to customers.

Tweeters with whom I had previously had nothing but schoolyard stoushes over politics (“commie!” “fascist!”) beat their swords into lost-dog posters.

People in distant corners of the planet alerted their followers — because, after all, one of them might be just down the street.

Every time I clicked the reload button, more ­re-tweets, more messages of sympathy.

And then, about two hours after my first tweet, a miracle of sorts: Someone tweeted a picture of our dog, in someone else’s front yard, and asked: “Is this little Maggie?”

A friend of the tweeter had found Maggie sniffing her way happily down the footpath sans people and scooped her up to take to the local vet — but, cleverly, not before posting a picture asking if anyone had lost a dog.

This twitter person put two and two together, posted the picture, and after a frantic phone call and a drive that may or may not have involved coming to a full and complete halt at stop signs, Maggie and family were back together. All thanks to an anonymous eagle-eyed social media user I haven’t met but who describes herself as a “vegan feminist Buddhist”.

After all that I didn’t have the heart to tell her that Maggie — the “iron terrier” — was named after Margaret Thatcher. But if she and her friend want the champagne that’s coming to them, they know where to follow me.

James Morrow writes about food and culture at prickwithafork.com and tweets about lost dogs at @pwafork.