How to find a lost dog

When my terrier went missing on New Year’s Eve, I found help from an unexpected quarter.

Bumper, Wish editor David Meagher's dog, went missing on New Year's Eve.

On New Year’s Eve my 13 year-old dog, Bumper, went missing at South Golden Beach on the NSW north coast. He’s not a wanderer and can usually be found by my side. I rescued Bumper from a pound 12 years ago and he’s kind of clingy, apprehensive about strangers — particularly male ones — and, like most terriers, he is guided by one principle: the pursuit of food. Straying from a barbecue in an unfamiliar town was definitely out of character.

It was about 10pm when I noticed he was gone. South Golden Beach is a tiny town with one local shop and a community hall/surf club. It’s surrounded by bushland and there’s a creek that flows into the Brunswick River at one end and the beach at the other. There are few street lights in the town and despite it being New Year’s Eve the place was relatively quiet, with every second house in darkness.

We searched the town back, front and sideways — repeatedly — calling his name and asking anyone we passed if they’d seen a small black dog. Nothing. After hours of searching my partner convinced me the best thing to do was to go home and continue the search in the morning. We were staying 25km away in Byron Bay and drove back there in stupefied silence. I couldn’t believe that after rescuing a dog and keeping him alive for 12 years I had just carelessly lost him.

After I’d made a flyer to post around the town the next day, I turned to Google. After typing in “what to do when you lose your dog” I stumbled on a story about a man in Britain who found his lost cat by creating a Facebook page for it and then boosting the number of visitors to the page by paying Facebook an advertising fee.

So that’s what I did. I created a page called “Find Bumper”, posted the flyer I’d created and then boosted the post as an advertisement. It seemed pointless to post it on my personal Facebook page — hardly any of my friends were in the area.

Facebook advertising, on the other hand, allows you to geo-­target a post (you can’t advertise posts from your personal page, you need to create a page as a business, brand or community group). In other words, you can advertise just to people who are logged into Facebook in a particular area.

I targeted the post to reach Facebook users active within a 25km radius from where Bumper went missing. For good measure I also reported him missing to the Byron Shire rangers, contacted a pet rescue service and posted on a couple of community Facebook pages in the area.

At 6am the next day we drove back to South Golden Beach to continue the search but there was still no sign of him. At a civilised hour we returned to Byron Bay to print out the flyers at a friend’s house. When we returned to South Golden Beach at about 9am, my phone rang just as I was tacking the first flyer to the notice board at the local shop.

“I’ve got your dog,” said the man on the other end. He hadn’t called sooner because the dog did not have a name tag — it had fallen off when he went walkabout. My Facebook ad had shown up in this man’s feed when he checked his account after he woke up.

When I cancelled the ad campaign an hour later I noticed it had been seen by more than 800 Facebook users in the targeted area. The cost of my social media campaign was a whopping $4. As for Bumper, he was found just two blocks from the party. The experience was a stark reminder that our cute little puppy is now a senior citizen. Just has he can no longer walk an entire lap of Centennial Park, perhaps his party days are behind him.