The Lost Pet Chronicles: Adventures of a K-9 Cop Turned Pet Detective - Hardcover

Albrecht, Kat; Murphy, Jana

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1582343799 ISBN 13: 9781582343792

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2004

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Kat Albrecht is an award-winning former police bloodhound handler, crime scene investigator, search-and-rescue manager, and police officer turned investigative pet detective who also runs Missing Pet Partnership, a national non profit organization working to establish community-based pet rescue services. She lives in Clovis, California, with her three dogs and three cats.

Reviews

In this thoroughly engaging book, Albrecht narrates, with deadpan humor and Grisham-like suspense, the story of how she came to create an entirely new career: lost pet search and rescue. As a police dispatcher and later a police officer in California, Albrecht was duty bound to give human emergencies priority over animal crises, but it wasn't until her Eeyore-like bloodhound, A.J., went missing that Albrecht saw the need for sophisticated detective and scent trail work to find pets. Going against the advice of colleagues and even friends, Albrecht trains her dogsâ€"first Rachel, a search-and-rescue Weimeraner, and then bloodhounds Chase and A.J. (who was found)â€"to scent cats and other dogs in the same way they located lost hikers or on-the-lam criminals. Taking the reader on searches for everything from huskies and terriers to boa constrictors, she describes her dogs' incredible ability to detect scents and shares her own honed deductions about animal and human behavior. Sometimes the author isn't able to find the lost animal and can only return bad news to people, like the owners of Gus, a cat who runs away days after their son's death. Yet with humor and fascinating insight into search-and-rescue work, Albrecht continues to find innovative ways to help animals and the humans who love them, and inspires readers with her dramatic career changes. With an epilogue containing indispensable information on how to look for missing pets, this is a must-read for animal lovers and sleuths alike.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Yes, Virginia, there really is a pet detective. But erase from your mind those images of gangly Jim Carrey slapsticking his way through a case. This pet detective, a former police officer and crime-scene investigator, is smart, shrewd, and possessed of a deep and passionate love for animals (puppy lovers will not be able to read her first chapter without emitting a giggle or three). Of course, anyone would have to love animals to embark on a career involving lost puppies, kitties, horses, and snakes, which is what Albrecht did when she realized that she did not have much of a future with the police department. The book, which recounts several of her cases, is downright engrossing. Readers who think "pet detective" is a silly name for a profession will be impressed with the skill and dedication it takes to locate a missing animal. Animal lovers will be alternately sad, angry, nervous, and happy. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1582343799
• ISBN 13: 9781582343792
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 243