A Dogged Search for Teddy : Pets: Joan Peck has paid $1,200 so far in her three-month hunt for a lost mutt that she got for free. She spends several hours a day scouring the hillsides above Woodland Hills.

Only those who have lost a beloved pet could begin to understand Joan Peck’s obsession.

Everyone else, she figures, will likely think she’s crazy.

For the past three months, Peck has spent several hours a day crawling along storm drains overgrown with brush and scouring the hillsides above Woodland Hills in search of a lost dog, Teddy. Weighing about 45 pounds, the shaggy, reddish-brown mutt with short, fat legs bolted out of an open gate April 12 and disappeared in the chaparral at the southern end of Canoga Avenue.

“The average person wouldn’t do it,” said Peck, 61, a hearty junior high school English and social studies teacher who lives in Echo Park.

But then, she concedes, she is not the average pet owner. Peck has spent $1,200 to date on the search for Teddy, a mutt that she got for free.

“But it’s so painful to think of him trying to get along on his own,” she said. “To leave him out here scrounging on his own would really upset me. He really has nobody but me.”

In addition to distributing the usual lost pet posters and placing daily ads in the lost and found columns of The Times, Peck spends several hours a day in the brush looking for tracks made by Teddy, a squat Irish setter-dachshund mix who is deaf and painfully shy. Peck has learned to recognize footprints and can tell at a glance if animal droppings belong to a dog or to a coyote.

She routinely makes the rounds at animal shelters, checking to see if animal-regulation officers have found Teddy--dead or alive. “There are times when I wish I’d see him on the dead animal pickup list, because it would be over,” she said. “I could get on with my life.”

She has mailed more than 1,500 postcards with Teddy’s picture and a description to residents of the area, urging them to watch for the dog. A local Boy Scout troop has gone door-to-door asking people to call if they see Teddy.

Ironically, Peck had given the dog away six days before it disappeared. But soon after Teddy ran away from the yard on Canoga Avenue near Mulholland Dive, his new owner told Peck that she was welcome to keep the dog if she found it.

Peck had the dog since it was 4 days old. A former city animal regulation commissioner, Peck was trying to find homes for Teddy and the other four dogs of a litter.

The other dogs were given away quickly but she couldn’t find any takers for Teddy because of his shyness and his odd appearance.

After 2 1/2 years, Peck finally found someone to take the dog. But she soon began missing him, even though she has a number of other dogs at her house in Echo Park.

Then she heard that Teddy had run away from his new home and the search began.

In the pictures that Peck carries with her, Teddy resembles the television alien Alf. “It’s the strangest-looking dog you’ve ever seen,” said Agi Kessler, who saw Teddy several times playing in her yard after he ran away, and who allows Peck to cross her property to gain access to the foothills.

Over the course of her search, Peck has come to know most of the homeowners in the area and their sightings in recent weeks make her think that her dog is somewhere around the southern end of Winnetka Avenue, living off food from other dogs’ dishes or from trash cans.

Some residents wondered Monday whether Peck was wasting her time.

“When do you say it’s enough, it’s time to give up?” Kessler said.

Peck said she is convinced that Teddy is alive. “I examine my feelings every night, and I’m not finished,” she said. “I feel we’re so close.”