Countywide : High-Tech Help to Find Lost Pets

When her Siamese cat vanished about three years ago, Rebecca Rosenbaum found herself in a scenario all too familiar to many Orange County residents.

For months, she searched for Crystal, a white cat with brown paws and bright-blue eyes.

“I ended up spending every day (looking for the cat),” she said. “I had to take time off to do this, and I had my boyfriend taking off on his lunch hour.”

But, finally, unable to find her beloved pet, she gave up.

Someday, however, other Orange County residents may benefit from her loss, because Rosenbaum is spearheading a drive to create a computer network to help reunite pets and owners. Rosenbaum, treasurer of the Animal Assistance League of Orange County, is heading up the group’s plan to build a “PetNet” communications system to link all the county’s shelters via computer.

Rosenbaum said the network is needed because lost pets may easily meander 15 miles before being picked up by a stranger and left in a shelter far from home. Currently, the county’s 11 shelters lack an effective way of communicating with one another, and so pet owners often drive from to one to another in a fruitless search, she said.

“It’s a very frustrating process,” she said. “Dogs and cats can wander for weeks before they’re actually picked up and turned in. . . . There are too many lost and found animals that never make it back to their owners.”

Compounding the problem, said the Foothill Ranch resident, is that some shelters won’t release information over the phone.

“We want to put a computer in every shelter in Orange County and eventually network them,” she said.

The system would contain data on every animal turned into any of the shelters. Currently, shelter workers keep lists of found animals and exchange that information by telephone, said Ruth Frankel, the league president.

Laguna Beach Animal Control Officer Joy Lingenfelter called PetNet a wonderful idea and said it deals with “one of the greatest challenges we have locally.”

Although the league will not begin lobbying other shelters to join PetNet until next year, it has purchased four computers to launch the system and is hoping other shelters will get their own.

“We want to make sure we get those animals into the database,” Rosenbaum said. “If it means we have to buy the computers for” the other shelters, the league will.

The latest project is an ambitious goal for the nonprofit Animal Assistance League of Orange County, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary. It was formed in November, 1973, by a handful of women who set up a help line in a Huntington Beach office to assist residents with pet problems, particularly lost pets.

About six years ago, the group moved into an office offered by the Orange County Animal Shelter in Orange. All activities are funded by donations from the public.

Today the league operates a kennel, subsidizes spay and neuter operations and assists in pet adoptions. Telephone operators field more than 2,400 calls each month.

“I think as more people understand what we’re trying to do (for lost pets), the idea will catch on,” Rosenbaum said. “It’s just one of those things--unless you’ve lost a pet yourself, you don’t realize the lack of structure there is.”