How to find a lost dog or cat in India: the first hour, the search radius and who to tell

The first hour, and how to spend it

Spend the first hour on foot, within a few hundred metres of where your animal was last seen, talking to every person you pass.

Speed matters because the easy recoveries happen early and the hard ones get harder. In a survey of 187 dogs lost in one Ohio county, 132 (71 percent) were recovered and the median time to recovery was 2 days, with a range of half a day to 21 days. For cats the curve is slower and flatter. Of 1,210 missing cats, 34 percent were recovered alive by the owner within 7 days, only 61 percent were found within a year, and few were found alive after 90 days.

The hour you lose is not only time. Lost-pet recovery specialists describe owners who take a wait-and-see approach, on the theory that the dog comes home by itself, and by the time they start looking the first few hours in which they could have found the dog, or found a witness who saw it, are gone. Witnesses move. The guard changes shift, the delivery rider finishes his round, the morning walkers go home.

1. Send one person out of the gate now and leave one person at home, because an animal that doubles back finds nobody if the house is empty.
2. Walk, do not drive. Open your own gate, stilt parking, stairwell and terrace first.
3. Carry a torch even in daylight, because the places a frightened animal hides are dark at any hour.
4. Carry strong-smelling food and the animal's own bedding, which smells of home.
5. Search inside your own flat before the street, for a cat. Behind the geyser, inside a cupboard, above a false ceiling and in the loft are all real hiding places.
6. Tell every person you pass, and ask them not to chase the animal if they see it.
7. Note the exact spot and time the animal was last seen, because every search radius is measured from there.
8. Ask the security desk for gate camera footage before it is overwritten, which on most society systems happens within a week.
9. Post online only once somebody is already out walking, because the first hour belongs to the street.

What actually brings animals home is ordinary and local. Among 101 recovered dogs in a United States national telephone survey of 1,015 households, 49 percent were found by the owner searching the neighbourhood, 20 percent returned on their own, 15 percent came home because somebody read a tag or a microchip, 7 percent were carried home by a neighbour and 6 percent were traced through animal control. For the 55 recovered cats in the same survey the order flips. 59 percent returned on their own and 30 percent were found by the owner searching the neighbourhood.

You are looking for people, not for an animal

In most lost-dog cases you are searching for people rather than for a dog, because somebody has either picked it up or watched it go past. That changes what a search looks like. Knocking on ten doors beats walking ten more streets, and one guard who saw a brown dog turn left at 9:40 is worth more than an hour of wandering.

How a frightened animal behaves, and why calling its name can backfire

Treat a lost animal as a frightened stranger rather than as your pet, because fear overrides training and a panicked dog runs from the person who raised it.

Dogs leave for three different reasons and the reason predicts the search. Recovery work separates them into the opportunistic journey, where a gate is left open and the nose leads the dog away; wanderlust, where an intact male or a scent-driven breed actively works at escaping; and blind panic, where the flight half of fight or flight takes over after a loud noise, a road accident, or in a dog with a fearful temperament.

The three ways a dog goes missing

• Opportunistic journey. The gate was open. The dog is following a smell, doubling back as it goes, and is usually close.
• Wanderlust. The dog worked at getting out and keeps going. Intact males travel furthest.
• Blind panic. The dog bolted from a bang or a crash. It travels far, travels fast and avoids every human, including you.

Firecrackers produce the third kind, which is why so many Indian searches begin the morning after a festival night. Our guide to how to calm dogs during firecrackers in India covers the fear itself. This page starts after the dog has already gone.

Calling a panicked dog by name can push it further away. Recovery specialists put it bluntly, that calling a dog can cause it to run from you, and that chasing it afterwards is the worst thing you can do. The mechanism is learned rather than mysterious. By the time you reach your dog, other people have usually tried to catch it already, and calling has become a trigger that makes it bolt automatically when anyone calls, including its owner. Most of those people called while looking straight at the dog and walking towards it, which a dog in fight or flight reads as a threat. Whistling, clapping and slapping your leg carry the same risk, because strangers use those too.

Three temperaments, three different searches

How a dog behaves towards strangers decides how far it gets before somebody intervenes. Recovery work sorts lost dogs into three groups. Gregarious dogs walk up to the first person who calls them and are usually picked up close to home. Aloof dogs avoid strangers at first, accept help only once hunger wins, and are often not recovered for weeks or months. Xenophobic dogs travel furthest and carry the highest risk of being hit by a car. Welfare guidance says the same thing more simply, that a confident dog turns up where people and other dogs gather while a frightened or injured one hides or keeps running.

Your dog's temperament at home is a poor guide to its temperament at two in the morning on an unfamiliar main road. Plan for the frightened version.

Where these numbers come from, and what India does not have

Read every figure on this page as foreign, because no Indian study has measured how often a lost pet is recovered.

Four studies carry almost all of the evidence in this field. A national random digit dial telephone survey of 1,015 United States households, run between September and November 2010, asked whether a dog or cat had been lost in the past five years. Two county surveys in Montgomery County, Ohio, telephoned the owners of 187 dogs and 138 cats lost between June and September 2005 Lord, Wittum, Ferketich. An online questionnaire recruited 1,210 missing cats in 2016, most of them in the United States, Australia and Canada.

They disagree with each other, and the disagreement is informative rather than embarrassing. The national survey found 93 percent of lost dogs recovered; the Ohio survey found 71 percent Lord, Wittum, Ferketich. For cats those two put recovery at 75 percent and 53 percent, while the online study found only 61 percent found within a year Lord, Wittum, Ferketich Huang, Coradini, Rand, Morton, Albrecht. A household survey catches the same-day recoveries nobody reports to anyone. A survey of owners who had already reported a dog missing starts at a harder case. An online study recruiting people who are still searching for a cat starts harder again. We publish all four figures rather than averaging them into one.

Three things would move an Indian number and none of them has been measured. India has a very large free-ranging dog population, so an unidentified loose dog on an Indian street reads to most passers-by as a community dog rather than as somebody's missing pet, which weakens the single most productive recovery route, a stranger deciding to intervene. Municipal pound and sterilisation practice works differently from American animal control. And the hot, humid months add injury risks a temperate study never had to count. Our guide to stray dogs in India sets out the civic position behind the first of those.

Treat the foreign figures as the shape of the problem rather than as your odds.

How far a lost animal actually travels

Search close before you search wide, because three quarters of missing cats are found within 500 metres of the point of escape.

The cat evidence is the firmest number in this field. Among 477 cats found alive, the median distance from where the cat went missing to where it was found was 50 metres, with a 25th to 75th percentile range of 9 to 500 metres and a single maximum of 25 kilometres. Outdoor habit moves that a long way. Indoor-only cats had a median of 39 metres and a 75th percentile of 137 metres, while cats allowed outside unsupervised had a median of 300 metres and a 75th percentile of 1,609 metres. The authors translate that into a search instruction. A 200 metre radius usually suffices for an indoor-only cat, while a cat with outdoor access needs a radius extended to 2 kilometres or more.

The dog numbers are weaker and you should know it. A GPS collar company reported that 95 percent of dogs that wander out of a set safe zone travel at most 1.8 miles, about 2 kilometres, and that lost dogs are recovered on average 0.13 miles from home, roughly 700 feet. Shelter data gathered between 2017 and 2021 agrees in direction, with 60 percent of dogs reunited after entering a shelter picked up less than a mile from home and 42 percent spotted a single block away.

Why the dog figure needs a warning label

Neither dog figure is published with a denominator, a date range or a method note, and a collar dataset can only contain dogs that were already wearing a tracking collar. More to the point, a dog that strolls out of a safe zone is not the dog this page is mostly about. Recovery specialists are explicit that a dog bolting in panic from fireworks or thunder takes off at a blind run and can cover several miles. Both statements can be true, because they describe different animals. Plan the first circle for the common case and the second for the bad one.

Density works in your favour in an Indian city

Population density is one of six factors recovery work uses to predict how far a lost dog gets, alongside temperament, the circumstances of the escape, the weather, the terrain and what the dog looks like. A dog that escapes into a crowded area has a better chance of being found close to the escape point than one that escapes into open country. Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune and Ahmedabad are about as dense as streets get, which means more eyes, more walls and gates breaking the run, and a shorter distance before somebody sees your dog. That density also means traffic, so speed still matters.

Timing and weather pull in the same direction. A dog that escapes in the middle of the night travels further before anyone sees it than one that escapes in rush hour, and extreme heat or heavy rain shortens the distance a lost dog covers. Neither is comfort in May or in the monsoon, because both leave an animal out with no shade and no clean water.

A lost cat is a completely different search from a lost dog

Search for a cat slowly, silently and very close to home, because a frightened cat hides within a short radius and usually does not answer.

Of the cats found alive in the largest study, 83 percent were found outside, 11 percent inside somebody else's house, 4 percent inside their own home and 2 percent inside a public building. The outdoor hiding places follow a pattern. 20 percent were in a yard, 19 percent were waiting at the door of the house they lived in, 16 percent were hiding under vegetation, 10 percent under a patio or porch, 5 percent under a house, 4 percent in a storm drain or sewer and 3 percent under a vehicle. Of the cats found inside a neighbour's house, 28 percent were in the garage.

Translate those into an Indian building. The equivalents are the stilt parking and the undersides of the cars standing in it, the gap behind the society water tank, the service shaft, the duct behind the kitchen, an unlocked store room, the stairwell landing above the top floor, the terrace pump room, a neighbour's balcony storage, the drain channel along the compound wall and the engine bay of a parked car. Every one of them is dark, enclosed and within a hundred metres of your door.

Calling is the one thing you should do for a cat and should not do for a dog. 93 percent of owners called their cat's name while searching, yet only 34 percent of those who found the cat alive named calling among the two methods that helped most, the lowest figure of any physical search technique. The reason sits in the detail. Of the 151 owners for whom calling helped most, 54 percent said the cat meowed back but did not come to them.

So call, then stop. Stand still for a full minute and listen. When you hear anything at all, search that exact spot on your hands and knees with a torch, because a cat that answers has told you where it is and will not walk out to meet you.

Search at night, with a torch

73 percent of owners walked the area at night with a torch, and 53 percent of those who found the cat alive rated it one of the two most helpful things they did, against 49 percent for walking in daylight and 39 percent for driving around. Night suits an Indian street search for its own reasons. Traffic drops, shops shut, the lanes go quiet, and a torch beam catches eyeshine under a parked car from ten metres away.

Of 585 cats whose behaviour on being found was recorded, 50 percent appeared scared, 30 percent were quiet but alert, 25 percent were friendly or relaxed, 25 percent were vocalising and only 10 percent hissed or behaved like a feral cat. A silent, flattened, staring cat is the normal presentation and not a sign that it has forgotten you.

The humane trap is the strongest method in the data

20 percent of owners used some trapping technique, 88 percent of those used a humane trap or drop trap, 65 percent of the cats in that group were found alive, and 72 percent of owners who found the cat alive after trapping named the trap as the method that helped most, the highest figure for any method in the study. The sequence that gets you there is a feeding station in the spot the animal is visiting, a camera to confirm it is the right animal and to learn what time it comes, and only then a trap. Local rescue groups and the organisations that run your city's sterilisation programme are the people who own humane traps, so ask them rather than buying one.

Who to tell first on an Indian street

Tell the people who are on your street all day before you tell the internet, because they see every animal on it and several of them have already seen yours.

Neighbours are measurably the most productive people to involve. 85 percent of owners of missing cats asked neighbours to look or to help, and among those who found the cat alive, 57 percent named that as one of the two things that helped most, the highest share of any physical search method. Asking permission and then running a slow, methodical search of a neighbour's property yourself did better still on outcome, with 62 percent of those cats found alive. In the dog data, 7 percent of recovered dogs were simply carried home by a neighbour.

In an Indian neighbourhood the useful list runs well past the people you know by name.

• Safai karamcharis and the sweepers on your lane, who start before anyone else is awake and know every animal on the road.
• Security guards on every shift, including the night guard you have never met, and the guards at the buildings on either side.
• Delivery riders waiting at the gate, who cover more road per hour than anybody else in the city.
• Milk and newspaper vendors, who finish their round before seven in the morning.
• The chaiwala and the kirana shop, which are where a street's information collects.
• Car cleaners and drivers, who look under every parked car each morning.
• Autorickshaw and cab drivers at the nearest stand, who sit in one place and watch the road all day.
• Community feeders, who already know which animals belong on which street.
• Garbage collection crews, who open every bin shed and service area on the block.

Send each of them the photograph on WhatsApp and give a missed call so they have your number without writing anything down. Ask them to call you if they see the animal and not to chase it.

Social media helps, and in India the WhatsApp groups do more of the work than the public platforms. One message in the building group with a clear photograph reaches every flat, every guard and usually the neighbouring societies within an hour. Our guide to society rules for pets in India covers how those groups run. After that, post in your ward or locality group rather than the citywide one, because the people who can actually walk out and look are the ones within a kilometre.

The municipal route: the animal helpline, the dog van and the ABC centre

Call your city corporation's animal helpline early, because the rules require every urban local body to run one and because a municipal van is one of the few ways your animal moves without anybody telling you.

The Animal Birth Control Rules, 2023, place four obligations on your urban local body that matter to a search. The body must establish an animal helpline for complaints. It must put up public notices before capturing dogs in an area. It must keep detailed records of captured and treated animals, including dog van logbooks. And it must release dogs back in the same area from which they were picked up, after recovery.

Read those four as search tools. A helpline exists. A log exists of which van went where. And a dog that was picked up is meant to come back to your street rather than vanish into another ward. Sterilised dogs are identified by an ear notch, which also tells you at a glance whether a dog standing on your road has already been through the programme.

Take the current helpline number from your city corporation's own website rather than from a blog post, because these numbers change. That holds in Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune, Kolkata and Ahmedabad alike. Then do the same for the ABC centre, the local rescue groups and the recognised animal welfare organisations and shelters working in your ward, which the helpline can usually name.

• Ask whether a van operated in your area today, and in which lanes.
• Ask to have the dog van logbook entries for that date read out to you.
• Ask which ABC centre or shelter animals from your ward are taken to, then go there in person.
• Ask the centre to record your animal's description and your number against the date.
• Ask all of it again two days later, because records are written up late and staff change.

Set your expectations honestly. In the United States national survey, only 9 of 184 lost pets, 7 dogs and 2 cats, were found at animal control or through law enforcement, and fewer than 2 percent of the cats found alive in the cat study were in a shelter. The pound is a box you must tick rather than the route that usually works. There is a structural reason, and it cuts both ways: the shelter is the first place an owner looks and often the last place a person who has found a loose dog is willing to take it.

A collared pet is not a community dog and should not be picked up by a sterilisation van, but a frightened dog that has slipped its collar looks exactly like one. Our guide to stray dogs in India explains the programme itself, and our guide to dog license in India covers municipal registration, which is the record that proves the animal is yours.

When to involve the police, and what Indian law actually says

Go to the police when there is a real reason to suspect the animal was taken, because taking an animal is theft under Indian criminal law rather than a civil dispute.

Section 303 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, which replaced the Indian Penal Code, 1860, defines theft as dishonestly taking any movable property out of a person's possession without that person's consent and moving it. Explanation 4 to the same section settles the question people argue about on forums. A person who by any means causes an animal to move is said to move that animal. A pet is movable property, and taking one is theft.

The punishment runs to imprisonment of up to three years, or a fine, or both, rising on a second or subsequent conviction to rigorous imprisonment of not less than one year and up to five years, with a fine. A first-time conviction where the stolen property is worth less than five thousand rupees can be met with community service on return of the property, a proviso that will rarely reach a pedigree animal and is worth knowing before anybody tells you the case is too small to register.

Filing an FIR is not a favour

Where your information discloses a cognizable offence, registration of a First Information Report is mandatory. One statutory exception has existed since 1 July 2024 and almost no page repeating these directions has caught up with it. Section 173(3) of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 lets the officer in charge, on information about a cognizable offence made punishable for three years or more but less than seven, take the prior permission of an officer not below the rank of Deputy Superintendent of Police and then either conduct a preliminary enquiry within fourteen days to see whether a prima facie case exists, or proceed straight to investigation. The Supreme Court calls that sub-section a significant departure from section 154 of the old Code and an exception to section 173(1), because inside that band a preliminary enquiry is allowed even where the information already discloses a cognizable offence. The scope of such an enquiry is not to test whether you are telling the truth, only to see whether a prima facie case is made out. If the enquiry ends with no prima facie case, the officer should tell you immediately so that you can use section 173(4), which is a written complaint sent by post to the Superintendent of Police The Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita. Whether a pet theft falls inside that band is genuinely unsettled, because section 303(2) punishes theft with up to three years on a first conviction and up to five on a second, and “three years or more” can be read either way, and we are reporting that rather than choosing. If the complaint is closed, you are entitled to a copy of the closure entry with brief reasons, supplied within a week. An officer who does not register an FIR where a cognizable offence is disclosed is liable to action.

One accuracy point, because almost every page that repeats these directions gets it wrong. They were issued under section 154 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973. That Code was replaced by the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 on 1 July 2024, and the equivalent provision is now section 173. The directions remain the leading authority on when an FIR must be registered. The seven-day cap still quoted all over the internet came from those directions under the old Code, and the Sanhita did not carry it forward; the only window it sets is the fourteen days in section 173(3).

Theft is usually not the explanation

Assume theft last. Recovery specialists describe tunnel vision as a common and costly owner failure, where the owner settles on a theft theory and stops searching the street, while the animal has in fact been picked up by somebody who assumed it was homeless. The data gives that warning a sharp edge. In the Ohio dog survey, owners who believed their dog had been stolen were markedly less likely to recover it, at a hazard ratio of 0.3. The same survey found that calling an animal agency raised the likelihood of recovery, at a hazard ratio of 2.1, as did visiting one at 1.8. Keep searching and keep posting while the complaint sits with the police.

Three things genuinely raise the odds that it was theft, and each belongs in the complaint. A visibly expensive pedigree animal. A collar or lead found cut or dumped. And a witness who saw the animal being carried away or put into a vehicle.

Lost pet posters that work, and the scam that follows them

Build a poster that can be read in five seconds from a moving vehicle, and leave one identifying detail off it.

Poster design is measurable, and the big ones win. In the cat study, giant neon posters, defined as five words readable in five seconds at 90 kilometres per hour, were used by only 15 percent of the owners who advertised, 107 of 734, yet 63 percent of owners who found their cat alive after using one named it the advertising method that helped most, the highest share of any advertising type. Hand-distributed fliers came second, at 60 percent. In the Ohio dog survey, neighbourhood signs brought home 20 of the 132 recovered dogs, 15.2 percent, and were independently associated with a higher chance of recovery.

1. Put the word LOST and the species in the largest type on the sheet, readable from across a road.
2. Use one current photograph, taken from the side, in daylight, filling most of the sheet.
3. Give the area and the date, never your full address.
4. Give one phone number, large, with nothing else competing for attention.
5. Withhold one identifying mark and never print it anywhere.
6. Print in colour on A3 where you can, and sleeve or laminate it against the rain.
7. Paste at eye level at gates, bus stops, the kirana shop, the chemist, the vegetable cart, the ATM lobby and every society notice board within a kilometre.

• Ask what the animal is doing right now, and for a photograph taken at this moment.
• Ask for the mark you withheld, described in their own words rather than confirmed from a list you read out.
• Ask exactly where they found it and at what time, then compare that with your own sightings.
• Offer to collect in person, at a public place or a police station, and send nothing in advance.
• Record the number and give it to the police if money is demanded before the animal is produced.

One finding in the cat study reads as an argument against advertising and is not one. Cats whose owners advertised were less likely to be found alive, at a sub-hazard ratio of 0.51. The authors explain it themselves. People advertise after the easy searching has already failed, so the method is being applied to the harder cases, and the association reflects timing rather than harm. Post, and keep walking.

Online, the order that works is the building group first, then the ward or locality group, then your city's lost-and-found pet pages, then the public platforms. Repost every day rather than once, because those feeds move fast. Write the post the way you wrote the poster, with the photograph first, the area and the date, one number, and the withheld mark still withheld.

Paid search help exists in Indian cities, advertised as a pet detective, a professional tracker or a sniffer-dog team. In the cat study, 24 percent of owners who sought professional help used a pet detective or a volunteer recovery service, 57 percent of those cats were found alive, and 70 percent of the owners who found the cat alive named that help as the thing that helped most. That is the strongest professional-help figure in the data, and it comes from markets where the service is established and reviewed. Bonbeno recommends no provider. Ask for named, contactable past cases in your own city before you pay anything, and never pay in full ahead of a result.

What to do in the moment you see them

Sit down on the ground and look away, because standing up and walking towards a panicked animal is exactly what makes it run again.

The instruction that saves this moment is counter-intuitive and very specific. Lure the animal towards you and never chase it. If your dog is looking at you, sit down immediately and then look away, because standing is a dominant gesture to a frightened dog while sitting is what attracts a panicked one to approach.

1. Stop moving the instant you see the animal.
2. Sit or lie down on the ground, turned slightly away from it.
3. Avoid eye contact and watch out of the corner of your eye.
4. Make soft food noises rather than calling the name.
5. Scatter strong-smelling food on the ground in front of you and pretend to eat some yourself.
6. Wait, and let the animal close the distance at its own pace, which can take twenty minutes.
7. Let it reach you, sniff you and settle before you touch it or reach for a collar.
8. Clip a lead on quietly, from the side, never over the head from the front.

Food does not always work, and a refusal does not mean you have the wrong animal. Recovery specialists report that a dog in full fight or flight will sometimes refuse food it would normally take, and explain it by the effect of adrenaline on the sense of smell. Treat that as their working explanation rather than as settled physiology. Either way, patience, a lower body position and silence do more than food does.

For the animal that is clearly in the area but will not come to anyone, stop trying to catch it and start feeding it. Put food and water in a safe spot it is known to visit, watch with a motion-activated camera to confirm it is yours and to learn what time it comes, and set a humane trap only once you know both. Chasing a skittish animal at this stage drives it out of the area altogether.

After they are home: the vet check and the next time

Take a recovered animal to a veterinarian within a day even when it looks fine, because 9 percent of found cats were sick or injured and the rest had spent days without clean water.

Of 585 cats whose condition was recorded when they were found, 9 percent were sick or injured. That is the visible fraction. An animal that has been out for two days in an Indian city has drunk from drains, eaten whatever it found, slept under vehicles and been chased or bitten, and most of what follows from that does not show on the first evening.

• Dehydration and gum colour, which is the first thing a vet corrects.
• Wounds and bites, and anything carrying fly eggs or maggots.
• Tick and flea burden picked up from street animals or scrub.
• Soft tissue and limb injury from a vehicle, which can stay hidden for a day.
• Paw pads burned on hot tar or cut on glass.
• What it has eaten, including garbage and poison bait.
• Rabies vaccination status, if it was bitten or you cannot be certain it was not.

Maggot wounds deserve naming, because they move fast in Indian conditions. A study of canine myiasis in pet dogs across districts of Punjab recorded 153 cases, of which 41.1 percent fell in the July to September rains, when a temperature range of 30 to 35 degrees and 60 to 70 percent relative humidity suit the flies, and the old world screwworm fly Chrysomya bezziana accounted for 90.8 percent of them. The neck, the perianal region and the ear canal were among the commonest sites. That paper reports a case series rather than a rate, because it does not say how many dogs were examined, so read it as a seasonal pattern rather than as a risk figure. In the monsoon months, part a recovered animal's coat and look, rather than waiting for the smell. Our pages on maggot wound in dogs in India and monsoon care for dogs in India cover the rest.

The two things that prevent the next one

A collar tag carrying a phone number that actually rings is the highest-value item you can buy. In the national survey, 15 percent of recovered dogs came home because somebody read a tag or a microchip, against 2 percent of cats, and of the 18 cats never found, 15 had no personalised identification at all. In the Ohio dog survey, a dog wearing a licence tag had a higher likelihood of recovery, at a hazard ratio of 1.6. Welfare guidance puts the same point as a rule rather than a statistic, that a lost pet stands a better chance of coming home if it always wears a collar and an ID tag with your name and telephone number.

A microchip is the backup for the collar that comes off, and it is not a tracker. In the cat study, microchipping did not improve the chance of a missing cat being found alive, largely because few lost cats ever reach a place with a scanner to read the chip. Registration data is the other half of the problem. The same paper cites work finding that 37 percent of microchipped animals had incorrect or unregistered owner details, and that the proportion reclaimed from a shelter fell from 75 percent to 41 percent where the data was wrong. Check and update your details once a year. Our guide to dog microchip in India covers the standard, the cost and the registries.

Take the photograph today. A current picture from the side and one from the front, in daylight, showing the animal's markings, is what a poster and a WhatsApp post are built from, and the photograph you go looking for after the animal is missing is always the wrong one.

Two prevention jobs are seasonal rather than permanent. Before a festival week, read our guide to how to calm dogs during firecrackers in India, because a dog that never bolts is a dog you never have to find. If you keep a cat in a flat, the escape route is almost always a window or a balcony, and our guide to indoor cat safety in India covers the nets and grilles that close it.