Amber Alerts for Pets Help Owners Locate Missing Pals

Feb. 28, 2008 — -- After 6-year-old yellow Labrador Mooch had been missing for more than two weeks, his owner, Rebecca Backer, had lost all hope of finding her beloved pooch.

Despite calling countless animal shelters in her New Jersey neighborhood and plastering the area with missing fliers bearing the dog's furry mug, Backer had no luck locating Mooch, who had managed to escape her front yard's invisible electric fence and disappear in broad daylight.

It wasn't until she discovered FindToto.com, one of the few Internet-based companies specializing in locating lost pets, that Baker found Mooch at a local country club, skinny and tick-ridden, but otherwise OK.

"[Losing a dog] is like losing your child. I was panicked and frantic," said Backer. "I had been spreading the news all over. But I couldn't hand out enough fliers or put them in enough places."

And that's exactly where FindToto.com came in -- helping Backer find Mooch by calling all of her neighbors and playing a prerecorded message describing what the dog looked like and who to call if he was found. In Backer's case, the country club owner had received a call from the site, spotted Mooch, hungry and homeless, and immediately knew whom to call.

"It's like the Amber Alert for pets," said FindToto.com co-founder Krislyn Sterlino, who said her brother Dustin came up with the idea after a good friend of theirs lost her cat and quickly discovered there was no efficient way to notify the entire neighborhood of the missing kitty. "Plus, putting up fliers takes a lot of time and not everyone sees them."

FindToto.com, which operates nationwide, uses an outside company to find the phone numbers within a particular neighborhood, and Sterlino said those who are on the "Do Not Call list are not contacted.

While Sterlino's Web site offers to call customers' neighbors in exchange for a fee -- the more neighbors they call, the more they charge -- Bill Rozich's Colorado-based organization, Amber Alert for Pets, notifies members of missing pets through e-mail.