For decades when someone found a lost pet, the prevailing wisdom was to take the dog or cat straight to a local animal shelter. But that advice is changing.
When a “finder” has the time and ability, the best thing to do is try to reunite a pet directly with their family, according to Jessica Nett, director of operations for Humane Colorado’s Leslie A. Malone Center, a large animal shelter that the nonprofit operates in Denver, Colorado.
“What we say is the very first thing is to just look around. Potentially the owner is close by,” she said. “Animals that get out don’t usually go very far. I’ve found in my time that an animal’s brought to the shelter and the owner was maybe just on the opposite side of the street looking around.”
If there’s nobody nearby, check the pet’s collar for an ID tag and if there’s a phone number, call the owner. That helps spare the dog or cat the stress of a car ride with a stranger to an animal shelter, she noted.
The next step — if there’s no ID tag — is to take the dog or cat to an animal hospital or shelter to scan for a microchip. (Some fire stations and pet stores now have microchip scanners as well.)
The pet’s microchip number can be searched on with the American Animal Hospital Association’s free Microchip Lookup tool to determine where it’s registered, she said. If the owner has registered the microchip with a registry and updated it with their current contact information, it’s another chance to call the owner about their missing pet.
Nett emphasized that the responsibility lies with the owner to register their pet’s microchip with a registry (such as PetLink or AKC Reunite) and to update their phone number and email address whenever it changes.
“Microchips are effectively useless without current registration. Some companies quote fees, but basic registration is free. If your company’s saying it’s not, there’s another one out there that will register the chip for free,” she said. “We trace microchips to every little piece of information on there, but if a phone number’s out of service, if an email bounces back, there’s almost nothing we can do at that point to get ahold of somebody.”
Using Technology When You Find A Lost Pet
If the microchip scan is unfruitful, Nett recommends heading online to search for lost pets reported by their owners on 24Petconnect as well as PawBoost, where you can also report a found pet in your possession or even a sighting. Neighborhood Facebook groups or Nextdoor also share discussions about lost and found pets.
Additionally, Petco Love Lost uses AI photo-matching technology to compare photos of missing pets with “found” pets — in one instance, reuniting a cat lost for 11 days with her owners.
“There are so many different websites where people will post their lost pet or post if they’ve found a pet,” Nett said. “Sometimes you can end up opening up the website and you’ll see that the owner has posted that lost pet. So we do encourage those website searches to maybe skip a step of having to put the pet in the shelter at any point if they don’t need to go there.”
How Directly Reuniting A Pet With The Owner Helps
When a finder is able to personally reunite a dog or cat they find with the owner, it is often much faster than if the pet enters the shelter system — where barking and handling by strangers can be stressful for the animals.
It also saves the shelter from spending time and resources on the lost pet, and frees up kennel space for pets truly in need, such as dogs and cats surrendered by their owners, Nett noted.
That’s important since so many animal shelters nationwide are struggling with capacity issues. Last year, 5.8 million animals arrived in U.S. animal shelters and rescue organizations. Tragically, 757,000 dogs and cats had “non-live outcomes,” according to the Shelter Animals Count 2025 Annual Data Report.
When a stray animal is brought into the Leslie A. Malone Center, the team takes a photo, puts a collar with a tag with a unique number around their neck, scans for a microchip, performs a triage examination to see if they seem healthy or need the veterinary team to look at an issue more closely, and gives standard vaccinations, according to Nett.
“Most shelters have protocols because we are putting them in a kenneling environment,” she said. “Especially with a stray, we can’t ask them what vaccines they’ve had. We have to assume they might have none or that they might be expired and we don’t want them to catch anything from a dog that might be sick in a kennel nearby or have something underneath that we haven’t seen symptoms of yet.”
So when a finder is able to reunite a pet directly with their family, it eliminates that intake process at a shelter.
The Question Of Kittens
If you find a lost kitten or kittens, pause before removing them — just as you should pause before “rescuing” any baby animal. Very young animals do best with their mothers, who might be hiding or hunting, Nett noted.
“There is a high likelihood that mom is close by,” she said. “What we really see with kittens is there’s an age range where it does make sense to pick them up and get them to a shelter. Once they’re really moving around, their eyes are wide open, they’re meowing at you, there’s a chance that mom is done and is moving on. But I think any younger than that, it’s best to leave them be and see if she comes back for them because the nutrition and the developmental things she’s going to give them are so valuable.”
The ASPCA offers a free online tool to evaluate when it’s time to remove or leave kittens you find outside.
Beware Of Lost Pet Scams
With over a decade working in animal rescue, Nett has become alarmed by the rapid rise of scammers in the past few years who target people with lost pets.
“People responding to some of these posts online saying, ‘I found your animal, but you need to send me money before I’ll give it back to you’ and things like that are just preying on people in such a vulnerable moment in their life,” she said. “It’s such a terrible thing to prey on people during that moment, but it’s happening.”
Because of this alarming trend, Nett stressed the importance of never sending money, and arranging to meet the person who claims to have found a pet in a neutral location like an animal shelter.
“If they’re scamming you, they’re not going to agree to meet somewhere like that,” she said. “Most people are genuinely good. It just has come up more and more, so warning people that it’s out there is something I’ve been trying to do.”
Ultimately, she’s grateful to the good people who find lost pets and do what they can to reunite them with their owners as quickly as possible.
“It saves time, it saves resources,” she said. “It saves stress.”
