People power behind Lost and Found Pets group

Finding grey cat Alby is one of many success stories from Illawarra Lost and Found Pets on Facebook.

Alby’s owners had moved to the UK and he was booked on a plane to follow them. Then he escaped.

“He was missing for about five weeks… from Albion Park Rail near the highway,” said admin Anne McNaughton, who runs the 43,000-strong Facebook group with fellow admin Nicole Harrison.

“A lady was riding a horse through Croome Road [Sporting Complex] and she saw a cat similar to Alby go down a drain, so she put it on his post on our page.

“The people who were looking after Alby went to the place where he’d been seen, couldn't see him, so they set up a couple of traps.

"I got a telephone call one morning about seven o'clock... they brought him around to my house and I scanned him… I read out his number, we both read it out together, and it was him.

“We couldn't believe it – it looked so much like him, but [it was] five weeks and quite a long way away.”

“It’s rewarding when a plan comes together, and people are reunited.”

With up to 500 posts a month and dozens of posts daily, the Illawarra Lost and Found Pets Facebook group is one of the busiest community pet forums in the Illawarra.

For more than a decade, Anne and Nicole have spent hours each day monitoring posts to help reunite owners with lost pets.

The group’s creator has been and gone, as have a team of admins and moderators over the years, but the two have been constant supporters. Most of their time is spent overseeing missing and found posts, coordinating efforts to return animals and sharing reliable information with group members. But the role of admin often goes further.

“We also have people who will hold animals overnight… so if anybody finds an animal after hours, they're pretty stuck. One of the alternatives is let it go – which is not what we want to happen – so we try to encourage people to hold them overnight, or to get one of our team who might be able to hold the animal overnight,” said Anne, who often takes in lost pets herself.

“We have a team of people that we've provided with microchip scanners, so they can go out and scan animals for microchips.

“An approved person, they would look up the microchip number and contact the owner of the animal. There’s privacy concerns, so we can't actually look that up ourselves, but we have people who are authorised who'll be sent the number.

“It appears in the forefront that Nicole and I have totally run the group, but there are a lot of people behind it who do a lot of good work in going out if an animal is sighted and... look to see if they can find them.

“If animals are located, we've got volunteers who'll go out and grab them and keep them overnight.”

Anne says the group’s estimated 80 per cent pet return rate is a credit to the volunteers and group members who regularly check in and help.

The admins aim to ensure that pets stay out of shelters.

“I've got a background, as has Nicole who admins the group with me, in rescue,” Anne said. “So we naturally, fell towards lost pets during our sort of rescue [work].

“[We want] to get animals safely home without being hit by cars… and also to try to save people money when they're going to be charged money because their animal is taken to the pound. But within all of that, we do try to educate people. We’ve often gone out and helped people make their fences so that their dogs can't get out.”

The pair also act as admins on two other Facebook groups: Illawarra Pet Q&A, where users can ask pet-related questions, and Lost and Found Pets Illawarra Rescue, a rehoming group they started in 2019.

“Any animals that are found as strays have to go to the pound – that's the law. If they're microchipped, the pound has to keep them for 14 days, and if they're not microchipped, the pound has to keep them for seven days. That is the law, and we wouldn't go against that, but [through] our rescue, we do take animals from the pound who haven't been claimed,” Anne said.

“We get a lot of kittens and [animals] surrendered to us as well.

“That's another arm of trying to save them and keep them out of the pound and possible euthanasia.”

You can find the Lost and Found Pets Illawarra group here.