Nine months after disappearing from a vacation condo in Ocean City, Maryland, a Boston terrier turned up about 150 miles away, outside a Baltimore nightclub on a Saturday night, sporting a leather-spiked collar.
Where he'd been and what he'd been up to in the meantime were something of a mystery. But he was healthy, well cared for and, evidently, had acquired a little nightlife experience.
It was one of the more surprising recoveries of Carmen Brothers' career as a professional pet tracker.
Someone apparently had taken the dog in rather than turning him over to a shelter. He managed to get away again, and that's when the search finally ended.
"He was 100 percent well cared for," Brothers told Patch. "Had he not ended up in front of that nightclub, we might never have found him."
Missing pets don't always behave the way their owners expect. Some travel astonishing distances. Others hide practically under their owners' noses. A few find friends along the way. And some, like the nightclub terrier, apparently have entire chapters of their lives that will remain a mystery.
Figuring out where they've gone, and sometimes why, is the business of Professional Pet Trackers, the company Brothers founded after trading a career in human resources for one tracking down lost animals.
As it turns out, dealing with people in distress, managing expectations and understanding different personalities were pretty good preparation for the job.
"Human resources did help me gear up for the wonderful world of lost pets," Brothers said. "You deal with a lot of different personalities in this work. You have to learn game plans in a way the audience will accept and process — craft that information in a way that each person will understand it."
The 47-year-old Brothers, who lives in Capon Bridge, West Virginia, with her husband and their dogs, admits she "fell into it."
She was volunteering for an animal rescue group in 2018 when she got a call asking if she was interested in becoming a regular on National Geographic Wild's "Trackers" docuseries.
"When I left my normal job for National Geographic, I thought I could always go back to HR if all else fails," she said.
As Plan B, it was half-hearted at best.
"I never did go back," Brothers said.
And she found a particular satisfaction that her former profession couldn't quite match.
"There's nothing more rewarding than helping reunite families," she said. "While HR can be rewarding depending on specialty, there is no feeling like making a family complete again."
Finding a lost pet has become a lot more sophisticated than posting flyers on telephone poles, knocking on doors and hoping for the best. But Brothers cautions against abandoning those old-fashioned methods in favor of technology.
The pet owner is her most important partner in any search, and getting the word out quickly is crucial.
"A lot of people will depend on social media, but remember, not everyone is on Facebook," Brothers said. "Get flyers up immediately. It's the most tedious but also the most helpful. You have to do that."
Too often, pet owners turn to her business as a "last-ditch effort," after other methods have failed and the trail has gone cold.
"The earlier people get to me, the more likely I'm able to be able to help," she said.
Her services range from phone consultations on where to search and how to lure a frightened animal home to trained dogs that can follow a missing pet's scent. Feeding stations, surveillance cameras and humane traps are other tools of the trade.
And increasingly, there's help from above.
Drones equipped with thermal-imaging cameras can detect heat signatures in woods, fields and other places where pets might be hiding. They can cover large areas far more quickly than people searching on foot, while scent-tracking dogs can follow trails through vegetation and into places cameras can't see.
The combination helped bring Pearl, a 2-year-old dog, home after she escaped from a groomer in Raymond, Maine, in April 2025.
Her owner, Dawn Elwell, spent days searching before calling in the professionals. Rob Russell of 2A TAC Air Ops Drone Services in New Hampshire brought a thermal-imaging drone, while Brothers brought Finley, her trained black Labrador retriever, to follow Pearl's scent on the ground.
There was a complication familiar to anyone who has tried to catch a frightened runaway. Well-meaning people calling Pearl's name and trying to approach her were only making her more elusive.
Brothers redirected volunteers to posting flyers while the search team monitored sightings, established feeding stations and narrowed down Pearl's hiding places.
After five days on the run, Pearl was caught in a humane trap baited with Elwell's sweatshirt, according to The Windham Eagle.
All that sophisticated equipment, and the familiar scent of home, helped finish the job.
Brothers said her team and local partners have tracked and returned more than 1,000 animals to their owners across all 50 states. Although primarily based out of Stephens City, Virginia, they work nationwide, traveling for select on-site searches and sharing their expertise remotely with lost-pet groups and communities.
Dogs and cats are the usual customers, but goats and other animals have also made the list.
"If it moves," Brothers said, "I can track it."
Sometimes, a lost dog finds a friend along the way.
That was the case with a pair of runaway dogs in Brooklyn who found each other before anyone found them.
Pickles, a 7-year-old Australian cattle dog, broke loose from a dog walker in August 2018. Violet had been on her own since November 2016 after running away from a foster home.
Pickles was the subject of an extensive search that included 13,600 posters, 44 tips to a hotline and more than 14,700 automated calls. Eventually, the dog-walking service hired Brothers and trapper Teddy Henn.
Brothers used surveillance cameras near Brooklyn College to track Pickles, and Henn lured the elusive dog into a humane trap with food.
The natural traits that make dogs like Pickles ideal for ranchers and sheep herders also made finding her a challenge.
"They're super smart, they're little and they hide really well," Brothers said.
The bonus was Violet, who had apparently teamed up with Pickles during their time on the loose. Both were found healthy. Pickles went home to her delighted family, while Violet was returned to the care of Sean Casey Animal Rescue.
Pickles' owner, Jasmin Cruz, told Bklyner she was relieved to learn her pet hadn't been alone during the adventure.
"Our family is over the moon and so joyful that Pickles is finally back home!" Cruz said. "To find out that he was found with Violet was truly surprising! I was so happy to know that he was not alone and they kept each other going strong."
Another search involving two missing dogs had a happy ending for one family, but left another still waiting.
Buddy, a Cane Corso, bolted from a PetSmart training session after being startled by another dog in 2021. His owner, Jacquawn Cummings of La Plata, Maryland, hired Brothers, whose scent-tracking dog followed Buddy's trail to a gate, suggesting someone might have picked him up.
For more than a year, Cummings posted photos, followed leads and searched for Buddy.
"I prayed for him every night," she told news station WJLA.
There were sightings, including surveillance footage, but the trail kept going cold. At some point, someone apparently had Buddy long enough to crop his ears before he turned up loose again.
Then came an unexpected break. Wendy Benoit of Franconia, Virginia, was searching for her own missing dog, Miles, when she recognized Buddy in a photograph of a dog picked up by animal control in Alexandria.
Benoit alerted Cummings, and Buddy was reunited with his family in January 2022.
Benoit wasn't so lucky. Miles, a skittish pit bull mix, had escaped from dog walkers in June 2021. When Patch reported her story in March 2022, she was still searching for him.
No two missing-pet searches unfold quite the same way. And while youth and speed can make an animal difficult to catch, old age doesn't necessarily make the job easier.
Consider Khmow, a former Cambodian street dog who had once helped save a child's life.
Years earlier, New York Times bestselling author Rachel Louise Snyder was pushing her 5-month-old daughter in a stroller on the streets of Cambodia when Khmow began running in frantic circles and whining beside the carriage.
The dog was alerting Snyder that her baby had passed out from heatstroke.
In 2020, the tables turned.
Khmow, by then 16, mostly deaf and nearly blind, disappeared from a warehouse in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Even with her age and sensory limitations, the 20-pound Khmow was no couch potato. She routinely walked five or six miles a day, and apparently wasn't about to let her diminished senses keep her from exploring.
She wandered into Rock Creek Park and traveled as far as Chevy Chase, eluding people who spotted her along the way.
Snyder hired Brothers and her scent-tracking dog, Magic.
After about three hours of searching, Snyder spotted Khmow's black ears among the vegetation. Following Brothers' advice, she lay in the mud, whimpered and waved some chicken until Khmow approached close enough to be caught.
The reunion came after two harrowing days.
One of the more maddening realities for people searching for missing pets is that an animal may be perfectly capable of recognizing its owner under normal circumstances, but react very differently when frightened and on the run.
A familiar voice doesn't always bring a dog running into welcoming arms. Sometimes it sends the animal running in the opposite direction.
Chasing a frightened pet can make matters worse. Brothers advises getting low to the ground, speaking softly and allowing the animal to approach on its own terms.
"When they are in flight mode, they are no longer associating with the owner," Brothers told Patch. "It's all about the scent and feeding stations."
And don't assume a missing pet is helpless. With enough food, water and relatively few predators, some can survive for years.
A Chihuahua on the run in Michigan for 4½ years actually gained weight, Brothers said.
These frisky little dogs can "just go and go" like they're powered by Energizer batteries. And the same is true for boxers, German shepherds and other bigger breeds that can cover a surprising amount of territory in a short time.
"At the end of the day, they're animals, and their animal instincts take over," she said.
That unpredictability is one reason pet tracking is rarely as simple as following a trail from Point A to Point B. A dog might stay hidden for weeks, wander far from home or be taken in by someone who has no idea a family is desperately looking for it.
And, as the nightclub terrier demonstrated, the people who encounter a missing animal can become part of the mystery.
The same technology that's making it easier to find lost pets is also making it easier for scammers to prey on desperate owners. Brothers knows firsthand how convincing the impostors can be.
"There aren't many of us who do this throughout the U.S.," she said. "Especially in this day and age of AI, people need to be aware of scammers. I've had people claim to be me and take money."
Her Facebook page has been cloned and her website copied. One fraudulent site featured a photo of a woman who looked nothing like Brothers holding a cat. It also had Cash App and Venmo payment buttons, but listed Brothers' actual phone number.
She essentially caught herself being impersonated.
Brothers called it a "lazy mistake," but warned that other impostors are considerably more sophisticated, and that frantic pet owners can make easy targets.
"People need to do their homework before investing in these services," she said. "There are not as many resources for lost pets — not all the resources as, say, if you lost your 5-year-old."
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