Oct 20, 2023 4 min read

Most every morning a message appears in my email, from somebody I don’t know, accompanied by a photo of a dog. Often the message shows a dog found wandering a neighborhood or wrangled in some stranger’s yard.

More often, the photo is posted by the owner of a dog that slipped free of its leash while on a walk or slipped through the front door.

This is the daily content of Nextdoor, the social media site designed to connect people in their own neighborhood, like a hyper-local Facebook page. I joined the Nextdoor site when I moved to this place last year, hoping to get recommendations for an electrician and a new dentist.

Who knew there are so many lost dogs?

By many I mean several lost pets every day in my community alone. Each post brings a pang of empathy for the family of these animals: what must it be like for the little kids who keep looking out the window hoping to see that pup running back into the yard? Or for the dad driving around his neighborhood and the next one over, hoping.

It makes me wonder if dogs have always slipped the collar, maybe longing for freedom or a different vista or new smells to experience. Back in the old neighborhood, we all knew the neighbor dogs by name, the way we knew the neighbor kids. Next door was a schnauzer with the spectacularly appropriate name of Schnitzel. We’d hear the name as the mom stood on the front porch and called for the dog.

The neighbor dogs roamed our little dead-end street the way we kids did. Later, when we moved to the outskirts, our three dogs roamed our wooded lot. The last thing we’d do before lights out was to call for them. Sometimes I’d listen from my bed, unable to sleep until the most adventurous of the three would finally come in for the night. Winston, the boxer, was the one who kept me up at night.

Dogs have always needed to roam. We used to have to wait for them to return. If a day passed and the dog hadn’t come back, the family would scramble to find a snapshot of the animal to post on a phone pole. On a recent walk on a rural road in Westmoreland County, I saw such a photo stapled to a tree. The paper was so faded from sun and rain you couldn’t discern the breed of the dog. How long had the dog been missing? And did it ever make it back home?

Now, our phones hold a dozen photos of our pets. And if a dog or cat slips away, there’s a place to announce that. As with all social media, Nextdoor can be a snarky place. When one disgruntled breakfast patron climbs aboard to complain about the omelet he had at the local diner, a dozen more people will pile on. “Yes, they have terrible omelets there, and the server wasn’t even nice!”

But scroll down and you’ll see the photo of Max the Rottweiler, who went missing on that street yesterday. He’s friendly, but don’t chase him.

Sometimes I’ll sign in the next day, to find out if Max ever made it back home. Usually, I can’t find that message thread, so I’ll never know. But once in a while, I’ll see an update. Reunited! Sometimes there’s a photo of a happy child with a happy dog.

As with my adventurous, wandering Winston, Max’s family could finally sleep that night.