Woman dedicates her time to finding lost dogs

A Mountain View County woman has dedicated her time to reuniting lost dogs with their owners ever since her dog went missing near Sundre last year.

Kim Taylor still has hope her male chocolate Lab Ryley will return home, after he went missing on Feb. 15, 2013, just west of Sundre on Rge. Rd. 6.1. But in the meantime, she enjoys helping other people look for their lost dogs.

After Ryley went missing, Taylor contacted the Alberta Lost Pet Locator and Rescue Society for help. She got in contact with a woman from the organization and learned what to do when finding or looking for a lost dog.

"I teamed up with her and I started going on some of her rescues to see what am I doing wrong? Why can't I find him?" said Taylor.

She has attended many lost dog searches throughout the county over the past year, including the search for the several dogs that had gone missing from the vehicle accident on the highway near Olds this summer.

If she hears a dog is lost in the area, she contacts the owner and offers her assistance.

"After a certain amount of time they don't think like a house dog anymore. They start thinking more on the terms of survival. So they don't see us like they used to," she explained.

"I just engrossed myself in everything I could possibly find on the Internet, through people, through rescues, through other families who have lost their dogs and recovered them or have lost them and not recovered them, and I just took everything I learned and then started just giving that information freely to anyone who has lost their dogs."

Since losing Ryley, she has returned at least a dozen dogs to their owners. She has also found two dogs whose owners could not be located, but they were adopted.

She enjoys helping other people look for their dogs because she remembers what it was like to lose Ryley.

"I'm just trying to help them not have to go through the hell I went through and I'm still going through," she said.

"I lost Ryley and I know that feeling. That feeling of despair of where do you go? Who do you talk to? What do you do? Because what you do naturally isn't what you need to do."

She recalls a time last winter when she found a Great Pyrenees while out hiking with her dogs near the Mountain Aire Lodge area.

"There's no way he would have lasted another day, there's no way. It took me over a half an hour to coax him, it took me about another hour to load him in my truck," she said.

The dog's fur was so matted his front legs and back legs were frozen to his stomach, so he couldn't walk, she added.

When she saw him she didn't approach him, but she did what she learned from her research, and dropped to her knees and pretended she was eating something.

The dog eventually crawled over to her and she took him to the nearest veterinary clinic. No one claimed him so he was eventually adopted out to a good family, she said.

"I don't just drop them off, I follow them up."

She holds onto hope for Ryley's return, and is offering a $1,000 reward to the person who returns him home. He is six years old and has a distinctive large scar on his stomach from a surgery.

"It's too strange that not hide nor hair ever turned up. I've done literally a military approach to finding him three feet between me and the next path, for 10 kilometres, from the spot he stood," she said.

"I think someone picked him up off the trail."

Ryley was last seen with Taylor's husband Gord, walking down trails to the Red Deer River, along with their black Lab, Mason. The two dogs were off-leash and Gord suddenly realized only one dog was with him, she said.

"We still hold out hope for old Ryley boy. I look for him every day and that's another reason I go on these searches for these lost dogs, because it puts me in areas that I normally wouldn't go. And I'm always looking for him."

If anyone has any information on Ryley's location, they are asked to call Taylor at 403-636-4170.