THE PET DETECTIVE
Animal sleuth combines his love of pets with detective work to track down missing four-legged friends
Trudging through the snow on the side of a mountain with his night-vision goggles strapped on tight, Al MacLellan is alert not only for the lost pups he’s searching for, but for bears, cougars and coyotes that might become too curious.
“Once I had a cougar wander into one of my traps,” said MacLellan, a Surrey-based pet detective.
“I was searching for a German shepherd called Merle that had been missing for about three months.”
It was January 2017 on Eagle Mountain near Coquitlam.
“The cougar, she was playing like a kitten inside the trap. The male was standing next to the trap.”
The door to the trap hadn’t been set to lock yet and the big cat inside finally figured out to go out the way she’d come in.
Merle — who was four and had an anxiety disorder — was found by MacLellan after 96 days, 40 pounds lighter than when he’d gone missing on the mountain, but otherwise happy and healthy.
MacLellan’s search-andrescue kit includes drones and infrared night-vision goggles. He has bloodhounds, he’ll build hunting blinds in the woods to monitor the area, and baits traps with roast chicken and beef bones.
He calls his agency Petsearchers Canada — as far as he knows, he’s the only pet detective in Canada — and it all began on a personal note.
Saxxon, a shar pei belonging to Al and his wife Alesha MacLellan, disappeared for several weeks a few winters back.
They searched day and night, through rain and snow and howling winds. She was a realtor, he a business manager; they put their work, and income, on hold.
“At least a couple thousand bucks, but it’s hard to say what it cost us,” the 59-year-old MacLellan said. “Time is money when you’re running a business.”
They placed ads everywhere they could think of. They burned who knows how much fuel driving over what seemed like every road in South Surrey and Langley. They put up hundreds of dollars worth of posters.
“It was an enormous cost to our family,” MacLellan said.
And he realized something. He was too emotional, too worked up that there wasn’t some sort of network to go to for help. He wasn’t thinking clearly.
What he needed to do, he decided, was to use the hunting and tracking skills he’d developed growing up in Ontario. Using those, he tracked down Saxxon in a row of bushes kilometres from the MacLellans’ home.
“We added up what we’d spent,” MacLellan said. “And we’d run into lots of other people during our search who’d lost their own pets.”
There’s a need for this service, the couple thought, so they adopted Jed, a bloodhound, and Petsearchers Canada was born.
Most recently, MacLellan was in the news when he reunited a rescued mixed-breed from Thailand named Littlefoot with a joyous Mike Boultbee and Jocelyn Aspa.
Littlefoot had gone missing from Vancouver’s Main Street neighbourhood of Mount Pleasant in December, and was found in Richmond five weeks later.
“Al was constantly reassuring in his search for Littlefoot for us,” Aspa said. “Even when the weather was bad, during that crazy wind storm in December, he always reassured me that Littlefoot would be safe as long as he stayed away from danger.
“He told me several times he’d get him and even turned down other cases during the Christmas period so he could solely focus his efforts on bringing Littlefoot home for us.”
MacLellan even went out Christmas Day after opening presents with his wife and young daughter, came home for Christmas dinner, then went out again.
Littlefoot probably made his way along Highway 99, or maybe along the bike path, to Richmond, MacLellan guesses. Either way, he wasn’t surprised by the distance covered.
MacLellan and his employee Jordii Wurst had earlier in the year caught a husky that made its way from Vancouver to Mitchell Island, “over the Knight Street Bridge, I guess.”
They followed leads for the husky for weeks, then when they found it and set up a trap, they caught it in five minutes. “That was just luck.”
The dog who had been missing the longest that MacLellan found was lost for more than 10 months.
“He had the scars on his face to prove it,” MacLellan said. “Quite a few dogs go missing for six or seven months, they’re survivors.”
How resilient a lost dog is depends on breed, but the pet detective once returned a Chihuahua named Roxy after it had been lost for four weeks in Coquitlam.
“It had been one month out there in a really bad area, full of cougars,” MacLellan said. “But just because your dog is small, don’t write them off. Dogs are survivors.
“And if they can survive, we can get to them.”
MacLellan and Wurst are now looking for another Roxy, this time a Formosan mountain dog rescued from Korea.
The size of a coyote, Formosans behave like coyotes, too, MacLellan said. And in this case, the dog had been beaten before being rescued, was extremely skittish, and ran away after leaving the car on its introductory drive home.
“Roxy didn’t even make into the house,” he said.
After the owners searched on their own for a month and it a half, they contacted Petsearchers.
There have been recent sightings of Roxy in Burnaby.
“She’s a tough one, she looks like a coyote and moves around at night,” MacLellan said. “But we’re closing in on her. I’ll get her.
“For me, it’s a bit like putting a puzzle together. Once I get the first piece I can surround the dog and complete the puzzle, get the dog home.
“Planning is the biggest thing. It never goes 100-percent to plan, but you need a plan.”
MacLellan charges by the hour and he’ll spell out what it will cost you at the beginning.
“But a lot of time I go beyond (the hours billed), I don’t watch the clock,” he said. “It’s not a cheap service, but I don’t get rich from this job.”
He wouldn’t say what his success rate is, only that every breed, every case, is different, adding that predators come with two legs as well as four, that cars take their toll.
“You can’t find all the (lost) pets. You could have a halfdozen full-time people looking. People have no idea how many pets go missing.
“I say all I can do is guarantee I’ll do the best I can, that we’ll look for your pet like we’d look for our own pets. We don’t give up easy.”
For which Littlefoot’s owner, Aspa, gives thanks.
“If we didn’t have Al, I don’t know how we would have gotten Littlefoot home.”
Once I get the first piece I can surround the dog and complete the puzzle, get the dog home.” Al MacLellan, Petsearchers