Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Playful Tyson needs a home
TYSON is an older male Jack Russell.
He enjoys playing with balls and is very active. He is friendly and has a sweet nature.
He would be a great addition to your family.
For more information and if your are interested in adopting Tyson, call SPCA Adoptions at 021 700 4152. MORE than 20 years ago, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective descended on movie theatres, with Jim Carrey portraying the cartoonish, wisecracking south Florida private investigator specialising in finding missing animals.
A couple of weeks ago, Jamie Katz, a seriousminded south Florida private investigator specialising in finding missing animals, sat in her apartment fielding a steady stream of client calls, texts and Facebook messages after having just closed the case of an awol parrot.
The African grey parrot, Oscar Gray, had turned up in the hands of a woman who runs a bird rescue and wouldn’t release Oscar to his owner. Six days after Oscar flew the coop, the owner, at wit’s end, heeded the advice of a parrot lost-and-found registry and turned to Katz.
“I had got to the point where I could not get the woman to turn my bird over, or even let me see if it was him. We were playing cat and mouse with this bird,” recalled Liz Kohout, the parrot’s owner. “We needed a negotiator.”
Katz, 36, is one of those people who seems to know everyone, and it turned out she shared a friend with the bird rescuer and leveraged that to negotiate the parrot handover. Kohout said that once Katz took over, things moved fast: Oscar was home that day.
Oscar Gray was the latest of about 150 animals Katz says she has helped return to their owners since hanging out her shingle less than two years ago. Another vital pet detective skill is sniffing out baloney.
For Katz, perhaps the most dramatic instance of this involved Sheppie, a dog who had been missing for two months when his owner called her. He said his wife told him that she was swimming at a beach in Key Biscayne when a man kidnapped Sheppie. Katz found the story sketchy.
She began researching to see if anything notable had happened at the beach and a nearby golf course during the afternoon in question. She found news articles reporting that a crocodile that lives in a pond at the golf course had eaten a dog that day. That dog was Sheppie, and the wife hadn’t wanted her family to know about the dog’s gruesome demise. Case closed. – Washington Post