When the Mazur family’s dog, Brooklyn, ran off one day last May, the Mazurs were the ones who truly felt lost.
That was until Robin Siegel helped save them.
Brandon Mazur had already sent out hundreds of fliers and put up 3-foot-high posters with a picture of the Vizsla-breed dog around their Silver Spring neighborhood, offering a $1,000 reward for Brooklyn’s return. He even hired a professional dog tracker.
But after a week passed with no response, their then 1-year-old daughter, Olivia, began standing at the front window of their home in the afternoons, shouting for her “Bobo” to come home.
Then Mazur got his first email from Siegel, also of Silver Spring, offering her advice and encouragement. Over the weeks that followed, a woman Mazur would never meet in person guided him back to Brooklyn, who was found almost six weeks after she ran away in an animal shelter in Virginia, nearly 50 miles from home.
“She made a difference; she kept us sane, she kept us focused on a methodical search,” Mazur said. “She kept us looking.”Siegel, 60, has been reuniting lost pets and their owners in Montgomery County for the past five years. Owners she’s helped say she doesn’t take reward money for her work, generally only asking that they instead help the Humane Society animal advocacy group by donating either their money or time.
But her work is a habit she said she’s quitting this week, citing health concerns and her age, although not before she makes sure the job is still being done.
In the five years she’s been at it, the retired National Geographic conservator has amassed a long list of stories about finding lost pets. There’s Cosmo, the border terrier found in Rockville weeks after he braved a solo crossing of the Potomac River, presumably trying to return to his Philadelphia, Pa., home after escaping from his owner. And Tegri, a domestic shorthair tabby cat Siegel helped bring back to her owner in Friendship Heights after a four-month search.
But the story of Brooklyn is one of her favorites, and it sheds light on Siegel’s mission, both of the past five years and for a future that, she hopes, doesn’t need her.
Beyond practical help
Siegel takes a multi-pronged approach to finding lost pets. Her work starts at the Montgomery County Humane’s Society’s animal shelter in Rockville, where three times per week she volunteers to photograph the new animals so she can post their faces on the group’s website and either help the pets find their old home or a new one.
Aside from helping out at the shelter, Siegel also scours the streets looking for posters like the ones Mazur put up to also post them online. Then the rest is done from her home in Silver Spring, she said.
Siegel has signed up for nearly every neighborhood listserv — an email-based communications group — in Montgomery County, 175 in all. She combs through the hundreds of emails she receives every day as well as sites like Craigslist.org or Petfinder.com — which provide free classified listings — for postings on lost animals. Then she compares the postings to each other as well as to the animals at the shelter. She also contacts almost any person that posts a listing for lost animals, offering advice and encouragement.
She said most of her work is connecting people, those with lost pets and those with found ones.
“What you have is a lot of people talking to their neighbors,” she said. “But what I do is talk to all the neighborhoods.”
This is how she helped find Brooklyn: by connecting the Mazurs to a shelter in Virginia and a family who found a dog that matched their dog’s description, expanding their search beyond their neighborhoods.
Last year, about 11,000 animals came to the Humane Society countywide, all of which were strays or animals impounded by Montgomery County’s Department of Animal Control, said David Poole, volunteer coordinator at the Rockville shelter. To handle the intake, the Humane Society has a pool of 100 volunteers, like Siegel, supplementing its 100 employees. The volunteers are crucial, because, try as they might, the $3.8 million budget the Montgomery County group had last year does not cover the entire cost of the organization’s mission, Poole said.
After she’s gone
Siegel, who has always had an affection for animals, has spent her life raising Norwich terriers, her favorite breed of dog. She owns three Norwich terriers, and her fourth dog, a mixed terrier named Possum, is from her time with a group called Stealth Volunteers, which she helped in 2005 to connect lost pets with their Louisiana owners in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Over the past few weeks, Siegel has been trying to refer everyone with a lost pet to her website, mcmdlostpets.blogspot.com, which explains what to do when a pet is lost. Some of the people who have benefited from her work also plan to help carry on the torch after she is gone.
It was Ania Firsowicz’s cat, Tegri, that Siegel helped find. Now, Firsowicz said she’s passing that favor on, forwarding practical advice to others and even lending a hand with giving out information about lost pets.
To date, Firsowicz has successfully helped bring home two lost cats and one chinchilla, but she knows her efforts still pale next to Siegel’s.
“Honestly I think my help is nothing compared with Robin,” she said.
aruoff@gazette.net
Copyright © 2012 Post-Newsweek Media, Inc./Gazette.Net