Searching For Lost Pets Made Easier

Wednesday, March 14th 2007, 10:19 am

By: News On 6

Anyone who's a dog or cat lover can understand the anguish of losing your pet. A Tulsa man has come up with what could be a better way of finding them, but for it to work he needs to get the word out. That's where the News On 6 comes in.

Jack Sampson is not a computer whiz. He actually remodels kitchens for a living. But he realized the Internet could offer a good solution for lost pets.The News On 6â€™s Steve Berg reports Sampson has helped create a website to do just that.

It was 4th of July a couple of years ago when Jack Sampson learned first hand what it's like to lose a pet when his dogs, Ivy and Lennox, got out of the backyard.

He eventually got them back, but it took four days of hard work and a worried wife. Sampson did what a lot of people do. He put a flier on a telephone pole, but even on a busy street it can only reach so many people, and that's assuming they have time to read it as they drive past.

"If you drive around the neighborhood, you'll see posters on just about every telephone pole. I mean they're everywhere," said Sampson. "It's just kind of a hard way to find a pet, lot of legwork and phone calls and stuff like that."

The people who found Ivy and Lennox wouldn't take Sampson's reward money, so he used it instead to create LostTulsaPets.com. He says he got the idea because he had looked for a local lost pets website in his search for his dogs and couldn't find one.

"There are a few maybe, but none of them in Tulsa and barely in Oklahoma," Sampson said.

Sampsonâ€™s website, www.losttulsapets.com is completely free, and it has a section for dogs, cats, and everything else. The only thing it doesn't have right now is many users, and it will only be as effective as there are people who use it.

"Yeah, the more people, the more posts, the more lookers we have on there," said Sampson. "So if we can get half of Tulsa to check it out."

You might save a pet owner some heartache.