About the Baltimore Lost Cats Project
There are approximately 185,000 cats living on the streets of Baltimore City. (Which, if you’re counting, is about one cat for every three human residents.) Many of these cats have heartbroken owners who are looking for them, but there is no centralized way to report cats lost or found. You can report it to your local shelter, but most of those are woefully understaffed, underfunded, and working with technology from the previous century. If your cat doesn’t have distinguishing markings, or if it’s missing for more than a few weeks, you’re pretty much out of luck.
The return-to-owner rate for lost cats is dismal. Most cats don’t wear collars (and those that do can easily lose them). Microchips work wonderfully, but most cats don’t have them and many Good Samaritans don’t know to check for them.
Doesn’t it seem like there has to be a better way? We thought so.
Our hope is that a searchable public database of cats that have been lost and found will allow the people who are most invested—the devastated owners of lost cats and the dedicated rescuers of found cats—to do their own sleuthing and detective work, rather than relying on a shelter volunteer to connect the dots. We’re also employing social media, getting these lost/found kitty faces out there on Facebook and Twitter, so the general public can do more to get them home, too.
There is no big company behind this website, just a somewhat tech-savvy cat rescuer who put it together and runs it with the help of volunteers. We’re very much figuring this out by trial and error, so please bear with us during the early stages! Everything here is free; we’re not selling a service of any kind. (Although there are some paid pet-finding services linked on our resources pages, we are not affiliated with any of them.) If you report a cat to us as “lost” or “found,” we promise we won’t use or sell any of your personal contact information for any nefarious purposes, although we will check in with you periodically to see if your listing needs to be removed.
We also welcome comments and suggestions, and volunteers! (Especially if you’re a techie.)
The database is restricted to cats at this time, although if we can find other people willing to manage a database for dogs, we’re willing to branch out. And although it is the Baltimore Lost Cat Project, we won’t turn you away if you want to list a cat that wasn’t lost in Baltimore proper. Who knows, perhaps there will be franchise opportunities in other cities in the future...