Sunday evening - stakeout night 3

About now is the third evening of our dogfood stakeout. No luck so far regarding Raven. We have been urged to be at the site 24 hours, but we are finding that this is just physically impossible to comply with. I (Mark) was physically shaking with fatigue the other day so much so that people sent me home to rest. I'm not used to feeling that way. Others are not too far behind me, I don't think. Our thought is that the Octoberfest and 5k events of the weekend may possibly have made Raven more skittish than normal and now as the weekend ends and things quiet down more we maybe will see her. But quite possibly this is just wishful thinking too. At any rate, we will keep the stakeout going for a while longer as we're able and see what happens. We don't have any better ideas.



This is a photo of our stake-out set up. After we took it we added in the scent items, our worn clothing, directly underneath the plates of dog food. Monica bought a whole case of canned food and we have been putting out new plates (with that fresh from the can smell!) a few times a day.

I'm not personally shocked that the City of Campbell doesn't want our posters around. Cities like this are run by their respective Chamber of Commerce groups, and those chambers are all about the money. Lost dog posters maybe distract people from buying things or disturb the city's charm or are too depressing or something along those lines. It's of a piece with my earlier experience with Safeway, where the supermarket would not let me post a poster. I wonder what a Campbell city manager would do if s/he lost a dog in the area and needed to recruit the help of local people in order to secure the return of the dog?

I want to recognize again, all of the folks who were not on the stake out but were helping in other ways. Wendy and her kids, Veronica and her family and also Randi and Gary of Poodle Rescue all came out to walk the trail, talk to people and hand out flyers etc. Campbell did not have a farmer's market this weekend, but we did have a presence at the alternate event, their Octoberfest, so that many of the vendors there knew to be on the look out for Raven.