The idea first came to Clayton Gladieux during a frantic night of searching for a lost dog. This was 2014; earlier in the evening, a friend of his had let her rescue lab, Ramsay, out in the yard to go to the bathroom. Ramsay got spooked by a car and took off into the dark.
“We freaked out,” Gladieux tells the INDY from his office in Raleigh. “You just don’t think it’s gonna happen to you, and when it does, you don’t know what to do, right? It’s frantic and time is of the essence. It’s a very overwhelming feeling.”
“I was on the phone Googling ‘What to do when you lose a pet,’” he continues. “It was two hours of just driving around looking for her and knocking on doors and calling her name.”
Ramsay found her way home the next morning, but Gladieux, then 24, still felt there had to be a more efficient way to quickly get the word out about a lost pet. He’d wanted to start his own company for a while, he says, but nothing had yet sparked an idea. When Ramsey ran away, it occurred to him that, that there ought to be a centralized database for pet owners to use if a pet slips loose.
Thus, with just one initial $5,000 investment, was born PawBoost—first named FindingFido, then changed due to the ubiquity of “Fido” pet companies—effectively an “amber alert” for lost pets.
According to the Animal Humane Society, one out of every three pets will go missing in their lifetime; a figure that comes out to roughly about 10 million lost pets in the United States each year. This estimate will not come as a surprise to anyone who belongs to NextDoor or a neighborhood listserv, in which notices of lost pets of all stripes and shades circulate frequently. If an animal is picked up without identifying information or a way to connect with an owner, it will land in a shelter. According to the ASPCA, about 920,200 animals in shelters are euthanized a year; more than half of those are cats, while around 390,000 are dogs.
PawBoost, which now claims to be behind more than 1,796,700 lost-pet reunions across the world, functions like an amplified listserv: users upload a lost pet post, which is then shared to the area PawBoost Facebook page, pushed out to PawBoost app users, and added to a large database of lost pets. Alerts also go out to local “rescue squads”—volunteer groups comprising local shelter employees, veterinarians, and pet lovers.
According to the PawBoost website, as many as 3,318,592 people are signed up for PawBoost notifications in their area. A simple “missing” post gets streamlined and amplified. Anyone who has either found a lost pet or helped someone else find a lost pet knows how emotional of an experience it is. Pets are family.
My own cat and dog both wandered into my life in zigzaggy ways—the dog (Penny) from a Wake Forest rescue, Saving Grace; the cat (Juniper) more literally, as a street cat in Brooklyn consistently jonesing for food and tuna cans. Both have fundamentally altered how I experience the world and other beings in it. On daily walks, seeing how many people’s faces light up just coming into the general radius of a dog is one of those sturdy affirmations of humanity that makes life feel both generous and generative.
And while I have not, following my conversation with Gladieux, joined a local “rescue squad,” it by no means feels far-fetched that anyone would choose to spend their time pursuing such reunions. In Raleigh, the PawBoost Facebook page alone has more than 9,000 followers.
“There are all these people that are animal lovers that want to help—there’s a huge community aspect to it,” says Gladieux. “The avatar for this person is literally my mom. You go on her Facebook and it’s all pet photos.”
Daily “Happy Tail” updates on the website attest to both the platform’s community and its utility. Take the account of Muffin, a steely-eyed white cat who jumped a porch railing in Ken Caryl, Colorado, and was located a mile and a half away by a neighbor. “I also posted on Facebook, Nextdoor, and Ring,” Muffin’s owner wrote in a recent Happy Tail update. “PawBoost seems to have a longer reach into the community.”
Or this philandering pug from San Bernardino, California: “Silas got out while looking for his girlfriend,” the owner wrote. “My neighbor saw my missing pet alert on PawBoost and contacted me almost immediately. Silas is now home safely.”
For Gladieux, who now has around a dozen employees, the bet has paid off. The company is, he says, “bootstrapped” with no official valuation, but revenue is in the low millions. By way of a bonus, he also gets to see happy updates roll in.
According to Gladieux, human error, animal curiosity, and loud noises—namely fireworks or a loud car like the one that scared his friend’s dog Ramsay—are most often to blame for a pet getting loose. Collars with name tags help, as do microchips, so long as the registration information is up to date. But nothing replaces a Good Samaritan willing to step in and try and get a pet home.
Marianna Chambers is one such Good Samaritan. While living in Garner several years ago, a “super friendly, beautiful dog” wandered into her yard, she tells me over the phone, in a gentle Southern drawl. Chambers and her family searched for the owner of the dog—whom her kids began to call “Goldie”—for a month. Eventually, their PawBoost post made its way to the owner, who’d just moved to a new home when the dog took off, unsure of its surroundings.
The family had grown attached to the dog, Chambers says, but the saga had a happy ending: they stayed in Goldie’s life and became its dog sitters, even keeping the dog over Christmas one year.
“It was a really a nice story, because we got to stay involved,” Chambers says. “The dog was always really happy to see us—and always happy to see its owner when she got back.”
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