SALEM, Ohio – When a beloved pet darts out the front door and disappears into the woods or neighborhood, owners panic.
Some individuals and businesses charge high fees to recover the lost pet. But Warbuck’s Drone Services, based in Salem, searches for lost pets for free through the Compassionate Paws Foundation. Drones allow the company to cover more ground than people searching through an area.
Owner Paul Groves and Sarah Oaks, an animal rescuer, started the Compassionate Paws Foundation last year to help people with pet recovery, as well as vet care, food and other needs.
Warbuck’s, which has been in business for about five years, specializes in deer recovery, as well as excavating and crop spraying services. It also searches for lost people, generally those who are elderly.
The company used to charge people for pet recovery, and Groves and Oaks kept running into each other while searching for lost pets. They both saw the need for a free service.
“She would run into the issue that she would have people that couldn’t afford to have these services done,” Groves explained.
Some drone companies offered services with 30% financing, he said.
“And people are having to come out and look. Then they never find the dog, and these people are stuck with a $1,500 bill,” he said, adding that he doesn’t object to companies charging for services.
He disagrees, though, with them taking advantage of people during difficult times and charging high fees.
“I can’t imagine my own mother or family members or anybody for that matter, to have to sit at home crying because their family member is missing,” Groves said. “They have this at their disposal but couldn’t afford it. That would weigh on me, especially when that pet never returns home.”
Oaks started helping people find lost pets several years ago, beginning with traditional methods – printing and posting flyers and searching areas on foot. She’s learning to use a drone, and Groves donated one to the foundation for her to use. The foundation helps pet owners in other ways too.
“So far, we’ve covered two large emergency vet bills for people,” Oaks said.
With a drone, Groves can quickly comb thousands of acres. During fall and winter when foliage is sparse, locating a missing pet is easier, and he’s gotten really good at it. When leaves cover trees, however, searches get more difficult, and he relies more on sightings from members of the public.
They can search at night too.
“We run in thermal, and then we have spotlights that go on the drone,” Groves explained.
A missing dog can cover a lot of ground. Oaks and Groves recalled a dog missing from Cornersburg, spotted near Chaney High School and finally found on Kirk Road near state Route 46 in Austintown.
“This dog made it from Youngstown to Austintown – 7 miles,” with no one spotting it until the day it was found, he said.
It proved a difficult rescue involving a lot of time and Groves and Oaks running a lot of miles.
“I began to set a trap, because the dog would not stay in one spot,” Oaks said. “I always tell people, do not chase dogs – just leave them be. But this dog was going everywhere. We looked, and he was in a roundabout, a cul de sac, and everything was fenced. And I’m like, let’s just go.”
Owners don’t understand that after a dog has been running, it’s in flight mode and likely won’t respond to its master’s pleas.
“If you call out to a lost dog, they’re nine times out of 10 going to run away from you,” Oaks said.
Both she and Groves fit the pet searches in despite him being a business owner and her working full time.
“Sometimes it’ll be an emergency case,” Groves said. “Say a dog gets out on [state Route] 165 or 62 and the dog is spotted crossing that road, time’s of the essence. If an animal is crossing a main road, it has a 50-50 shot of crossing that road successfully. They just can’t wait.”
He acknowledges that canceling an appointment for the business to go search for an animal can hurt his bottom line. But if an animal gets killed and he was able to help but didn’t, it would weigh on him.
Both Groves and Oaks own several pets of their own. He has a tortoise, two rheas, two chickens and several cats. Oaks owns four rescue dogs and two cats. And several cats pad around inside and outside at Warbuck’s too.
A few months ago, Compassionate Paws found Sarah Csepeggi’s dog, Guinness, a Rottweiler mix. Guinness attends an Austintown doggie day care, and Csepeggi’s father-in-law picked the dog up one day.
As he opened the car door at the family’s Austintown home, he dropped his keys and the dog bolted when the man leaned down to retrieve them. She got a call at work that Guinness ran away and panicked. Heavy rain dumped on the region that afternoon, with a storm brewing.
The family’s backyard abuts woods that lead to Austintown Township Park. The dog took off into the woods. He was wearing a harness and leash, and they thought he’d eventually get caught among the trees.
“We had easily 30 to 35 people walking those woods, walking Austintown Park looking for him,” Csepeggi said.
But they were looking in the wrong place. She later learned from a resident’s doorbell video that Guinness made it through the woods and crossed Kirk Road within a few minutes of his escape. After about an hour, she called Oaks. The storm prevented use of the drones, but Oaks spent five hours searching.
When the storm lessened, Groves flew the drone and found the dog about half an hour later.
“He got stuck in those woods on the other side of Kirk and, luckily, like I said, he had that leash,” Csepeggi said.
The dog still gets spooked during thunderstorms but is otherwise unharmed. If Oaks and Groves hadn’t pitched in though, Csepeggi believes there would have been a different outcome.
“We honest to God believe he would have died in those woods, 100%,” she said. “The woods he was at on Easy Street, where he got stuck in – he was a good football field length, if not two football field lengths deep in those woods. And it is so overgrown.”
Pictured at top: Sarah Oaks and Paul Groves of the Compassionate Paws Foundation.