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Text Box: Glen Echo residents who recently read this notice on the town’s yahoo listserv, GlenEcho@yahoogroups.com., may have wondered who posted it and other similar notices received in the past year or so: LOST DOG 55 lb-adult, male yellow lab mix. Lost in Glen Echo Hghts 10/26 VERY SHY DO NOT CHASE! The poster of these messages was Robin Siegel, a full-time volunteer for the Montgomery County Humane Society, who uses neighborhood Yahoo groups in an effort to reunite pets and their owners. Every day she receives a list of the stray pets received at the animal shelter and where they were found and sends out announcements to the listservs, volunteers and pet services in that area. She also checks about 100 local listservs to see if people have lost or found pets and sends that information out. She also checks Craigslist, Petfinder.com and other such online boards. She says she has found a surprising number of owners this way. Robin is a resident of Woodside Park, Silver Spring, who retired in 2006 after 26 years with National Geographic. An animal lover all her life, she began by taking care of boarded horses in Potomac and California while in college, then was on the staff of the county Humane Society for five years. She developed her system of finding owners of pets after Hurricane Katrina, when a national group of volunteers banded together to track down the evacuated owners of over 1000 pets in foster care. She encourages all those who lose or find a pet in Montgomery County to file a report with the county shelter (the Montgomery County Humane Society) at 240-773-5960 or go to their website at http://www.mchumane.org/ and click on Programs and Services/Lost & Found Animals. It will lead you to links to the lost and found forms. Shelter staff will match your report if they can. However, she suggests it is better to seek your lost pet by visiting the shelter You can follow what’s at the shelter on a daily basis at http://www.petharbor.com/ and checking Montgomery County Humane Society. You can reach Robin at the following email address: pennyroyalnorwich@yahoo.com. She does all her work online, not by phone. Update: On Oct. 20 the Board of Directors of the MCHS fired the employee who was acting as shelter manager since the actual Shelter Manager/Director/Chairman of the Board had been terminated. That has left the shelter staff temporarily unable to create reports for the county, unable to post photographs of the animals, and finding it difficult to run the shelter with nobody left who knows how. Nevertheless, Robin

Text Box: plans to continue to photograph as many animals as she can, and post them on her Flickr page at http://www.flickr.com/photos/robinsiegel/sets/72157594579349103/ --Carlotta Anderson