At 7:15 p.m. on a recent Tuesday, Sue Wear loaded a cat trap into the back of her Subaru Outback. Gustavo, a tabby on the lam since January, had been captured by Wear’s game cameras twice on Monday night and again that morning as he waltzed in and out of a trap, eating the food intended for a missing dog.
It was “game on.”
Gustavo had repeatedly returned to the wooded area off Dorset Street in South Burlington, and he was clearly comfortable walking into a trap. Wear expected to catch him that night. The cameras were already in place, and her car was stocked with other essentials: cat food and a dish. She grabbed a blanket to disguise the trap as a tunnel to make it more inviting and headed for the woods.
Over the past 12 years, Wear has recovered hundreds of lost dogs and cats. The 55-year-old South Burlington woman is a software systems analyst by day and a pet detective by night — and early mornings and weekends. She works “pro bono and with passion,” Alicia Daniel said. For 123 days last year, Wear helped Daniel and her family search for Ruby, the Mexican street dog who bolted from their Burlington home less than 24 hours after the family adopted her. Daniel, a naturalist who understands wildlife behavior, learned a lot from Wear, she said: “I got a PhD in lost dogs in four months.”
The work requires patience, dedication and an occasional can of Vienna sausages.
Ruby, Mabel, Max, Mama, Sweet Pea, Sugar Babe, Udon, Highway Kitty: Wear has tracked them all — along with a wild turkey, a parakeet and a goat, which she successfully trapped. She doesn’t advertise. Pet owners hear about her, and they text, email or message her on Facebook. Sometimes she sees a post on the Lost & Found Animals of Vermont Facebook page and concludes that a pet owner needs help, and she contacts them.
Two months ago, when the owner of a lost dog solicited opinions on Reddit about “lost pet investigators” who claim on Facebook to employ search teams and drones, another Reddit user replied, “Sue Wear is all u need.”
The self-taught sleuth understands lost pets’ patterns: They move at night. Dogs tend to loop and typically are found within two miles of where they went missing. Cats stay within a mile — indoor-only cats within a tenth of a mile — but they can take longer to find because they hide. They’ll hunker under a porch for two weeks. “They will not eat, they will not drink, and they will eventually pop out,” Wear said.
And Wear will wait. She repeatedly sat in the cold on a stakeout last spring to catch a cat in Colchester. Temperatures dipped into the 30s as she waited to drop a trap on the kitty, which would not walk into a regular one.
She also stayed on the case of Ruby, the Mexican street dog, when the trail went cold for weeks at a time. Ruby was sighted but not caught nine miles south of home on Quaker Smith Point in Shelburne and six miles north on Blakely Road in Colchester. In an attempt to understand the dog’s unusual behavior, Wear even corresponded with the rescue worker in Colima, Mexico, who had housed Ruby. She learned that the dog and her two puppies had been found near a restaurant. The worker sent a blanket the puppies had slept on so their scent could be used as a lure.
When she started out tracking pets, Wear refused to take compensation. Now she accepts donations from grateful pet owners to buy the supplies she needs, which include plastic sleeves for lost-pet signs and neon duct tape to stick them on stop signs and make them eye-catching. After she caught Ruby in December — behind the Mexican restaurant Casa Real in Colchester — Daniel’s daughter posted the news on Front Porch Forum, calling Wear “a hometown hero.” She included a link to Wear’s Amazon wish list, and packages started showing up at Wear’s door.
“Literally, at Christmas, it was Christmas,” she said.
Growing up, Wear lived in East Hartford, Conn., with a beagle named Penny and several cats. When she moved to Vermont after college, she volunteered at Greyhound Rescue of Vermont, a shelter for former racing dogs. “I don’t even fully understand why that appealed to me at the time,” she said, “because I wasn’t a real animal person.” Still, she stuck with it for years and adopted a shy greyhound.
She has had other dogs and cats since. None has gone missing, but she got into the pet-finding field in 2013, when she lived in Colchester and heard about a lost dog in her neighborhood. Her own dog Mysty, “a big fluffy Lab,” had just died of cancer, she said, and she was looking for connection and something to do. On lunch breaks and after work, she drove around the neighborhood looking for Sugar Babe, a 35-pound American leopard hound, and bumped into Michele Rennie, an Essex woman doing the same thing.
Rennie had no experience, either. It took 64 days to catch the dog, so the two women got to know each other. A third woman joined them, “and we became this little unit finding dogs,” Rennie said. Eventually there were six volunteers in the Chittenden County group, but since then people have moved, switched jobs or stepped back for other reasons. Some still pitch in from time to time, but Wear is the only one working steadily.
She’s organized and patient, Rennie said of her friend, and she sympathizes with people rather than chastising them for losing an animal. If someone routinely lets a dog out and the dog gets away, “you just can’t play the blame game,” Rennie said, and Sue does not. “She’s really just willing to step in and do whatever is needed for that particular family, for that particular dog or cat.”
Step one, Wear tells pet owners: Get the word out. Report your lost pet to the police, on Front Porch Forum, and on the Lost & Found Animals of Vermont Facebook page, which has 27,000 followers. There are also lost-pet Facebook pages for Addison County, the Northeast Kingdom, Milton and other areas. Hang signs at intersections within a one-mile radius, and make them simple so drivers can read them while sitting at a stop sign.
Put out food and water where the animal went missing and where it has recently been seen. Place cameras there, if you have them.
And in the case of dogs, though it seems counterintuitive: Stop searching and calling the dog’s name. The most important factor in catching a lost dog is making it feel safe, not like it’s being pursued. Dogs lost for 24 hours or more are scared, and they don’t think clearly, Wear said. When people call them, even their owners, “it just sounds like someone yelling.”
Community help is crucial for homing in on an animal. “Every sighting matters,” Wear said, clapping to emphasize each word. Once the animal has been spotted, she sets up another food station, with another camera, in that location, and she maintains it until evidence suggests the lost pet has moved on. If the dog or cat keeps coming to eat the food, she said, it’s “game on.”
Wear brings in a trap. First, she zip-ties the door open because some pets are suspicious. Drawn to the trap by the liquid smoke food additive Wear sprinkles nearby and the pet food she scatters just inside, some animals hesitate to enter. Wear wants to see them walk calmly into the trap and eat from the dish in the back before she sets the door to close, because when it slams shut, it’s startling. “If that trap starts to close, and that dog gets hit in the butt and gets out, then I’m game over,” Wear said. The animal most certainly won’t be back.
The work requires patience, dedication and an occasional can of Vienna sausages. Sometimes, serendipity plays a role — as in the case of Gustavo the cat.
Wear’s trap in the Dorset Street woods had been tied open to lure a dog named Mabel when Gustavo showed up in May. The cat had been living with a family in a van parked in South Burlington when he slipped away as a 7-month-old in January. Wear heard about him and offered her help to his family, but their efforts failed to turn up a single lead for four months.
Then, in early May, someone posted a photo on the Lost & Found Animals page of a cat sitting in the parking lot at Barnes & Noble. Gustavo has distinctive dark patches, one on each front leg, which together form a heart. But the cat at the bookstore sat with its tail curled over its front legs. Wear scrutinized the picture, comparing it to a family photo of Gustavo. Each cat had a white peak between its eyes, just off-center. Each had a black line on its nose. His family agreed: That was likely Gustavo. And then he disappeared.
About two weeks later, Wear got pictures of a tabby cat coming by to eat the food she left for Mabel in three locations about a mile from Barnes & Noble. Wouldn’t it be funny if that was Gustavo? she thought, though not seriously. More pictures came in, she said, “and I start to look, and I’m like, Holy shit, that is Gustavo.”
He had marched into a trap left to lure Mabel, so that night, Wear took away the dog trap and set a cat trap. She pointed two cameras at it, then went home to sleep with her phone nearby. Pings around 11:15 p.m. alerted her to new photos: One taken at 11:14 showed a cat in the trap. Wear picked it up at 11:30 — “I’m on his schedule,” she said — and shined a flashlight on the cat’s legs. Their spots formed a heart.
Contact Sue Wear at suewearvt@gmail.com or on Facebook.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Dogged Pursuit | South Burlington’s Sue Wear seeks — and finds — lost dogs and cats”
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This article appears in The Animal Issue 2025.
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