Your dog just got out.Here's what to do first.

If you're reading this with your heart in your throat, skip to the list. Everything here is stuff that actually moves the needle in the first few hours, in the order it matters. Nothing on this page costs you anything.

The first hour

1. Search your own property twice. Under the deck, behind the shed, inside the garage, under the truck, in the crawlspace, in a closet. Scared and hurt dogs wedge into small dark places and go quiet. People find their dog on their own property more often than you'd think, sometimes hours into a neighborhood search.
2. Walk, don't drive, the first pass. Cover the blocks around your house on foot at a slow pace. Stop every so often and just be quiet and listen. Driving 25 mph past a ditch line will miss a dog lying in it.
3. Bring the loud stuff. Shake the treat bag, squeak the toy, open a can. Sounds a dog knows carry better than a name shouted in a panicked voice — and a panicked voice can actually push a frightened dog farther away.
4. Knock on doors. Ask neighbors to check their garages, sheds, fenced backyards, and porches, and to look at any doorbell or trail camera footage from the last few hours. A time-stamped camera hit tells you which direction he went, which is worth more than another hour of guessing.
5. Ask for a photo, not a description. When someone says they saw him, ask what time, exactly where, which way he was headed, and whether he was walking or running. Write it down with the time. Those pins are how you find the pattern.

Search the way a lost dog actually moves

A dog that slips out on a normal day usually pokes around close by. A dog that bolted — fireworks, thunder, a wreck, a new home he doesn't know yet — is in flight mode, and flight mode is a different animal. He'll run until something stops him, then tuck into the first quiet cover he finds and stay there.

So search two ways at once. Cover the close-in stuff carefully: culverts, ditch lines, drainage pipes, storm drains, hedge rows, brush piles, empty lots, the treeline behind the subdivision, boat and RV storage. Then think about the barriers — a busy highway, a creek, a fence line, a subdivision wall usually turns a running dog rather than letting him cross, so the corner where two of those meet is a good place to look hard.

And if you see him: do not chase him and do not call him in a scared voice. Stop. Sit down or crouch, turn sideways, don't stare at him, talk normal and low. Toss hot dogs or chicken toward him and let him decide to come in. Chasing turns a dog three houses away into a dog three miles away, and it is the mistake that costs people the most ground.

Get the whole county looking

One family searching is one set of eyes. A neighborhood that knows what your dog looks like is hundreds. Do all of these the same day:

Make a flyer that works from a moving car: one big photo, the word LOST huge, your phone number huge, cross streets, and a reward if you're offering one. Skip the paragraph — nobody reads it at 40 mph. Put them at the intersections leading out of your neighborhood, the gas stations, the feed store, and the boat ramp.

Check the microchip today

Call your vet, get the chip number off the record, and look it up in the registry — then confirm your phone number on that account is the one you actually use. A huge share of chipped dogs come back with a disconnected number or a previous owner's address attached, and a chip nobody can call is just a bead under the skin. If you adopted him, the rescue's info may still be the contact of record, so make sure your name is on it too. Do this while you're waiting on callbacks; it takes ten minutes.

Scent-anchor your yard

Dogs find their way home by nose far more than by sight. Give his nose something to aim at and a reason to stay once he gets there:

• Put his crate or bed outside near the door he uses, along with an unwashed shirt or blanket that smells like the family.
• Set out water and something strong-smelling — canned food, warm rotisserie chicken. Refresh it every night.
• If you have a trail camera or a spare doorbell camera, point it at that spot. Plenty of dogs come back at 3 a.m., eat, and leave again before anybody wakes up. If your camera shows that, you now know he's alive, close, and on a schedule — which is the single most useful thing you can learn.
• Don't power-wash the driveway or mow while he's missing. You're erasing the scent map he's using.

Days two and three

This is when most people burn out, and it's exactly when the good sightings come in. Keep the flyers fresh, keep re-posting to the groups (an old post stops showing up in feeds), keep calling the shelters, and keep the food and scent items out at night. Log every sighting with a time and a location on a map — after three or four of them a pattern usually shows up, and that pattern is what a targeted search gets built on. Dogs come home a week, two weeks, a month later. Don't stop.

When a thermal drone search helps — and when it doesn't

A thermal camera in the air reads body heat against cooler ground. That's it. It doesn't see through roofs, walls, or a thick canopy, and it doesn't know your dog from a possum until somebody looks at the screen. But when the conditions line up, it covers in twenty minutes the kind of ground a search party can't cover in a night.

It's worth flying when:

• It's dusk, night, or first light. The bigger the gap between your dog's body heat and the ground temperature, the better the picture. Midday sun on pavement and sand washes it out.
• He's in cover, not on a sidewalk. Fields, treelines, ditches, marsh edges, cutovers, brush piles — the places a ground search physically can't get into and a car can't see into.
• He's skittish and won't be caught. A dog that runs from everyone, including you, doesn't need more people walking at him. He needs to be located from a quarter mile up so one person he trusts can walk in on him — that's how a lot of these actually end.
• You have recent sightings to work from. A search flown over a real sighting map beats a random grid every time.

It's probably not the move when: he's been gone an hour and nobody's checked the neighborhood yet, when it's the middle of a hot afternoon, or when the only place he could be is inside somebody's fenced yard or garage. In those cases the doorknocking and the Facebook post do more.

If you want to know whether your situation is one where flying makes sense, that's a phone call, not a sales pitch — here's how thermal drone pet recovery works, and what it costs.

One straight word about outcomes: nobody can promise you a found dog, and anyone who does is lying to you. Thermal multiplies a search. It doesn't replace neighbors, luck, or a dog deciding on his own to walk back up the driveway.