Northern Virginia's Ace Ventura
    When Lamb Chop's On the Lam, Carl Washington Is on the Case

By Barbara S. Moffet
Special to The Washington Post
Thursday, November 1, 2001; Page C10

It was just after 11 on a summer morning when the call came in from a frantic cat owner: Short-haired, orange-and-white-striped male feline. Has claws and wears a collar. Missing for days in neighborhood off Braddock Road in Annandale, and has never been gone for so long. Answers to "Woody." "Please help!"

It was a job for none other than Carl Washington, Pet Detective.

Owner of a house-painting company by day, it is late evening or into the wee hours when Washington assumes his alter ego. As his Falls Church neighborhood settles in for the night, Carl Washington often is just setting out on a case: He zips his bright orange jacket, dons his safari hat, complete with miner's headlamp, and grabs the tools of a trade he is helping invent -- maps, night goggles, flashlight, machete, walkie-talkie, and bags of pet food, the smellier the better. Most important, he reaches for his secret weapons: A 2-year-old poodle named Cocoa and a 2-year-old Jack Russell terrier called Rocky.

"It got so the poodle was great at picking up scents, but he wasn't fast enough to catch the cat or dog," Washington says. "That's when I added the Jack Russell to the team."

Washington, 44, had trained dogs for hunting for years and knew how powerful a dog's senses of smell and hearing could be.

He solved his first case about five years ago when he helped a neighbor locate his missing diabetic cat. "The guy was so grateful, he insisted I take some money, and I thought, 'Hmm, that wasn't bad for an hour's work,' " Washington said.

The demand for such a service was clear: About 5 million pets are reported missing every year in this country. Last year the D.C. animal shelter took in more than 6,000 stray pets, many of them never reclaimed by their owners.

Carl Washington has found and returned 50 pets this year, about two-thirds of those he hunted. He's one of only about 10 pet detectives nationwide -- and the only one in the metropolitan Washington area -- registered with a network called National Pet Detectives. Most of his successful rescues have involved cats, but Washington also has rescued dogs, pet rabbits and ferrets.

He has descended down a manhole into a Virginia sewer to retrieve a cat named Eggroll and sat in his Jeep in the middle of the night, howling to coax a lost dog to give up its location. Sometimes he sets up a tape recorder in the street to fill the air with the irresistible-to-pets cries of a rabbit in distress.

"It's a miracle from God that we got our baby back after three months and two days," one grateful cat owner wrote him after he returned her long-lost cat, Callie. "I honestly believe Mr. Washington is one of God's angels."

Washington charges $120 to take on a case and $350 more if he succeeds in what he calls his "look under every rock" service. He approaches each case as a scientific problem, starting out with some basic geography. After poring over detailed street maps of a pet's neighborhood, he draws a circle around the area where he believes the pet most likely is hiding. Cats generally don't stray more than a half-mile from home, he says, and 60 percent of them stay within a quarter-mile. Dogs, on the other hand, venture an average of five miles, some of them as far as 20 miles from home. But most pets avoid crossing major barriers such as highways and wide streams.

By the time Washington gets to a pet's house, he has devised a plan, and the "hunt" is on. He asks for a picture of the pet and information about its behavior and personality. "The key question is whether the pet has ever been lost before," he says. "No cat or dog is just like another, but history repeats itself. An animal is likely to go the same place it went last time."

As Washington mulls the pet's profile, Cocoa and Rocky are preparing by sniffing a comb or blanket belonging to the pet. Every animal has its own special scent, and the dogs will remember it for weeks once they've had a whiff. Washington says they can remember multiple scents when simultaneously involved in several cases.

Once the dogs have mastered the scent, they retire to a cage in the back of Washington's red Jeep, where they will remain, completely silent, until needed. Washington then takes off into the night to scout the neighborhood, slowly rolling the vehicle up and down the key streets, scattering bits of dry pet food along the curb as he goes, in hopes of drawing out a pet that might be hiding in a back yard. All the time his eyes scan the yards, illuminated by the car's sidelights.

When he comes to a cul-de-sac or another area he deems a pet magnet, Washington employs an original tactic -- "splatting" a wide area with a concoction of pet food. The food is Washington's own secret formula, a blend of several types of commercial pet food that he spent a year perfecting. He "splats" it across several feet of road so that a hungry pet can't just run out and grab the food and head for cover.

If he gets the feeling the pet is lurking in the area, or he sees the animal but can't lure it, it's time to set a trap, a metal box that can painlessly secure the animal. Baiting it with his special food, Washington sets the trap in a key location and then disappears for a while.

He doesn't bring out the dogs -- they can scare an animal away -- until necessary. Cocoa and Rocky had to come to the rescue in Garrett Park in Montgomery County after Punkin, a fluffy, 4-year-old indoor cat, slipped out the door one night unseen. "I couldn't sleep anymore 'cause I was so upset about it," recalls Willie Bradford, owner of Punkin. Bradford decided to enlist Washington's help, even though her friends laughed, saying they'd never heard of a "pet detective." Washington found Punkin in a few days, but before he could capture him, the cat took off. It took Cocoa and Rocky and a net to finally round the cat up and bring him in.

Dean and Amanda Nitz of Fairfax thought they'd never need a pet detective; their cuddly, black-and-white cat Lily, who wears a tiny bell, had never set a paw outside the house. But one May morning, as they walked out to a cab for the airport and a vacation, Lily took off. Despite an intensive search by friends while the Nitzes were away, Lily was not found, and on returning home a week later, they phoned Washington.

"We were asleep when he arrived, about 1 a.m., wearing an orange vest and that miner's light," Dean Nitz remembers. "He brought the dogs up to sniff where Lily had been, which was under our bed. I gave him $125 -- I figured I wouldn't see him again. We went back to sleep, but around 4 he was banging on the front door again. He said, 'Your cat's up a tree on the next street -- the dogs are over there -- and I need you to help get her down.' "

Once the Nitzes had made their way through the darkness to the tree, Washington asked if the frightened animal perched on a high branch was indeed their cat. As neighbors slept nearby, apparently oblivious to the commotion, the Nitzes made out the animal's familiar markings -- it was Lily. But she refused to come down. So Washington took action, climbing partway up the tree and swinging a loop around Lily's head to guide her down the trunk. Cocoa and Rocky then closed in, helping to keep her from fleeing, while Dean Nitz grabbed for her. Lily's claws raked him in the process. Nitz didn't care. He went right back to the house and wrote Washington another, larger check.

Carl Washington is one of the National Pet Detectives network's star members, says Larry Maynard, the organization president. The organization's goal is "providing assistance to every pet owner who asks for it nationwide." Maynard, a U.S. Navy captain, encourages pet owners to pay $19.95 to register animals so that if they suddenly become lost, the network can spring into action immediately, armed with the pet's vital statistics.

The key to finding Woody, the orange cat lost in Annandale, was Cocoa and Rocky. On the first night of the hunt, Washington grew frustrated and brought the dogs out to help. After sniffing a couple of areas, one cul-de-sac made the dogs particularly excited, and they charged from house to house as if they had picked up Woody's scent. But no sign of a cat. Well after midnight Washington gave up for the night but instructed Woody's owner to return to the cul-de-sac the next day and call her pet.

"She found him there, stuck in the garage of someone who was away," Washington said. "He'd apparently been in there the whole week. The dogs must have heard him meow that night as we approached the house. They have a lot better hearing than I do."

To contact Carl Washington, call 703-960-9596 or e-mail him at petdetective77@hotmail.com.

© 2001 The Washington Post Company