Lost and found pets in metro Atlanta

Metro Atlanta has no single lost-pet office. Strays go to the animal services of the county where they were picked up, and each county has its own hours, hold period and way of taking reports. This directory puts all of them in one place, checked against each county’s own website.

Metro Atlanta animal shelter directory

Live in Atlanta itself? The city is split between two county shelters. See lost pets in Atlanta.

Emergency checklist: the first 24 hours

1. Search your home first, then a few houses in every direction. Check garages, sheds, crawl spaces and under decks.
2. Call the county shelter and file a report. Use the directory above.
3. File a free report on Petco Love Lost. Fulton and DeKalb route lost reports through it.
4. Confirm your microchip registration is current at the AAHA Universal Pet Microchip Lookup. A chip with an old phone number is the most common reason chipped pets aren’t returned.
5. Post on Nextdoor and in local lost-pet Facebook groups with a clear, recent photo.
6. Put up flyers at eye level at intersections near where your pet was last seen.
7. Get the alert in front of neighbors who aren’t looking. That’s what Find a Paw does.
8. Visit the shelter in person within 48 hours and keep going back.

What the research says

• In a national survey of 1,015 households, about 15% had lost a dog or cat in the previous five years. 93% of lost dogs and 75% of lost cats were recovered. (Weiss, Slater and Lord, Animals, 2012)
• In that same study, searching the neighborhood was the most common way dogs were found (49%). For cats, 59% came home on their own, which is why searching right around home matters so much.
• A study of 7,704 microchipped strays at 53 shelters found microchipped dogs were returned to their owners 52.2% of the time versus 21.9% for dogs without chips, and microchipped cats 38.5% versus 1.8%. (Lord et al., JAVMA 2009, via AVMA)