Business Is Booming for Brazil’s Four-Legged Pet Detectives

BY SAMANTHA PEARSON

Following the trail of Zen, the nervous mutt; ‘let’s go find that crazy little dude’

SÃO PAULO—Moana, an 8year-old bloodhound with jowls like velvet drapes and ears so big they sweep the ground, is trained to track missing people, helping Brazil’s police solve homicide cases.

But these days her targets are furrier. Her latest mission: finding a small, anxiety-ridden mutt named Zen.

Zen had bolted during an altercation with another dog at a park in an upscale neighborhood of São Paulo while out on a stroll with his dog walker. His distraught owners did what any wealthy Brazilians would do: They called the pet detectives.

In pet-mad Brazil, search dogs like Moana and her sidekick, Google, moonlight as private detectives, hunting down everything from lost cats to

stray hamsters for desperate owners who pay up to $200 an hour.

Business is booming. More Brazilians are living alone than ever before, filling their homes with animals instead of offspring. The country’s pet population has surged to some 160 million, approaching its human population. It has more small dogs per capita than any other nation.

“No one has children in São Paulo anymore; they have dogs,“ said Zen’s breathless dog walker, who joined the hunt for the missing black pooch. Racked with guilt, he asked to not be named.

Zen disappeared around lunchtime on June 12, Valentine’s Day in Brazil and Moana’s birthday. The next day, Moana was on the case. After a whiff of Zen’s favorite blanket, she followed his trail out into the Southern Hemisphere’s biggest city.

“Come on, let’s go find that crazy little dude,” Moana’s trainer Danilo Souza exhorted the stoic hound. Moana lowered her nose to the dusty sidewalk outside the park, retracing Zen’s meandering route.

After a zigzag tour past the mansions of politicians and millionaires, Moana followed Zen’s scent across a skate park and a homeless encampment before the trail went cold at an intersection next to a pet store. Here, she encountered São Paulo’s gravest danger: traffic.

Souza and Diego de Oliveira, another of Moana’s handlers, rushed to wave down oncoming cars as Moana sauntered across a three-lane highway. “Get out of the god--damn way!” yelled one irate driver, blaring his horn.

Hunting down pets in Brazil isn’t easy, said Souza. Moana also sometimes ambles straight into one of the city’s most dangerous favelas in pursuit of a cute critter. Souza and his team have to ask permission from local drug lords to continue, he said.

On one hunt for a missing pet in the countryside, a farmer fired his revolver at Souza and the search party. “We threw ourselves on the ground and tried to reason with him,” said de Oliveira.

Moana and Google are used to the drama. When they aren’t on paw patrol for lost pets, they hunt for missing people. Desperate families report cases to a local television channel—quicker than calling the police, they say—which hires Souza and his bloodhounds to help them find their loved ones.

Dogs, especially young ones like 2-year-old Zen, are harder to track because they can go so far in so little time. But swift as they are, dogs usually want to be found. The same can’t be said of cats. Souza recently took a missing cat case in the central state of Goiás, some 600 miles away. The owner paid for Souza, de Oliveira, Moana and Google to fly out.

After the 90-minute flight and a 3-hour hunt, Souza found the furry fugitive in a nearby forest. The cat emerged from the undergrowth, looked its sobbing owner in the eye and waltzed straight past her. “The cat basically gave her the middle finger,“ Souza said.

It was eventually captured after its owner laid a trap with some succulent fish pâté.

Some pets are more elusive. Last year, Moana spent hours following the scent of a runaway chinchilla through a high-security residential enclave on the edge of São Paulo. The fluffy rodent squeezed into the sewer and was never seen again.

“We even get calls about lost birds,” said Souza. “But, well, they fly.”

Moana was once called upon to find a lost pet coati, a relative of the raccoon. It didn’t take her long to follow its scent to a newly dug grave in the neighbor’s garden.

“The neighbor had buried it after his dog killed it…. He confessed on the spot,” said Souza. “That happens more than you would think.”

As the hunt for Zen entered its third hour, the dog’s inconsolable owners, Ligia Borges and Raphael Cordeiro, joined the search.

“For the love of God, Zen, ZEN, ZEN!” Borges called out, fighting back tears.

The problem, the couple explained in despair, was that Zen looked too ordinary. If he were a golden retriever or Pomeranian, someone might have noticed him. But as a crossbred mutt, Zen could be mistaken for just another of the city’s hardened street dogs.

The party took a lunch break as the midday sun made the ground too hot for the dogs’ paws. Then Borges and Cordeiro got a tip: A clerk at the pet store saw one of their pamphlets and spotted Zen a few hundred yards away, cowering in the grounds of an office building. The couple rushed to pick him up.

Moana may have snoozed through the reunion this time, but what mattered was marking another case closed, Souza said. Zen is finally back where he belongs: on the couch.