The wilting sign in the front yard of the large white house on Beach Drive grabs your attention first. It’s about 4 feet high. Laminated. The top right corner has folded into itself. It’s a grainy picture of a fluffy bichon frise under the words, “$5,000 reward.”
Three months after her dog went missing, Patricia Bonati’s determination to find Pooh Bear is holding up far better than her sign.
Bonati has the case number for her missing dog in the clue folder she still updates. She talked to the police the day Pooh Bear went missing, but it wasn’t until almost two weeks later that an officer told her to file a police report, she said.
“I can tell you what progress they’ve made,” she said. “None. Because as they told me when I called, it’s just a dog and not to expect anything.”
She’s spent close to $30,000 on private investigators, TV ads and newspaper ads for her missing dog. She expects results.
Bonati rescues poodles. She said she’s had dozens at her house and hundreds in foster poodle homes, and her organization has found families for thousands. Pooh Bear has been missing since April 7. That morning, around 6 a.m. when Bonati likes to take the eight dogs she’s adopted and the one or two extra she usually has with her for a morning run, the whole group went to Vinoy Park.
The dogs aren’t on leashes, even though Florida law requires them to be.
“The police wave at us,” Bonati said.
She picks up after the dogs and has trained them to move over to let joggers by. On this particular outing, she bent over to clean up after one of the poodles and took her eye off her bichon frise. The 17-pound ball of fur moved off — then poof. Gone. Three months later there is still no sign.
Pooh Bear is about 15 years old, deaf, walks slowly and can’t see well through her cataracts. Bonati believes her old, infirm dog is still alive. And not lost, but stolen.
“We checked the pond, we checked the water, we checked with the garbage people who sweep up,” she said. “She is not gone.”
Anybody who believes their dog — 85 in dog years — has survived alone or in captivity for two months has more unspoiled faith in the world than most.
Bonati’s faith in the world has survived through years of seeing what people are capable of: Abandoning an old pet because a new apartment doesn’t allow multiple pets. Letting dogs fester in their own waste until they’re matted, unrecognizable piles of filth and sores.
Bonati drives to Largo every few days to check the Pinellas County Animal Services shelter and keeps a file of clues and notes on Pooh Bear. She has theories about what happened to her dog, but she won’t share them. She said she doesn’t want to lose her chance to find her dog.
She works with animal communicators. She believes in people who can talk to dogs — dead or alive — and get messages in return. She even hired a pet detective.
She remembered reading an article in the Washington Post about a pet detective who said he delivered results, so she tracked him down and hired him.
“Well, that was a joke,” she said.
Carl Washington came down to Florida from Virginia and worked on the case for two days the week Pooh Bear disappeared, Patricia said.
Nothing.
Three months later, it takes two phone calls and an e-mail to get in touch with him, and he has to be reminded of details before he remembers this woman and her 15-year-old bichon frise. He answered the last phone call after he pulled over to the side of the road — he was driving to another case in Georgia.
“Why are you calling about this?” he asked. “That case is closed.”
Even Bonati’s pet detective thinks her dog is dead.
Bonati said she knows she can rely on her neighbors to be helpful. She said she’s given neighbors abandoned and abused poodles. The dogs still live up and down her street.
“Living in Northeast is nothing but pleasure,” she said.
In 1999, the neighborhood worked with her to save 276 poodles. Animal Control from Pinellas, Pasco and Hillsborough counties worked with veterinarians and volunteers from Patricia’s organization, Florida Poodle Rescue, to find 480 dogs (including the nearly 300 poodles) homes before a shelter closed.
“It was amazing how much pitching in there was,” she said. “Everybody knew I had 42 puppies in the guesthouse.”
No matter how supportive her community is, Patricia said she believes her dog was stolen in the area.
St. Petersburg police said the case is still open. But they say they have little to go on. George Kajtsa, a St. Petersburg Police community awareness officer, said Bonati’s story in the police report of seeing a car pass and realizing her dog was gone didn’t give enough information.
“It’s very difficult because we have no tag number for a vehicle involved in it,” he said. “We don’t even know if the vehicle picked a dog up. It could have run away on its own. In the report it says she turned around and saw a car driving away. That means nothing. ”
Even with Animal Control working to return a dog with a microchip embedded in its skin and tags, it can take a long time to get the dog back to its family, Bonati said. Pooh Bear has tags but no chip because of allergies.
According to the Animal Control Web site, the shelter gets 900 calls each day and deals with calls about public safety first. For the past 12 years, “reclaims,” when owners pick up their lost dogs, have made up less than a fifth of the animal control workload.
At least once a day, one of Bonati’s cell phones goes off with a peppy jazz ringtone. She grabs for it every time. This is the “Pooh line,” (813) 892-1865, the number she got for people to call with information about her dog.
“They just keep calling that line,” she said. “Two bichons were lost and I was on Channel 13 talking about Pooh and someone called saying he’d found a bichon in Safety Harbor. Another family called who’d lost their bichon and it was theirs. I got those two together. At least some good came.”
People have called claiming they saw Pooh Bear, Bonati said.
“I asked,’Well, did ya stop?’ ‘No … I didn’t think about it.’
“My favorite is the guy who called and said, ‘I ran over your dog.’ I said, ‘OK. Where do you live? Let me dig it up and see whether it’s my dog.’ He never called back.”
Bonati said the phone calls saying Pooh Bear is dead have come from concealed numbers or pay phones.
Why would anybody steal an old dog with cataracts?
Bonati heaved a sigh. “I don’t know. Maybe people (who) don’t like people, people that are sick, who want to hurt a dog …”
While Bonati’s search goes on, her eight other poodles have adjusted to missing their “sister.”
One afternoon, Rascal, Louie, Billy Bob Travis Catfish, Jake, Danny, Isabelle and Simon lay around the yellow sunroom, nuzzled visitors and climbed on her lap and the loveseats in the room. Sunshine was in a different room. Harpo was there too, but he’s not officially one of the family yet — it may be a while before she can adopt him.
“Grab a seat before they do,” Bonati told a visitor. She picked up miniature poodle Rascal and stepped over one of the extra-large black Royal poodles. It’s either Jake or Danny. You can’t tell until you check whether the dog is pigeontoed or bowlegged. Bowlegs? Danny. Pigeontoes? Jake.
Bonati is slowly getting her life back to normal. She ballroom dances and visits with friends. She spends time at her farm in Odessa with her three horses. She hopes to show horses again by September.
She’s boxing again.
“The dogs chase squirrels; I box,” she said.
She said she has to move to feel like herself.
“After Pooh went missing, my world stopped.”
But Bonati doesn’t equate moving on — pushing play after her world has been on pause for three months — with giving up. Pooh Bear wasn’t even supposed to be Patricia’s dog. She bought Pooh Bear for her husband, Alfred, a well-known back surgeon, on their 15th anniversary. She’s separated from her husband now, but Pooh Bear had stayed.
Callum Hay, a veterinarian who has worked with Bonati through Florida Poodle Rescue, said the animal community knows the pain of losing a pet.
“It’s sad,” he said. “She loves this dog. My heart goes out to her because I’ve lost a dog and the worst is not knowing.”
At home, Bonati looked through a photo album of all the dogs she’s sheltered over the past 15 years. Dogs in seasonal hats and costumes. Dogs lined up on her front porch.
She paused at a photo from 1997.
Five dogs, poodles of various sizes and one tiny 4-year-old bichon frise, sit in a line. Tongues loll out. They all seem to be smiling. Bonati tapped the photo, her finger on the bichon frise.
“There’s Miss Pooh,” she said. “They’re all dead now. Except for her.”