EIGHTEEN MONTHS, $30,000, AND A COMA: HOW TWO MISSING DOGS SHATTERED, THEN REBUILT ONE COUPLE’S LIVES

You might have seen the signs along the road, or found a leaflet in your mailbox: Two small dogs, very much loved, possibly separated and both at large.

Dice and Wee Dog vanished into the Otago hills about 18 months ago. Their owners, Louisa Andrew and Alan Funnell, started looking within minutes, and have not stopped since.

They’ve combed coastlines at 1am in the morning, and followed vague tip-offs and half remembered sightings across the country; they have rounded the South Island several times over, hit dead ends, turned down work, abandoned hobbies, gone broke, torn themselves apart.

The scale of the search for Dice and Wee Dog has few parallels in New Zealand. Not just for dogs, but for anything – human or otherwise.

Hundreds of signs have been affixed to roadsides, from Whangarei to Invercargill. A dedicated Facebook community drew more than 20,000 followers. Andrew and Funnell have appeared on prime-time television, in local newspapers, and on international radio; A banner with the dogs’ names once trailed behind a plane as it soared over Auckland.

The search has cost Andrew and Funnell more than $30,000. They stopped eating and sleeping. After months of non-stop searching, Andrew fell into a brief coma after contracting encephalitis, which she attributed to stress and fatigue. A few weeks later, they were victims of an extortion plot.

It all became too much. They ran themselves ragged; they wondered if they’d survive long enough to find their dogs.

But then, everything changed. The dogs, still missing, put their humans back together.

It’s strange to become known solely for intensely missing your pets. As they’ve searched for Dice and Wee Dog, Andrew and Funnell have had to contend with the complexities of human nature, and the range of attitudes people have towards animals.

“We’ve learned a heck of a lot in this journey about people,” Funnell says.

Most people are supportive. Some people have lost a pet themselves, and see the search for Dice and Wee Dog as a parallel to the bottomless love they feel for their own missing animal. Some regret not looking harder for their missing pets; they cultivate that pain for many years afterwards.

For that reason, the Dice and Wee Dog community is like a form of group therapy. Commenters on the page talk about their own lost pets; the pain of losing them, the unresolved grief of not knowing if they are still alive. It is a place of boundless empathy. Dice and Wee Dog are not just any missing pets, they are all missing pets.

To supporters, the extreme lengths taken to find Dice and Wee Dog are not strange, or abnormal; it is the only rational response to losing a loved one.

”I love my two dogs, and I feel like giving up is abnormal,” Andrew says.

“To me, the normal thing would be to persevere and keep going until you find them, but you’d be surprised how many people think it’s the other way around.

“We’ve found so many people just like us. Before that, I wouldn’t have realised so many people felt the same way, so it has been just amazing to see that there are actually thousands of people who do.”

Many such people can be found in other online communities dedicated to missing pets.

The New Zealand Lost Pet Register has 67,000 followers, and is run by a team of 17 volunteers. Its Facebook page is viewed around 650,000 times a week. Many thousands of pets have been posted as missing since the community formed, from cats and dogs, to goats, birds, pigs, and alpacas.