Ms. Vaughan and Dakota found Saba, who normally stayed indoors, under a porch a few doors down.

"It wasn't far, but he was a cat that wouldn't have gone to anybody," Ms. Sheppard said. "I think he probably would have died under there, to tell you the truth, because if anyone tried to help him out, he would have stayed put. He would have been too scared."

Yolande DuBois called Ms. Vaughan after her daughter's cat, Shadow, had been missing about four days.

"She came with her little dog and within 10 minutes the cat was found and everything was hunky-dory," said Ms. DuBois, who lives near First Lake in Lower Sackville.

The cat underwent a name change after the recovery.

"We used to call it Shadow because you could never find it," Ms. DuBois said, "but we've since called it Pretty Girl."

Much like a police investigation, Ms. Vaughan tries to develop a profile of the cat she's hunting.

"I'm not going to look for a skittish cat in the same way that I'm going to look for the super-friendly guy that's not afraid of anything."

Ms. Vaughan, who also has a day job in an office and three indoor cats of her own, figures she's worked on about 100 cases since she became a pet detective in late 2006.

She travelled to the United States to train for a week with California pet detective Kat Albrecht, a former police officer.

Now that she's taught Dakota to find cats, she's working on getting Montana, another beagle, to track lost dogs.

"I thought it would be a delightful thing to offer here because there's just nobody who can really help you," Ms. Vaughan said.

"I have an 80 per cent success rate. So 20 per cent of them I just cannot find. There's times when I felt so close, yet so far. That can be really hard on you."

Veterinarians and animal shelters are starting to recommend her services.

"People come in just mesmerized," she said. "Sometimes, within just a few minutes, we can locate the cat and they just think we're amazing."

One case, however, has been stretching on for a year and a half. Ms. Vaughan has caught images of Sabina, a wayward Cow Bay kitty, on a surveillance camera, but she can't lure her into a trap.

"What I suspect is this cat has already been trapped once," she said. "It's very difficult to convince them to enter the trap again. I think that she's gone to a state of mind where everything is a predator, so she's very, very cautious."

Source: thechronicleherald.ca