After a video of a dog’s body being mutilated went viral, the McLennan County Sheriff’s Office has located the rightful owner of the dog - a woman in China Spring.
Now, several groups are hoping to harness the same power of social media to reunite dogs and their owners’ one post at a time.
Kayla Reyes volunteers her time to help run the Central Texas Lost and Found Facebook page.
"I know if I were someone and I had to post on our page I would be absolutely heartbroken," Reyes said. Reyes also fosters animals.
She says often times shelters can be a stressful experience for the animal and lack resources to care for all the animals that run away. Reyes wants people to know when their pets go missing that help is just a click away.
"As a Facebook group, we have grown to over 16,000 members. Now our members help locate the lost and found pets that are located on our page,"she said.
As a group, Kayla Reyes says they have been able to reunite more than 2,000 dogs with their owners. But, the internet can only do so much for the search.
"We still encourage people to call the shelter. We still encourage them to hang the fliers other things outside of the internet and social media."
In addition to those resources, Don Bland with the Humane society of Central Texas says get your dog microchipped.
"That gets more animals home than anything," he said. When pets are microchipped they can be scanned at a number of locations. If all those searching tools fail, Bland suggests you stop by the shelter instead of just clicking.
"Sometimes you might be looking for your dog and the dog didn't photograph well on intake so you're looking through our web page and it looks more brown instead of red," Bland said.
Central Texas Lost and Found Facebook Page can be found here.
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