Animal welfare is public health.

On November 5, 2020, my Husky, Ash, disappeared from my front yard without a trace. For months afterwards, I created posters and flyers. I joined and scanned every Facebook lost & found group for a 300-mile radius (WV, Ohio, Virginia, and North Carolina). I paid $300 to boost my post on Facebook where over 60,000 people saw the ad. I called every shelter in the state. Nothing.

I couldn't eat. I couldn't sleep for worrying that he was tangled up somewhere with the rope he was tied up with in the yard, so I drove around every night yelling his name until I lost my voice. When I could sleep, I had nightmares of losing him all over again, only to wake up and realize it wasn't just a dream. I began to have hallucinations that I was seeing Ash everywhere. At first, I thought it was sleep deprivation, but later learned that it happens to almost every pet parent who has a missing pet.

That living nightmare exposed a broken system: microchip registries that don't connect, lost pet sites that charge you to boost your post only to steal your information, and shelter records that don't follow the animal.

Even worse — scammers scrape lost pet sites and target desperate pet parents in their darkest hour, claiming to have your pet, demanding payment, or sending you a code to see your pet's picture, but really phishing for your identity. I made a vow to Ash: no other family should experience the pain of losing a pet because of a broken system that could be fixed.

What I didn't understand at the time was that Ash's disappearance was pointing to something much larger than my own loss. The same broken system that couldn't track one missing dog couldn't see the warning signs happening all around it—the animal cruelty two streets over, the domestic violence in the same household, the quiet unraveling of a neighborhood that no agency ever connects together.

When systems begin to fail, animals, like the poor, are the first to suffer the consequences. And too often, the voiceless are treated as though they don't matter enough to be heard.

Ash didn't just disappear. He exposed a silence in the system—one where the suffering of the voiceless simply goes unrecorded.

And until we build systems that can see them, hear them, and protect them, that silence will continue to swallow lives.

Long before anyone realizes something is wrong.