Petco Love Creates ‘Love Lost’ to Reunite Lost Pets with Their Families

LOS ANGELES — For many pet par­ents, the thought of a fur­ry fam­i­ly mem­ber going miss­ing is noth­ing short of a night­mare. But thanks to Pet­co Love and its ground­break­ing plat­form “Love Lost,” hope is far from lost.

Pop­fuzion TV recent­ly sat down with Susanne Kogut, pres­i­dent of Pet­co Love and chair of the Human Ani­mal Bond Research Insti­tute (HABRI), to learn more about how the non­prof­it is using tech­nol­o­gy to bring pets home.

“One in three pets will go miss­ing in their life­time,” Kogut said. “That’s a stag­ger­ing sta­tis­tic, and it’s why we cre­at­ed Love Lost—to give fam­i­lies a real chance at being reunit­ed.”

Love Lost is the largest, free nation­al lost and found pet data­base, already respon­si­ble for more than 100,000 suc­cess­ful reunions. The plat­form uses pho­to-match­ing tech­nol­o­gy to iden­ti­fy miss­ing pets from uploaded pho­tos and match them with found reports, shel­ters, and good Samar­i­tans nation­wide.

“It’s like facial recog­ni­tion for pets,” Kogut explained. “You sim­ply upload a pho­to, and the sys­tem scans for match­es. It’s fast, free, and acces­si­ble to every­one.”

Kogut, who joined Pet­co Love in 2013 after trans­form­ing the Char­lottesville-Albe­mar­le SPCA into a nation­al­ly rec­og­nized life­sav­ing mod­el, empha­sized the pow­er of com­mu­ni­ty in solv­ing the lost pet cri­sis. “This isn’t just about one organization—it’s about unit­ing shel­ters, res­cues, and every­day peo­ple under one shared data­base to tru­ly make a dif­fer­ence.”

Dur­ing the inter­view, she also shared touch­ing reunion stories—one involv­ing a dog that had been miss­ing for over a year and was matched through Love Lost with­in days of being found by a shel­ter.

“Tech­nol­o­gy is allow­ing us to do things that weren’t pos­si­ble a decade ago,” she said. “But it’s also about love—love for ani­mals and for the fam­i­lies that con­sid­er them part of their hearts.”

For pet own­ers look­ing to pro­tect their fur­ry friends, Kogut rec­om­mends reg­is­ter­ing pets on Love Lost now—before the unthink­able hap­pens.

To learn more or reg­is­ter your pet, vis­it PetcoLoveLost.org.