What do you do when you see a stray dog? If you’re like me, your instinct is to stop the car—or if you’re on foot, stop in your tracks— and do what you can to apprehend the dog—or at least herd it off the streets and onto a sidewalk out of harm’s way. But even if you succeed at this, what do you do next? The dog is likely to be lost, frightened, anxious, hungry or thirsty, or some combination thereof. It could also be hurt, which could make it even more anxious and possibly aggressive. Or it could be very receptive to someone corralling it and giving it some TLC, ideally returning it to its owner (if indeed there is an owner who had enough foresight and caring to have given the dog a tag and/or microchip).

I’ve done a lot of on-the- spot rescues over the years. Frankly, there is no standard operating procedure. Each dog is truly different. Some will walk up right up to you, but my experience has been that most strays or lost dogs are too leery of people to be caught, no matter how great their need and no matter how good your intentions. They move away and move on. What I have learned is that you can rarely catch any dog by following it; you have to be still, or even move in the opposite direction, to get it to come to you. It sounds counter-intuitive, but it works. It helps if you have some food and water too: strays are usually more thirsty than hungry. (After all, you can go much longer without food than you can without water.)

Unfortunately, Inglewood’s population of home- less dogs is sizeable. And it’s quite diverse: I’ve taken in dogs that range from purebred to stereotypical (but adorable and very adoptable) mutts. Whether it’s because the economy is forcing more people out of their houses and into smaller spaces that don’t accommodate dogs, or because too many people routinely don’t keep track of their pets, hardly a week goes by that I don’t spot a dog (or two) out there on its own. Most of them wind up passing through my neighborhood and through my life, but each of them means something. In each case I like to imagine he or she made it back home, or encountered a new one.

That would be the best thing for all of us.