Babs Fry is on a mission.
It’s 74 degrees out, the sun is shining, and the 54-year-old is pushing through bumper-to-bumper traffic on the 8 freeway at 5 o’clock on a Tuesday evening. But she’s not going to Ocean Beach for a last minute dip. No, she’s headed in the opposite direction—to an overgrown strip on the outskirts of the Admiral Baker Golf Course that’s peppered with broken beer bottles and tents.
The reason? One of her wireless cameras picked up footage of a dog that she’s been tracking. Fry runs A Way Home for Dogs, a charity dedicated to finding lost pets for free, so this is equivalent to her Bat Signal—or Babs Signal. She has to go inspect the area, personal safety be damned.
“The jolt for me is when the hunt is on. You get a sighting, and we’re in the game. Let’s go,” Fry says. “This is life or death.”
And for Fry, it is her life. She’s been helping San Diegans reunite with their pets, day in and day out, for the last 10 years. Each month, Fry helps locate “dozens” of pets, according to her estimate.
Chicken and sausage in hand, Babs Fry sets up a cage on Fiesta Island to lure in Michelle Jones’ (right) missing cat.
Today, she’s already driven from her home in East County to La Jolla, then to Fiesta Island, before heading toward the golf course. A half dozen dog leashes, hanging from her rearview mirror like rosaries, and a moderate amount of fur accessorize her GMC Yukon. She herself is dressed in a black t-shirt reading “Dog Rescue in Progress.”
She says the long drives don’t faze her; this is just another afternoon on the job.
“I don’t take days off,” Fry adds. “Dogs don’t take days off.”
As Fry maneuvers through traffic, the radio is muted. Listening to music would be futile, because her iPhone rings every other minute with texts and calls from owners looking for help. One woman who reaches Fry is frantic, asking for pointers on the best gameplan to find her four-pound Pomeranian, who escaped from her house earlier that day.
“There are so many coyotes around here,” the woman says anxiously.
On a typical day, Fry drives all over the county seeking lost pets. She says she never takes a day off.
“Are you talking to Babs?” a friend of hers asks faintly in the background—proof of the local fame Fry has garnered as a “pet recovery specialist.” (Fry, beyond helping locals find their companions, has assisted owners as far away as Shanghai.)
Fry tells the woman to keep calm and follow her directions. Her first piece of advice is one that many owners find counterintuitive: “I would not be out actively looking for your dog,” Fry says. “The biggest mistake people make is they go off racing for their dog. And their dog is looking for them, and now they’re spreading their smell everywhere.”
That creates confusion for the pup, Fry continues, and extends the time they’re lost. The odds a dog returns home, Fry says later, are “directionally proportional to people staying the fuck out of the way.” The second step, she tells the woman, is to put an old sock in her front yard, because her dog will be acutely familiar with the scent. Fry asks the woman to contact her soon with any updates—and adds that she doesn’t need to worry about bothering her, because she’s available 24/7.
Fry says she learned these lessons the hard way a decade ago, when one of her dogs went missing for 10 days. “For a day and a half, I was an idiot,” she recalls. “I chased my dog, I searched for my dog, I did everything wrong.” After receiving input from Mike Noon, who runs a dog-finding service called CatchingPaws that assists owners in the greater Los Angeles area, Fry discovered her lost pup—and her calling in life.
Fry found her calling a decade ago, when her own dog went missing and another pet recovery specialist helped her solve the case. She was inspired to do the same for others.
A recovering alcoholic with 17 years of sobriety under her belt, Fry had previously worked in finance. That was nowhere near as rewarding as tracking down lost pets, though, she says. Fry—who had a hysterectomy in her 20s, barring her from having children with her Navy vet husband—feels that the dogs are more like kids than animals to her.
“When you get clean and sober, at the end of the day, you need purpose,” Fry says. “For me, this work and my dogs are sometimes the only reason I get up in the morning. They give me a reason to live. They remind me of unconditional love.”
After ending her call with the Pomeranian owner, Fry admits she’s reluctant to share “the recipe” for finding dogs in a magazine. Her concern is people will merely follow what they read, rather than reach out to her. And that’s a problem, she says, because there is no set playbook for locating a lost pup.
“This is a dance. The dog is picking a card, and I’m the dance instructor,” Fry continues. “And until your dog pulls that card, we don’t know whether we’re doing the waltz, the tango, or whatever.”
When Fry pulls up to the golf course, she’s ready to roll.
She jumps out of her truck, grabs a bag with supplies out of the back, and makes a beeline for her camera. It’s wrapped around a tree, pointing toward a large cage that she uses to trap lost dogs. Altogether, Fry has about 20 cameras—which run between $150 and $500 each—that she monitors via several iPhone apps. The dog she’s tracking is nowhere in sight, so Fry fills the cage with pieces of rotisserie chicken and summer sausage, then sprays the plants nearby with chicken broth and liquid smoke, to try and lure it back later. Before leaving, she marches up to the door of several RVs that are parked nearby, seeking intel.
Earlier in the day, at Fiesta Island, Fry looked like Napoleon scanning a battlefield. She squinted toward the sun, hands on her hips, and directed Michelle Jones, a 43-year-old nurse, as she searched for a missing cat. (Fry helps cat owners, too.) Jones knew to turn to Fry because she’d already used her guidance to find a lost dog.
“She’s incredible,” Jones says. “She takes into account patterns, where the dog has been, and what kind of personality it has. She’s savant-ish.”
Jones says that’s why she recently contributed $500 to Fry’s operation. A Way Home for Dogs is a 501(c)(3) that runs on donations—and Fry’s own savings, occasionally. Fry says the organization requires several thousand dollars a month to operate, with the bulk of that money going toward digital cameras, SIM cards, cages, gas, and food to lure in lost animals.
But Fry explains that Jones’ largess is the exception, not the rule.
“I get yelled at for free every day,” Fry says. “It’s amazing when you do things for free, how people can be. But I am reminded there are some amazing human beings in the world.”
Fry explains she’s balked at turning her operation into a for-profit business for one reason: She doesn’t want money to be the deciding factor for whether people call her or not.
After coming up empty for answers at the golf course, Fry hops back into her Yukon and heads for downtown. Her next mission: scout for a lost dog that’d caused an accident on the 5 freeway. If she’s lucky, she’ll make it back home, where she runs a rescue shelter with 80 dogs, at around 10 p.m. That might give her just enough time to watch an episode of 90 Day Fiancé, she says, before hitting the road again tomorrow morning.
“I’m convinced God put this in my journey because he knows my people skills still need some fine-tuning,” Fry says. “But I don’t do it for people—I do it for the dogs.”
