The desperate mission to find Vincent, a fox-red labrador last seen in a London park, has involved more than a few posters on lampposts.
Moments after he went missing, the crew of a passing air ambulance agreed to scan Hyde Park from the sky.
Then he was trending on Twitter, with a picture of the £5,000 reward poster shared by celebrities with more than 12 million followers and retweeted almost 2,000 times. Which is perhaps not surprising, given that Vincent’s owner is Matthew Freud, one of the country’s most influential and well-connected PR executives.
Kind-hearted members of the public have joined exhaustive daily searches, and Mr Freud’s ex-wife Caroline Hutton, who was walking Vincent when he went missing, has even sneaked into the park at night to hide his bed in bushes, so that just in case he is still there, he has somewhere familiar to sleep.
Yet more than a week after he vanished they are none the wiser as to what happened, raising fears their beloved family pet was the latest victim of a spate of organised dog thefts.
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“It was like he vaporised,” said Ms Hutton, 50. She was a few minutes from the end of an hour-long lap of Hyde Park with The Times correspondent Alice Thomson, when Vincent disappeared near the Italian fountains.
Bizarrely no one said they had seen the £2,000 pedigree dog.
Mr Freud, 53, said they received a couple of credible sightings suggesting he was still near by, but one caller said he had seen “undesirable looking guy” with a dog that matched Vincent’s description walking out of the park. “It’s 50-50, whether he has been taken, or whether he ran off,” Mr Freud said.
Almost 5,000 dogs were reported stolen to police in England and Wales from 2013-15. Nik Oakley, from the website doglost.co.uk, said police figures only told a fraction of the story because police rarely treated dog thefts as criminal offences unless there was evidence of a break-in or a burglary.
She said the website had a database of almost 120,000 dogs lost since 2003 and estimates that 60 dogs are stolen every week. “Dog theft has increased 24 per cent in the last three years,” she said.
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“We think that about one in three dogs are reunited in suspicious circumstances. Either it was stolen and recovered or money had to change hands in order to get it back. That’s around 20,000 in the last 13 years.”
She said organised dog thieves used to target “designer dogs” like French bull dogs and chihuahuas, but increasingly they were after gundogs like labradors and spaniels for breeding.
“The big change in dog theft is that it is no longer random theft, stealing a dog from outside a shop. Owners are being targeted for their breed. We have seen a trend in the theft of litters.”
Anyone hoping to breed from Vincent is unlikely to get far, because he has been neutered and micro-chipped.
“Vincent went everywhere with me. He was a proper part of the family. We are all distraught,” Mr Freud said.
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“The hope, if someone has stolen him, is that I am prepared to pay more than anyone else.”