He may not have Ace Ventura’s charm or his iconic hairdo, but Sun
Jinren is a real-life pet detective in all the ways that matter. When he
takes on a lost pet case, he pours all his effort as well as thousands
of dollars in expensive equipment in order to find them.
Dubbed China’s first pet detective by the country’s media, Sun Jinren
launched his business seven years ago and has since reunited about
1,000 lost pets with their owners. He has a success rate of around 70%,
and despite charging a whopping 8,000 yuan ($1,130) per case, clients
know his services are worth it. He now has an entire team working for
his company and uses all sorts of high-tech gadgets to increase his
chances of finding lost pets, including heat detectors, thermal imaging
cameras and even an endoscope.
“Most pet owners get very flustered, they don’t even own a flashlight,” Sun told AFP.
“They can only look for cats in the dark by the weak light of their
phones. We have advanced equipment and accumulated cases over the years
to analyse the data. We can think of 10 things to do while the owner can
think of one or two.”
Owning a pet was considered bourgeois and discouraged during China’s
Maoist regime, but things have changed considerably, and today Sun
Jinren’s pet detective services are highly sought after by worried pet
owners. About a third of pets go missing during their lifetime, and only
about 15% to 20% of dogs and 2% of cats find their way home by
themselves.
Sun founded his company in Shanghai, but he’s not afraid to launch
pet search operations all across the country. Unfortunately, some pets
get stolen rather than lost, and some dogs end up as someone’s dinner.
He can’t do too much in such cases, but when it comes to finding lost
pest, he knows his business.
To catch a lost British shorthair cat that had last been seen in an
underground garage in Beijing, Sun and his assistants used all kinds of
gadgets, as well as his years of experience. In a video shot by AFP, he
can be seen using a heat-detector, inspecting animal excrement, looking
for paw prints and even blasting the cat owner’s voice from a speaker to
draw it out.
“You have to be extremely careful when capturing pets. You can’t
catch small dogs like pomeranians with a net. Their hearts are very
small. It could kill them,” the pet detective said.
When he first started playing Ace Ventura, Sun Jinren had no
competition, but today he says there are at least 10 other pet
detectives in China. But with the rise of pet ownership in the Asian
countries, there is plenty of work for everyone.
