Where can you put up lost pet posters? (UK law)

• Ask first on private property: shops, cafes, vets, pubs, garden centres, community centres. Permission makes it legal and the poster lasts longer.
• Community noticeboards in libraries, village halls, supermarkets and parks are meant for exactly this.
• Lamp posts, street furniture and roadside trees belong to the highway authority, usually the council. Fixing a notice to them without its consent is an offence, and some councils fine lost pet posters as fly-posting while others let tidy ones stay for a short time. Ring the council and ask before you put any up.
• Never on road signs, traffic lights, bridges, or motorway and dual carriageway furniture. That is a safety issue, not a paperwork one.
• Take them down once your pet is home. It is what keeps councils tolerant of the next person.

Two laws apply in England. Section 132 of the Highways Act 1980 (England and Wales) makes it an offence to fix "any picture, letter, sign or other mark" to a tree, structure or works on a highway without the highway authority's consent, an authorisation or a reasonable excuse, with a fine of up to level 4 (£2,500) in court. And outdoor adverts are controlled by the Town and Country Planning (Control of Advertisements) (England) Regulations 2007: a poster on a lamp post counts as an advert in planning terms, whatever it's about.

Councils can also issue an on-the-spot fixed penalty instead. North West Leicestershire District Council, for example, lists "notices for lost pets" as fly-posting, with a fixed penalty of £225 per item. Other councils are more relaxed about tidy lost pet notices that come down promptly, which is why it's worth a phone call to yours first.

• Every vet nearby, including out-of-hours practices: found animals are often taken there to be scanned for a microchip.
• Local rescues, kennels and catteries.
• The park or green where your pet was last seen, at the entrances people walk in by.
• Your own street and the six or eight streets around it, especially junctions.
• Shops with foot traffic: the corner shop, the takeaway, the post office, the school gate noticeboard.
• Dog walkers and posties: hand them a poster rather than pinning one up. They cover the whole area every day.

• One huge word at the top: LOST, with DOG or CAT underneath.
• A single clear photo, big. Not a collage.
• The road or landmark where they went missing, and the date.
• A phone number in large digits, and nothing else to read.
• Whether they are nervous, and not to chase them, so a sighting doesn't turn into a frightened pet running further away.
• Weatherproofing: a poly pocket or a laminated sheet, taped closed along the top.

Our free lost pet poster maker lays all of that out for you, and there is a version set up for cats. Both print on ordinary A4.

Paper reaches the people who aren't online. The fast half is the phone: the council's dog warden, the microchip database, local Facebook groups and the vets. Work through the lost dog checklist or the lost cat checklist first, then put the posters up.

Faster still is being reachable the moment somebody picks your pet up. A QR code pet tag means the person holding your dog or cat scans it and reaches you in seconds, long before anybody reads a poster.