‘PSYCHIC ABILITIES?’: Viewers divided over woman’s $20,000 GoFundMe to find lost dog after she hired a pet detective

In November, a 3-year-old mini Goldendoodle named Rosie ran away from her pet sitter in Central Park. What has resulted is a search involving endless posturing, a $20,000 GoFundMe, and a pet tracker who says he has the “gift of clairvoyance.”

TikTok user Lucy (@lostwithlucy) offered her own perspective as someone based on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where the dog was lost.

According to Lucy in a video with over 150,000 views, neighborhood residents sprang into action soon after the dog went missing, with many volunteering to hang posters and search for the dog. Soon after, a GoFundMe was posted to benefit the dog’s owner, Shira Meged. The GoFundMe has raised almost $19,000 as of the time of writing.

Some may wonder why a dog search would require such funds. As Lucy notes, the GoFundMe page and the website lay out how that money will be spent. For example, some will go to continuing search efforts; some will go to a reward for finding the dog.

However, a majority of the funds are being spent on a man named Jim Tierney, who, per his website, is an “Intuitive Pet Tracker” who says that he employs “clairvoyance” as part of his methods.

“This person costs $300 a day,” Lucy reveals, a fact confirmed by Meged herself while speaking to the New York Post. In the Post article, Meged says that she spent about $13,000 in six weeks trying to find the dog.

While Lucy appears to claim that some money is going to Meged directly, the website states that, “No monies raised have gone or will go to lost wages from Shira being out of work or for any form of litigation.” 

The Daily Dot reached out to the Intuitive Pet Tracker, Jim Tierney, via email, who said that his share of the money also isn’t just going into his pocket.

“All of the money that was raised is not going solely to me,” he wrote. “There was gear that had to be purchased due to the vast amount of space we are dealing with in Central Park.”

As for the amount he does take, he says his fee is justified by the amount of effort and time such a job requires.

“I travel in and out of the city an hour away. Gas, tolls, tickets, batteries, food for feeding stations, camera subscriptions based on how much data is being used,” he said regarding how the money is spent. “After all is said and done, I get to keep about half of that.”

“The job requires walking through the park at night (as this cannot be done during the day), sometimes in the woods in areas that you wouldn’t find too many people walking into, setting cameras high up on trees using a ladder,” he continued. “To remove the eleven cameras and reposition them based on sightings takes 4.5 hours. It’s very physically and mentally taxing.”

Still, Lucy says that the involvement of Tierney has caused online drama in her neighborhood, with some getting upset that their money is being spent on a “clairvoyant” and others countering that any efforts to help find the dog are welcome.

@lostwithlucy the reward is now $6K so go have a look i guess #ues ♬ original sound - lucy q

The aforementioned online drama hasn’t been the best for Meged, Rosie’s owner.

“I’m really a very private person, so it has not been comfortable to be so visible on social media,” she told the Daily Dot in an Instagram direct message exchange. “But I have accepted that it has been necessary to get out of my comfort zone for the sake of finding Rosie and her safe return home.”

She then confirmed that she’s been working with Tierney. That said, she says his methods have been largely practical rather than mystical.

“Having now worked with Jim for several weeks, I’ve had a chance to see how he approaches this kind of search—it’s much more about combining his on-the-ground experience with intuition, not like he’s claiming to have a psychic connection with Rosie,” Meged detailed. “He talks with me to understand her personality and habits, then uses his professional knowledge to make decisions about where to concentrate his efforts. And because he’s got so much experience, he knows how to pivot as the situation demands, and I appreciate that.”

“I think we all use intuition to help inform our decisions, and when we are getting calls from people with potential sightings, our intuition can be helpful,” Meged shared, later clarifying that “Jim is a certified Missing Animal Response Technician, not a clairvoyant pet detective.”

The Daily Dot asked Tierney about his use of clairvoyance in searches for dogs. He said that it was “inherently in my process, but I am usually asked by the client, if I’m getting any impressions while the case is waiting for a sighting.”

“Anything physical overrides any impression I may get,” he shared. “Some people think I’m walking around the park with a crystal ball, but it’s simply not the case.”

Tierney then provided the Daily Dot with an image of a pencil sketch of what appeared to be a bridge.

“Here’s an example of something I drew one week before the dog actually showed up here,” he wrote in the email, regarding a lost dog case he solved in 2022. “This was also the spot where the dog was ultimately caught.”

Meged says she’s satisfied with Tierney’s efforts to date.

“He’s…really receptive to the group of volunteers who have come together over the past few weeks, which is great because the more people who are aware and actively looking for Rosie, the better,” she wrote.

And while she hasn’t caught Rosie yet, she says the expansive efforts have proven beneficial.

“The more visibility there is, the more people contact us with tips—so far, those tips have turned out to be other dogs, but you never know when it’s going to finally be Rosie,” she detailed. “If there’s a silver lining to this, it’s that two of the tips I’ve received have turned out to be other lost dogs that I already knew about, and I was able to help reunite those families with their dogs.”

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The post ‘PSYCHIC ABILITIES?’: Viewers divided over woman’s $20,000 GoFundMe to find lost dog after she hired a pet detective appeared first on The Daily Dot.

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