China’s First Pet Detective: Sun Jinrong Has Rescued Over 1000 Pets – Here’s His Story

Pets gone missing is a familiar saga in many households, and pet parents would do anything to find them and get them back home safe and sound. Most times, the little ones wander off into the neighboring homes, but sometimes, it’s more severe than that.

A woman in her 20s makes a desperate call for help from a residential complex in Shanghai. She was worried that her beloved cat had gone missing a few days ago. She had searched high and low and even asked for information about her missing pet but couldn’t find anything useful.

As soon as Sun Jinrong received the woman’s cry for help, he gathered his two teammates and rushed to her apartment to address the issue. The three men came fully prepared to find her precious cat that night. They carried flashlights and backpacks full of high-tech equipment for quick detection and tracking.

The first thing Jinrong did was collect all the necessary details about the missing cat, from its height to color. White and relatively tiny, the pet was not even half a meter tall. It weighed about four kilos, and that’s all he needed to know to get started.

A half-open window made him suspect that the little kitten would have made its great escape through the opening. We can’t blame the poor chap; maybe the cat wanted to catch some fresh air before supper. A quick trip to the security room in the complex proved him correct.

Only moments after the woman’s fur baby made a smooth landing, a couple from the same complex picked it up and walked away. Everyone who saw the footage knew instantly who the culprits were. After getting the apartment number of the thieving duo, Jinrong set out to recapture his target.

The woman was ecstatic to hold her dearest pet in her arms again and couldn’t heap enough praise on Jinrong and the team’s quick action in rescuing the cat. They did it in half an hour, which was no small feat.

Where there is a sincere effort, there is always a handsome reward. Jinrong’s passionate professionalism in rescuing lost pets became lucrative because the clients were willing to pay a reasonable amount for the task.

Growing up in a family with a solid military background, he grew up in the Chinese military base as the son of an Air Force mechanic. The experience taught him discipline and diligence that he holds dear to date. They have helped him immensely in crafting his success story.

Soon, Jinrong realized that his hobby turned out to be something he was good at. As an animal lover, his true joy was being in their company. So, he started to volunteer at a neighboring pet fostering agency during his spare time.

Imagine how passionate you should be to tirelessly track down the missing pets and return them safely to their owners with utmost joy in the process. It took only a short time for Jinrong to realize he had a knack for spotting pets.

As days turned to months, little by little, money started trickling in. More and more pet owners began seeking his help outside his job at the printing factory and his stint at the agency to help them find their missing pets. They were all willing to pay him for his efforts.

Jinrong’s sudden switch in profession made his parents anxious about his future. Maybe it was their strict and structured military life of the past, or their son wasn’t exactly making a lot of money in his newly chosen path. His family simply couldn’t accept the idea of him making a living by rescuing pets.

In the early 2010s, when Jinrong began his journey as a pet detective, the Chinese government still held a rather conservative view on keeping dogs as pets. During the mid-20th century, under Communist Party leader Mao Zedong, dog ownership remained banned for several decades.

Recent years have seen a paradigm shift in China’s treatment of pets and pet owners. Since 2014, the number of Chinese households with a pet has increased by 44 percent, which translates to around 100 million households. The pet market reached an incredible 200 billion yuan in 2019.

During the initial years, Jinrong struggled to make money because only a few were willing to pay to seek the help of a professional to rescue their missing pets. Since the income was slow, there were days when he had to eat at his parents’ place to save money.

Instead of letting the dark days hamper his progress, Jinrong focussed his energy on upgrading his knowledge about everything related to his profession. He learned the art of deduction, a vital skill for rescue missions.

Rescuing a pet requires a nuanced approach from the pet detective, and Jinrong has worked hard to learn various skills to make him one of the best in his field. Over the years, he has become an expert on pets and pet psychology and has studied pet owners’ mentality to gauge them and their expectations better.

Besides reading books on related topics such as zoology and psychology, Jinrong has also garnered knowledge and expertise on various hunting techniques. He had no choice but to chase knowledge because he had no predecessors in the industry to learn from.

This is an era of gadgets, and it makes sense that a pet detective uses many to maximize the chances of rescuing pets and reuniting them with their owners. He takes his profession seriously; you can see how he invests in expensive machinery.

Capturing pets is as hard as it sounds, or perhaps even more so, but Jinrong has eased into this challenging profession somewhere along the line. While his sense of pleasure at finding lost animals has decreased over time, he still feels the pain of losing one.

Another special case happened to be when he had to travel to Beijing. A pet owner, Li Hongtao, had lost his beloved cat Duoduo and he wanted Jinrong to find him. After an extensive search for clues, the sharp-eyed detective caught sight of his paw prints on dusty water pipes leading him to the nearby grassy area.

Hongtao was thrilled to be reunited with Duoduo, but the same man had been emotionally distraught when he first met the detective. Among the pet-owning community, he is famous for his poker-faced professionalism.

Everything about his successful business as a pet detective spread like wildfire in the pet owners fraternity, from his straightforward and sincere approach to his incredibly high success rate. By now, everyone in the country knows whom to reach out to just in case their pets go missing.

One of the current trends he has incorporated into his business is using social media to widen his reach. Being net savvy has become a prerequisite for every organization, and he has become quite adept at catering to the market.

In the decade since he took up the responsibility of a pet detective, Jinrong has helped over 1000 pet parents reunite with their beloved cats and dogs. He has witnessed incredibly happy reunions where the clients have expressed gratitude by hugging him, tearfully blubbering out their thanks.

Jinrong recalls people crying over the phone, unable to form coherent sentences because they are falling apart in the absence of their pets. At times, they are still crying at the time of their meeting, and sometimes they are inconsolable.

Emotions are high when your loved one goes missing, and Jinrong has encountered it in droves during every case he has taken up so far. Most of the time, these emotions restrict them from finding the pets themselves.

These emotions and the pet parents’ emotional attachment to their pets are the ones that drive them to spend large amounts on ensuring that their precious cats and dogs come back to them safely. They are willing to pay the pet detective whatever it takes.

Jinrong is an avid animal lover who has always had a soft spot for pets and their parents, who lovingly nurture them. The joy of tracking down the missing cats and dogs and bringing them back safely to reunite with their human families is beyond comparison for him.